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Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

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Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#141

Post by vetinari »

tdrdt wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server. Speaking of which, how long before it won't be possible to host your own web server? On another note: the biggest source of spam is gmail itself, and guess what, that makes it to my inbox just fine, because wh…

"Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server." I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on…

> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email?

By not delivering mail sent by your mailserver to mailboxes hosted by them. There's not much use for an own server, if your mail won't be received by most users on gmail or hotmail.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#142

Post by andix »

_abox wrote: post #28

Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either. Literally every…

If you use hotmail.com a lot of legitimate email goes to spam. I see it as a problem of the hotmail users, not mine as a sender.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#143

Post by wrycoder »

matt123456789 wrote: post #68
FpUser wrote: post #41

I do away with the middle ground. I rent email services from businesses that specialize in email hosting and I own domain name. No way I will have my email serviced by Google / MS / Apple and the likes.

Who do you use? After seeing all the horror stories posted on HN, I have been worried about getting banned from $MegaCorp randomly and would like to minimize the blast radius if that were to happen.

I’ve been using Fastmail for decades, with great results. You can bring your own domain.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#144

Post by feanaro »

_abox wrote: post #28

Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either. Literally every…

I host my own email and I have the same problem with MS. Perhaps this is something for the new Digital Markets Act and interoperability laws in the EU to handle.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#145

Post by indigochill »

Kwpolska wrote: post #88
tdrdt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server." I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on…

The problem with e-mail, and with other forms of communication, is that two parties (or their service providers) need to co-operate. You can run your own e-mail server just fine, but Google, Microsoft and friends might consider you to be a spammer or silently block your e-mail just because.

What if email was based on a whitelist instead of a blacklist? So you'd only receive email from addresses of people you've already established contact with some other way (maybe using conventional email)? This eliminates spam and if the big providers supported this, it could also enable them to stop blackholing innocent servers (though whether they care is another question).

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#146

Post by teekert »

I was doing well with my own email server until I got on some blacklist from Microsoft, all my outlook.com contacts didn't receive my email anymore, not even in their spam folder. I pushed hard on support, eventually they told me they don't control the process ??

I gave up. In retrospect I should have used another smtp gateway (perhaps from my provider), but back then the thought never occurred to me.

For a time it was nice, (basically) unlimited storage, unlimited aliasses, being able to send 200 mb (only to my wife admittedly) easily. I did really learn a lot, which it what I tell people now: Try and do it to learn, but it's really unpractical. I now pay for email.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#148

Post by nijave »

hannob wrote: post #70
rmdes wrote: post #6

Someone should try "artisanal email server" using cloudron or yunohost ! the bigger problem is that "authoritative" email monopolies such as Gmail, 365 and the other big ones arbitrarily define and impose what is a legit email server or not and even with better score than gmail an "artisanal" email server can suffer from being classified into spam by the big tech players just because they can and will do anything to…

I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case. If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works. In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No,…

You need control of the entire netblock you send email from. Everything was going smoothly for me for 7 years until the entire Digital Ocean netblock my static IP was in landed in a permanent blacklist due to enough of the other IPs in that block having repeated complaints. I don't remember the mailing blacklist it was on but unblocking that single IP required the netblock owner (Digital Ocean) contacting the blacklist provider directly

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#149

Post by feanaro »

kro wrote: post #86
hannob wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case. If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works. In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No,…

To most, including Gmail, it's actually no problem with DMARC in my experience too. However, one of my servers IPs is on a Microsoft blacklist since many years now. It sends <10 messages / day. I've tried every unlist form I could find, even called MS but it does not get taken of that list and they "won't disclose why". I'm routing SMTP to MS via another relay now :)

> I'm routing SMTP to MS via another relay now :)

How do you do this? Could you share details on the setup?

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#150

Post by 3np »

pyrale wrote: post #122

I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently: - Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fastmail or proton is a first step that gives you lots of security fom arbitrary. Because you own the doorstep, you can change provider without having to inform all your contacts of the move. You're also more secure from unilateral moves from your provider. -Hostin…

#2 has practical reasons as well, such as security and privacy (yes, other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight; that’s quite different from a mail provider having full retention of your email at any point in time)

I’d add another thing:

- Hosting your own mail client. You can self-host roundcube/mutt/thunderbird/or even an imap server that just fetches (and possibly deletes) email from the remote server using something like mbsync. This mail client/server doesn’t need to interact with any other mail server apart from the mail provider that receives the incoming email, be that gmail or fastmail. While paid ProtonMail can be used for this, it’s a bit of a hassle with their lack of native imap support.

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