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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

#171

Post by dmw_ng »

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…

> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part

It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound, while continuing to handle inbound a different way. Obviously SES doesn't count as fully self-hosted, but it does solve (or at least significantly ameliorate -- zero issues here) the reputation problem

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

#172

Post by dirwiz »

I suppose I fall into the artisanal category (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,roundcube etc). In our case everyone runs mobile/desktop IMAP clients, web mail at least seems to be a "when all else fails" backup plan for quick emails.

I do have a specific beef with all the consolidated email providers. If one of them determines your SMTP server to be spam (false-positive), ALL of their clients now reject your email with little recourse for the admin. Just had this happen with a solution that rhymes with 365. Even their clients were clueless as to how to resolve it.

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

#174

Post by GekkePrutser »

kiklion wrote: post #85
_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…

> This way the big players can just carve out a bigger market for themselves. Or it’s because there is a near infinite number of domains so it’s relatively simple for spammers to avoid bad rep blocks by grabbing new domains and starting fresh.

Yeah but then why keep putting me on the Blacklist every month? After I've been in touch so many times.

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

#175

Post by judge2020 »

dmw_ng wrote: post #171
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…

> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound, while continuing to handle inbound a different way. Obviously SES doesn't count as fully self-hosted, but it does solve (or at least significantly ameliorate -- zero issues here) the reputation problem

I think that's what they're talking about in terms of 'you don't send your own mail', but it is a good solution and SPF+DKIM means you should have very few issues with deliverability and reputation.

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

#176

Post by GekkePrutser »

jacob019 wrote: post #40
_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…

You can configure postfix to relay emails to certain domains through a 3rd party SMTP service like SES. The MS domains give all of us the same problems, there is no other solution.

Thanks I wasn't aware of this option. I'll consider it. Thanks for the tip! At least I'm not the only one but I'm sorry you're experiencing this too.

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

#177

Post by judge2020 »

3np wrote: post #150
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 rem…

> other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight

This also shouldn't be a problem most of the time if your email server supports TLS; Google currently sees 81% outbound email encryption[0], so you can imagine roughly 4/5ths of email servers support it.

0: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h...

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

#178

Post by edoceo »

dirwiz wrote: post #172

I suppose I fall into the artisanal category (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,roundcube etc). In our case everyone runs mobile/desktop IMAP clients, web mail at least seems to be a "when all else fails" backup plan for quick emails. I do have a specific beef with all the consolidated email providers. If one of them determines your SMTP server to be spam (false-positive), ALL of their clients now reject your email with l…

The best part is that everyone will blame the sender.

The ignorant always blame the informed - and it keeps working cause the informed can actually address the issue.

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

#179

Post by judge2020 »

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…

Sending to Gmail/Workspace and O365 is by far the easiest case for me. It's the random enterprise email servers that don't like new gTLDs like '.xyz' who cause the most headache.

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

#180

Post by znpy »

I run my own mailserver and I've been doing that for the last ~10 years.

I have a static ipv4 at home, and my biggest problems are the following:

- residential providers won't delegate a reverse dns zone or set a reverse ptr record for you -- or at least my ISP (Fastweb) will not do it for a residential contract

- spam lists (spamhaus etc) will blacklist residential ipv4 pools by default applying what effectively is a prejudice (and defamation).

Some considerations:

Major providers will effectively do as much as they can to prevent other organizations (let alone individuals) deliver their own mail.

Google is particularly shitty in this regard: it regularly delivers my mail to spam despite having both SPF, DKIM and DMARC in order. My gmail inbox however is full of SPAM because google decided that I really have to look at those promotional email.

Microsoft is surprisingly good instead: upon rejecting mail initally they're going to direct you to an automated procedure to de-list your domain from their spam services, and it works. Kudos to microsoft.

SPAM, surprisingly, isn't really a problem: if you have sufficient checks for incoming mail (does SPF for the domain allows this ip to send email? do DKIM signatures check out? are they using SSL/TLS for their connection? et similiar) you basically won't receive spam.

Most OS vendors (Red Hat / Debian / Ubuntu) deliver postfix with poor cryptographical default settings, meaning that the default settings will connect to plaintext SMTP to deliver outgoing email and will not setup submission (tls) by default, not even with a self-signed certificate. In the time of letsencrypt being available, this is a dumb choice.

Running low-volume mailserver is surprisingly light on resources. A raspberry pi is likely overpowered for the task. You can use pretty much anything and it's going to work, as long as it powers on and doesn't lose data.

Running a mailserver is also surprisingly versatile. The possibilities are pretty much endless. You want to alter outgoing emails? No problem, look at PCRE maps and postfix's header_checks (or similar). Want to have mail aliases? no problem. Want a catch-all address? easy. Want to hook a service into mail delivery chain? look at the milter protocols.

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