Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 519 posts

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

#181

Post by 3np »

judge2020 wrote: post #177
3np wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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...

Indeed. It was more of an inb4 of the common reply of “there is 0 privacy gains of self-hosting email since most of the people you’re mailing with will be on one of the big providers anyway”, which is tired and defeatist.

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

#182

Post by mehdix »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #92
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,…

> If you put some decent effort [...] it works Well, I put in more than some decent effort, and I didn't get it "to work". I detailed my efforts here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser... Please stop spreading falsehoods. If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.

My little server on Hetzner is delivering to gmail and outlook since two years with no hiccups: postfix,dovecot,rspamd.

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

#183

Post by ziml77 »

Running your own email is impractical because it's the only way for many people and services to get in contact with you. You really don't want it to fail. And it's entirely on you to ensure that you have monitoring to notify you when it does fail (through some non-email mechanism). And you better be prepared to solve the issue for yourself in a timely manner.

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

#184

Post by Anadorr »

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…

There's quite a lot of small providers left and thriving - I've recently migrated from Gmail to mailbox.org, set up inbox encryption with my own key and can't be happier about it.

It's not as feature-rich as Gmail, and webmail with your own encryption key is not usable, but desktop (Thunderbird) and mobile (K9 mail) clients fully cover my use cases. Cheaper than Google Workspace, too.

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

#185

Post by tzs »

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…

I'd like to see something to make it easy to address the case where you are doing #1, but your provider does unilaterally kick you off with short notice for some reason. The email equivalent of a bug out bag [1].

This would be something that provides in a single package an SMTP server, an IMAP and POP server, pre-trained spam filtering, and maybe a web server with a web-based email client, and a simple setup program that asks a few basic questions such as your domain name and configures everything on your end and provides help for configuring things elsewhere (such as with DNS, such as telling you what to put in your SPF and DKIM and DMARC records).

This is meant as something to handle your mail during the time it takes you to find another provider. It is meant to be something you can quickly install on a VM somewhere, point your MX record at it, get a Let's Encrypt or similar certificate for it, and not be losing mail while you are between providers.

It should have a quick start guide that includes details on signing up and getting a Linux VM up at major inexpensive VM hosting places. Amazon Lightsail, Hetzner, and such.

It should make minimal assumptions about your Linux environment. Probably it should not use the SMTP, POP, and IMAP servers that are packaged by your Linux distributor. It should use minimal servers that are written specifically for the emergency mail kit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_kit

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

#186

Post by spadros »

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

No, having quality spam and fraud filtering, and quality security, that you host yourself, is by far the much harder problem. I would argue that outsourcing your email to Proton or Tutanota is not running your own "artisanal" email server. By the way, even with those email providers, I still have terrible spam and fraud emails getting through filters that I never would have seen with my GMail.

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

#187

Post by nix23 »

>This is not directly about the big providers making it harder and harder to send them email, although that doesn't help. It's because a quality modern email environment is big, complex, and takes a lot of work to create and keep running.

Gosh...when people forget how to be a admin...

>takes a lot of work to create

True

>and keep running.

Not true

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

#188

Post by ftrobro »

deng wrote: post #127
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you put some decent effort [...] it works Well, I put in more than some decent effort, and I didn't get it "to work". I detailed my efforts here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser... Please stop spreading falsehoods. If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.

> If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it. Yes, that's probably true. I've been running my own server for 20 years now, and I guess that in itself helps with getting my mail delivered (apart from t-online, but who cares about them). At some time I also hosted some mailing lists, but I quickly abandone…

Haha I have the same experience... I have given up trying to send emails to t-online, but every other email-provider accept emails from the server I manage. It sends a few thousand emails per day.

A few years ago we had problems, but then I realized some of the emails sent from our servers had non-ascii characters in headers (subject, from, to) which caused email-providers to distrust our server. Using encoded-words syntax ("=?UTF-8?B?" + BASE64(text) + "?=") fixed that problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Encoded-Word

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

#189

Post by annoyingnoob »

Been running my own mail server out of my house for about a decade. It has been glorious. I have always paid for 3rd party spam filtering, both inbound and outbound. Inbound and outbound through a 3rd party helps reduce the attack surface at my house.

My users do not need webmail and I do not offer it. Calendars are done in local clients and shared through invites.

I went with DC powered equipment, with battery backup on the input. My internet and email can stand at least a 24 hour power outage. Its also all solid state and no fans, no moving parts. Its been very reliable, though I do replace the batteries every couple of years. I'm probably over due for hardware updates at this point.

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

#190

Post by judge2020 »

_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…

Moved away from outlook.com hosting a while ago since so much legitimate transactional email went to spam whilst actual spam easily got through. Now, when outlook forwards to gmail, gmail catch it before it hits the inbox.
Post reply on HN