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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

#191

Post by judge2020 »

mcbits wrote: post #38
_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…

> Said that it was because my mailserver did not send enough legitimate mail for their algorithm to trust it. In other words, a small self-hosted email server will be considered a spammer until it starts sending out large amounts of email? Maybe that can be automated...

'large amounts' is also pretty relative, I'm sure if you had a small team of 10-25 employees on a self-hosted mail server (preferably with a static IP via the ISP) you'd be taken seriously pretty quickly versus only you sending an email once a week or less.

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

#192

Post by boplicity »

I don't know. Cpanel makes it almost effortless. There are rare problems, and they don't tend to be difficult to fix. If we were using a provider such as Mailchimp, for our marketing email, we'd probably be spending $30k to $50k a year on email. It's well worth the very minor effort required to host our own email.

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

#193

Post by codazoda »

tzs wrote: post #185
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…

I use a domain, registered at Namecheap, and I forward to my gmail account. If gmail “goes away” I simply configure my email to forward elsewhere. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap forwarding, I point my DNS at another forwarding provider. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap, I transfer my domain to another provider.

It gives me all the flexibility I need with almost no work or maintenance.

There are enough mail providers that I could easily switch to that I don’t need a piece of software. Switching from gmail to yahoo, proton, apple, outlook, or juno is a simple domain adjustment and has me back receiving mail within the TTL period.

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

#194

Post by ireflect »

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 mail server running on DigitalOcean has been relatively trouble free over the last 9 years. It runs docker-mailserver and is used by me and a dozen employees of my various small businesses.

It requires some effort to maintain and understand, and I’ve had a few deliverability issues over the years but they are generally with niche providers. I’ve never had trouble sending mail to the big providers.

Every time I read comments about the impracticality of self-hosted email, I scratch my head. Maybe I’ve just been lucky.

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

#195

Post by IncRnd »

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.

I setup and have been running an email server for around 20 domains for over a decade. There have been no issues delivering to Gmail or Outlook, AOL, or Hotmail. There was some work I did initiallity to remove our IP addresses from blackhole lists, which had resulted from whatever the prior owners of the addresses had done. That was, however, minor and didn't take much time. Similarly, setting up DKIM, SPF, and the like were necessary and ugly to do, but they didn't take much time.

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

#196

Post by rnotaro »

tzs wrote: post #185
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…

https://mailinabox.email/ does most of that.

I have my own domain since when I was about 15 years old and used that for a while on a digital ocean droplets. It's incredibly easy to set-up.

The only issue I had was that other people were not getting my mail and I sometimes it was not even reaching their spam folders. Probably because Google/Microsoft were blocking that IP range of Digital Oceans.

Nowadays I just pay for a personal Gsuite license and use Google Infrastructure.

Much simpler that way and I'm almost guaranteed that my mail will reach the recipients. You only need to set-up your DMARC / SPF records and point your MX records to the ones that Google provides.

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

#197

Post by tjoff »

spadros wrote: post #186
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 wou…

Well, on the flip side unless you constantly check your spam folder (which pretty much completely defeats the purpose of a spam filter) you most definitely have lost important mails thanks to gmail.

I just don't see what people see in gmail part from the google brand - which surely isn't a good thing anymore.

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

#198

Post by throwaway27727 »

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.

Lots of sister comments here saying that they've been running a mail server for X amount of years, where X is a rather large number. That will obviously come with some reputation for your mail server, reducing the curve of being classified as down. I would be interested in hearing from someone who tried to setup a new mail server in the last 1-2 years who was able to run it without a hitch.

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

#199

Post by jms703 »

lixtra wrote: post #20

> … general security will not be as good as they have. > Entirely "on premise" email is now an inferior thing for almost everyone. I disagree on this one. Placing your email with a big player means that by definition, they have access to your mailbox (with sensitive stuff hopefully encrypted). To allow that you have to trust the big player and the countries where they reside. They can drop you any time for political…

Once you’ve sent or received email containing “sensitive stuff” you no longer control your data. Folks need to come to grips with the fact that email security is dead and hosting it yourself doesn’t fix this.

The author of the post should have included that in his post.

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

#200

Post by matt_heimer »

teekert wrote: post #151
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…

You'll get it when Microsoft decides you are a spammer for no other reason then sending email from port 25 from your house. Or when you can't seem to sign up for a service... until you use your old Gmail address.

Yeah, there was (is?) a period of time where viruses were used to send spam so if you got infected you'd suddenly be sending out a lot of SMTP traffic from a residential IP address. The entire industry adopted the practice of not trusting residential ips. Then the spammers shifted to cheap VPS providers and ip and netblock black lists became more common.
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