Is tending to your own email server really what you want to do with your once and precious life.
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
211–220 of 519 posts
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#212General email server? No, I would be worried too.
But I think you can set up an email server for your own tasks, like sending yourself some notifications. It's also nice to know how this works in theory.
These are the reasons I included some basic e-mail setup in my book (Deployment from Scratch), although also advising to depend on some reputable IP addresses.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
We've been running a small mail host for ~10 years (less than 100 accounts, but outgoing monthly newsletter to a few thousand addresses) ... we had basically zero problem with delivering to Gmail. Their spam filter, while strict and applies throttling (and a bit of greylisting) is completely livable, compared to the balls-to-the-wall insane Outlook/Microsoft "protection" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28982434 )
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#214Someone 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…
The most frustrating part is someone who isn't getting your mail will blame it on you. "I get everyone else's (gmail/outlook) email, it must be you."
Hmm, guess it's time for a counter-attack : "Sorry, but it's too much hassle to send e-mail to gmail/outlook, please use another provider if you want to communicate." ?
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#215The article makes a string of assertions without evidence. For example, that an “artisinal” email server will not “measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers.” One reason that I continue to run my own email server after more than a decade of trouble-free operation (thanks Postfix and Dovecot) is that it performs better than my Gmail account, which I mai…
> The article makes a string of assertions without evidence.
Agreed, but the same observation could be made about most blog posts. The author is expressing his opinions based on experience and judgment. This particular author has a good reputation so HN readers take his opinions seriously.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#216Someone 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,…
> If you [...] it works.
I've been running mailservers using free software for 20 years. I've run two for personal use, and several for groups like companies. In the old days, you could indeed throw up a server, and provided you don't spam, and you're not in a bad neighbourhood, outgoing mail would be accepted.
In more recent years, my experience has been that it takes time for a new mail sender to be acccepted; could be a year or two to build reputation. That's assuming you do everything right.
My personal mail, by the way, has been on the same domain since about 2001. I've quit running a mailserver now. My small ISP runs a setup that's basically what I would have built, so I use that; the support is excellent. But it's still on the same domain.
Last company I was at ran their mail on their ISPs mailserver. The ISP got taken over; service deteriorated, to the point it became unacceptable. So I built $EMPLOYER a mailserver; it took me longer than I predicted, because the bosses had all kinds of finicky requirements (don't they always) that I had to figure out how to provide after the fact. But that "artisanal" server beat the bejabers out of the ISP system; it was fast, reliable, and when anything went wrong I could fix it - which that ISP couldn't.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may just have been unlucky with your IP block having spammers. How were you hosting it - own ISP or another provider? I have not had deliverability issues for years with my Kimsufi (OVH France) server. While I am confident my server is well configured using best practices, I suspect some of it is also just luck not to be in the same IP block as a spammer.
I was using a colocation hoster in Belgium. They actually moved me to another netblock to test (they were a really nice small company). But the same happened. I heard Kimsufi is indeed pretty bad as it's so cheap people tend to use it for 'throwaway' purposes. It's basically the white label budget brand of OVH :)
I've had 2 kimsufi email servers and both were fine. It shares the same data centres as OVH so I guess IP ranges are similar. No problems with blacklisting based on anything other than my own misconfiguration so far, and it's been maybe 8 years.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Port 25 is only required if the destination doesn't support TLS, I think. I've not opened port 25 outgoing on my server and I've had zero issues delivering sent mail to other servers for maybe 5 years. I think OP might have meant " receiving on port 25 is getting difficult" rather than sending. The spec requires servers to support unencrypted deliveries over port 25, even though almost all servers use TLS these days.
Even with TLS, that is usually handled by issuing STARTTLS on TCP port 25. I can't find anything in the RFCs mentioning server-to-server smtp delivery happening on anything but port 25? Do you have a reference for that? In fact, even the MX for google domains (aspmx.l.google.com) does not listen on TCP port 465 or 587, only 25.
I'm not certain, so you might be more informed than me. It's possible my server is sending on port 25 and since the firewall I use doesn't block outgoing connection I just didn't notice. TIL!
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#219Except 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…
Speaking of which, how long before it won't be possible to host your own web server? Maybe its just a matter of time for some. For me personally, I could not possibly care less if all the free mail providers blocked me some day. If something is important I can call people and tell them to go to https://mydomain.tld/theirName/ to grab files. I have used this method with non technical people including lawyers without i…
GSuite and Office 365 are not free, and make security guarantees to their customers.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse. This may be because they blacklist your provider en bloc, your IP address or some subnet, because they feel like it, it's Tuesday or because their spam filters suck. But it happens and it happens often enough that running a business in that way will cost you money, sometimes lots of it…
See the Digital Markets Act in the EU. It could be a way to force large corporations to cooperate.
While completely abandoning hope for the small players in the process.