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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

#221

Post by SteveNuts »

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…

iredmail does this pretty well

https://www.iredmail.org/

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

#222

Post by throw0101a »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #34
sascha_sl wrote: post #23

Also, a lot of software in the field has never made sense to me. I know what the parts do, but I couldn't tell you how to assemble it all. It all seems very old and seperate software more for historical reasons than anything else. I ran mailinabox for a year or two, but eventually I just didn't want to maintain a piece of software I didn't understand where the documentation seemed actively hostile and presumptuous ab…

Postfix and Dovecot are classic magic word projects - completely useless unless you can work out the magic words, and then they work fine. The docs for magic word projects never to seem to prioritise essentials. So [obscure feature someone last used in 1984] gets equal billing with [essential fundamentals] and you have no idea which is which because - you haven't understood the docs yet. I'm still running my own serv…

Useful step-by-step instructions:

* https://workaround.org/ispmail

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

#223

Post by emteycz »

_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…

Corporate O365 users often have their own Exchange server (cloud or self-hosted) with custom configuration.

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

#224

Post by goodpoint »

yosamino wrote: post #124

> Your IMAP access might be as good as theirs, but things like your webmail, your spam filtering, and almost certainly your general security will not be as good as they have.[...] > Especially, open source can't compete on features like webmail and performance in things like spam filtering. If anything roundcube is a better webmail client than many of the mail-provider ones. And that's ignoring all the ads and tracki…

> A large mail provider doesn't have access to magically different security tooling than everyone else.

Actually various big FAANG companies have very privileged access to vulnerability disclosures.

However, the threat model can make small mailservers way more secure. Breaking into gmail is worth billions.

Breaking into your personal mailserver is not worth the time of any skilled attacker unless you have very valuable secrets.

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

#225

Post by Lex-2008 »

pjc50 wrote: post #93
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…

> biggest source of spam is gmail itself [citation needed]; is this actually going out from gmail or does it just use gmail return addresses? I too used to run my own email from about 2000-2010, but the maintenance overhead is quite stressful especially because it always happens for critical times or critical emails.

Re: [citation needed];

> Gmail obvious spam still #1 in the quarantine folders..

-- Michael Peddemors, President/CEO LinuxMagic Inc.

https://www.mail-archive.com/mailop@mailop.org/msg14526.html

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

#226

Post by tarunupaday »

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…

This is great advise. I do #1 and #2 but not #3. I use sendgrid.com for #3. They have one of the highest (if not the highest) deliverability rates in the world and mails arrive really fast (faster than gmail).

As a bonus: I get to see report which of my emails were classified as spam or not opened.

Also, first 100 mails per day are free (which has been enough for me so far).

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

#227

Post by velcrovan »

alufers wrote: post #111
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…

> Speaking of which, how long before it won't be possible to host your own web server? It's increasingly getting harder and harder. Recently I was trying to watch a TV show with my friends using a self-hosted Plex server, which was located in one of my friend's house, connected via a gigabit, albeit residential link. Another friend was using LTE internet at that time. He couldn't watch the show, because his connectio…

Why net neutrality would have been nice, exhibit 78

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

#228

Post by zkldi »

ancarda wrote: post #114
pjc50 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> biggest source of spam is gmail itself [citation needed]; is this actually going out from gmail or does it just use gmail return addresses? I too used to run my own email from about 2000-2010, but the maintenance overhead is quite stressful especially because it always happens for critical times or critical emails.

Almost all spam I receive is from Gmail. It's gotten so bad I've actually setup a filter that routes everything from @gmail.com into spam - except for some whitelisted email addresses. G Suite is fine, it's only @gmail.com that is an issue And yes, it's genuinely from Gmail; valid SPF, valid DKIM, came from a Google IP address, etc... To say the biggest source is Gmail might be technically wrong though - I suspect th…

> To say the biggest source is Gmail might be technically wrong though - I suspect there's a large volume of spam that Migadu (my provider) is dropping before it even reaches my inbox, i.e. emails that it is 100% sure are spam and it can just drop. Nevertheless, an overwhelming amount of spam I observe/have to deal with is coming from Gmail. Second to that is outlook/hotmail.

This. It's more likely to be survivorship bias -- the gmail emails happen to survive because gmail is more trusted.

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

#229

Post by judge2020 »

blibble wrote: post #209
judge2020 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

spammers tend to set up SPF/DKIM

I mean that SES gives you SES IP reputation, and they force you to have a low bounce rate & complaint rate, thus SES specifically is usually not blocked by big providers nor small enterprise networks.

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

#230

Post by stiray »

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…

Internet was meant to be decentralized. Lets leave it this way.

I am running my server for 15 years and couldn't be more happy with "artisan" infrastructure.

I don't want or use webmail (sluggish), I don't want others fingerpoking my emails, I don't want various compulsory registration systems (like requiring my phone number out of """security""" reasons like google), giving others the ability to kill my account and do me a huge amount of work and on the top of that, it breaks the sites registration schemes, I have set up a script that accepts any email with some special structure and each and every registration gets a specially customized mail address (that I can calculate in my head, no configuration needed) that can be resolved back to the registration.

Getting spam? I am sick of you, whatever? No issue, just REJECT the whole address. It is used by only one site, like smart people don't reuse passwords, I don't reuse email addresses.

And you would be surprised, how many sites sell email addresses to others, and I know it as every one gets its own email address.

Rspamd eats the spam just as good as "ai infrastructure" /s

Even if you go for 3rd party email infrastructure, registering a domain is a must, so you can switch the provider fast if it gets vampirized.

Out of my whole infrastructure (100% self hosted, as said, for 15 years, actually more but not 100%), the email server is the part that needs the least attention.

The response to the author would be: nice that large providers have webmails and some other quirks that I don't want or need. Feel free to use them, but I have freedom.

postfix. dovecot. rspamd.

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