Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by vaylian » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #231

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…

FWIW, someone is still reading your email. The owner of the infrastructure of your message recipients. If you've gone through the trouble of hosting your own email to avoid Google harvesting your messages, but you're exchanging emails with someone whose email is hosted by Google, then your emails are still being harvested and/or are harvestable.

Good point. But it is still one person/company less that reads your e-mail, if you and your correspondent used different e-mail providers previously.

There are also correspondences where you are only the receiver. For example, when you order things online. Gmail doesn't need to know what you are shopping for.

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

#242

Post by zbuf » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #235

throwaway27727 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to AWS, most mail servers will not even count statistics for low-volume senders. If that is true, then it won't matter whether your personal email server has been up for 20 years or 1 year, it won't have any reputation.

This matches my exprience. I switched recently after 10+ years, and was cautious that this might be a problem but it hasn't been at all. I think it has more to do with the choice of ISP.

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

#243

Post by vultour » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

tarunupaday wrote: post #226

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).

You put tracking pixels into private emails? That’s pretty upsetting, luckily I’ve had images disabled for years.

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

#244

Post by electric_mayhem » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

Your post is super insightful.

Option 2 in particular is super appealing.

I’ve tried a bunch of pricacy-focused email services and have been let down by one or more aspects of their service. Pretty much all of them managed to handle sending Ronny satisfaction, though.

So setting up inbound to run on my own gear and paying a couple bucks a month for others to deal with dkim and and domain keys and all that other crap… that’s brilliant.

Thanks for the idea!

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

#245

Post by authed » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

blop wrote: post #44

I still run my own email system (postfix/dovecot for imap), mostly for one reason: the virtual username function of postfix: I configured postfix with: recipient_delimiter = . which gives me unlimited dynamic virtual addresses (username. @mydomain), so I know where spam/leaks come from if I get unsolicited mail directed to `username. `, and it makes it trivial to block. I know that you can do the same thing with goog…

> so I know where spam/leaks come from

unless they use BCC

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

#246

Post by deadbunny » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

kaetemi wrote: post #237

codazoda wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But what if... the TLD owner decides to 10x the domain price?

As someone who de-googled about 5 years ago by buying a nice three letter .io address this hits right in the feels.

I could go through the process again (not fun) with some ridiculously long .com/.net or other OG tld which are probably somewhat more resistant to rent seeking practices like this or I just suck it up and hope it remains pricey but not egregious.

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

#247

Post by chriscjcj » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #230

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…

Honest and non-rhetorical question here: Have any of your customers had an e-mail they've tried to send not arrive because the recipient's system was using a black-hole list that, for some erroneous reason, had you blocked? If so, were you able to successfully communicate with and/or reasonably work through whatever issue got you black-holed?

I haven't administered e-mail servers for 20 years, but back when I did, this started to be a problem that eventually became insurmountable. I used to manage a small business oriented ISP. We were multi-homed with a /18 that we used for everything. I had a customer that was a reasonably sized organization that dealt with tourism and conventions for a major city. On one of their websites, (which we hosted with IPs that came out of the same /18 as their mail server,) they had a directory of vendors who were associated with them. ONE of those members had a website that had been hacked/defaced. This got our entire /18 on a blac-khole list. They had an employee that was trying to send e-mail to someone on a system that was using this black-hole server to filter spam.

When we explained to them what the problem was, we got glassy-eyed stares back at us and a, "just fix it." I told them that, they would need to remove the link to their partner's site from their website in order to get them AND all of our other customers using numbers inside our /18 de-listed from this particular black-hole. They asked, "We have hundreds of partners who pay for membership in our organization and being listed on our website is one of the benefits. How can we possibly police every one of those websites every day to make sure there's no defacement or serving of any problematic material from any URL in any of those domains?" That's a decent argument in my opinion. And I tried to explain that different black-holes have different policies and no black-hole is demanding that anyone use their system for filtering. I tired contacting the organization that was using that black-hole to explain the situation to them, but they weren't interested in discussing it. As far as they were concerned it was our problem to deal with.

This kind of problem happened dozens of times with varying degrees of severity but with increasing regularity and it was one of the primary reasons we quit hosting e-mail and started re-selling another vendor's solution. That was a long time ago, and maybe black-hole lists aren't a thing anymore.

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

#248

Post by tootie » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

I think you can extend this a whole host of other domains. A lot of the bread and butter of 2000s era IT departments are being replaced with a highly competitive SaaS market. Building brochure sites, email, CRM, CMS, e-commerce, directory services, accounting and ERP. Twenty years ago you'd do a months-long procurement process for enterprise licenses, set SLAs, size the hardware, buy servers, hire integrators and you'd get your software up an running in 8 months if you're lucky. Now you type your credit card into a website and get unlimited capacity and 99.9% uptime instantly.

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

#249

Post by im_down_w_otp » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

vaylian wrote: post #241

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, someone is still reading your email. The owner of the infrastructure of your message recipients. If you've gone through the trouble of hosting your own email to avoid Google harvesting your messages, but you're exchanging emails with someone whose email is hosted by Google, then your emails are still being harvested and/or are harvestable.

Good point. But it is still one person/company less that reads your e-mail, if you and your correspondent used different e-mail providers previously. There are also correspondences where you are only the receiver. For example, when you order things online. Gmail doesn't need to know what you are shopping for.

Unfortunately, they can still close the loop on purchase history and ad impressions through indirect, lazy association.

It's a very, very impressive edifice that's been created for identifying and tracking pretty much everybody irrespective of their direct, immediate interaction with the entity doing the tracking. I honestly think it's kind of funny that such a potentially insidious system was manifest for something as principally vapid as ad targeting.

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

#250

Post by patja » Fri, Dec 24, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

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…

You can have the best of both worlds with self-hosting received mail and achieving good deliverability by using a service such as Amazon SES. SES will probably cost you less than $10 a year for personal email sending volumes. I use it for my business and it is less than $15/yr. Rarely get a bill for more than $1. They hold you accountable for any abuse/complaints, which is a good thing.