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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

#271

Post by OJFord »

patja wrote: post #250
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.

I use it for personal use, would also recommend. It's not 'self-hosting' of course, but that's not what I actually care about personally, more interested in 'running my own' regardless of whether it's physically my hardware or not.

(Or rather given everything I've read about self-hosting email, not regardless, this is my preference...)

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

#272

Post by KeybInterrupt »

I personally don't host my own Mail Infrastructure, If I where forced to do so, I would probably run a Mailcow.

Especially the "dockerized" Mailcow is reasonably easy to setup.

You will still have to setup SPF, DKIM and the other DNS records. But Mailcow is a solid package!

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

#273

Post by croutonwagon »

pas wrote: post #213
rnotaro wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=2898243…

Don’t even get me started on outlook.co/o365.

If you put an address or domain in the safesenders list; they do literally nothing. Like you can just totally spoof the domain entirely.

However if you use transport rules as per their rec, there’s all sorts of stuff that will still get flagged, and you have to to reference ATP, anti-phishing, anti-spam policies. Much of which aren’t even in the Exchange admin panel, rather they are in “security” and buried in hamburger menus galore.

And what’s best. They don’t even have any documentation for how these modules interact or what order mail is processed in. I had a case open for months thst finally got escalated to someone that was able to explain the issues we had with specific list serves/domains getting flagged.

In the end my only option was to whitelist emails classes as phishing and route them to junk rather than keeping them in quarantine. Even though it was a 99% accuracy rate sans this single domain.

The guy was really only able to commiserate with me. We are but a number and not a big enough one to get Ms to change a thing. Their best recommendation was to deploy an edge device like proofpoint/proofpoint hosted and just handle it from there.

I get what they want to do. They are trying to make the crazy email RFCs easy for devops guys thst don’t give a damn about how e-mail works. But it’s still hard to keep up with as they constantly just move stuff around and change their own standards on a near monthly basis.

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

#274

Post by jasode »

johnklos wrote: post #253

It's amazing how quickly people with strong feelings about email come out when any mention of self hosting is made. They can't prove a negative, but they valiantly try, often using the very points that are excellent reasons to self-host as reasons we should all just give up. "It doesn't work for me, so it won't work for you" is rather weak when the reasons aren't articulated, when generalizations are made without det…

>"It doesn't work for me, so it won't work for you" is rather weak

Maybe I missed it but I scrolled through the comments and I don't see anyone in this thread claiming the above. In fact, I see the people who had problems with personal mail server deliverability acknowledge that others may have success and "that's good for them."

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

#275

Post by kortilla »

feanaro wrote: post #149
kro wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To most, including Gmail, it's actually no problem with DMARC in my experience too. However, one of my servers IPs is on a Microsoft blacklist since many years now. It sends <10 messages / day. I've tried every unlist form I could find, even called MS but it does not get taken of that list and they "won't disclose why". I'm routing SMTP to MS via another relay now :)

> I'm routing SMTP to MS via another relay now :) How do you do this? Could you share details on the setup?

https://serverfault.com/questions/257637/postfix-to-relay-ma...

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

#276

Post by kortilla »

velcrovan wrote: post #227
alufers wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Net neutrality wouldn’t fix this is if the issue is a peering problem (which is very common today). The internet has become so centralized that ISPs cheap out on transit and just direct peer to all of the big content providers.

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

#278

Post by denton-scratch »

chriscjcj wrote: post #247
stiray wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

> 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 [...] ?

Yes. Twice.

In the first case, the mail provider was our ISP; and they got themselves in some mainstream blacklists. The problems getting that sorted out were part of the motivation for bringing mail in-house.

In the second case, there was some academic departmental mailserver and they were using some list incorrectly; using an extremely-opinionated list to block when it should at best be used to score.

This wasn't in itself a big deal, but one of my boss's correspondents was a senior professor in this department and they had some important business; and the postmaster was a dick, and wouldn't help. Boss didn't want to use some secondary email address; I had to show him how to set up an alias on some commercial server, which was second-best, but he was in a hurry.

Boss was angry with me and barked at me. If you run a mailserver for some group, one you assembled yourself, then people expect you to take responsibility for sorting out any mail problems. Well, they're right: you have taken on that responsibility. You made it, and you're running it: who else can they complain to?

[Edit] My point is that it's not hard to set up an artisan mail system; what's hard is that you create a job for yourself that is at the same time networking, user-facing, and technical. It's an interesting learning point, and I recommend it. But don't underestimate what you are taking on.

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

#279

Post by charwalker »

koolba wrote: post #130
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…

There’s a midpoint at #1.5 where you control the domain and rely on an external host, but also have a continuous archive of your historical mails on your own server. Otherwise with a standard IMAP setup, if your provider locks you out, you’re limited to only the most recent N messages on connected devices.

Buy a domain for $20, get a GSuite account with it for $6 a month or similar, then archive all your mail via Outlook or your desktop email app of choice. You also get a lot of other tools and storage space for very low cost which I find useful.

It's still using Google but it allows plenty of control and management, and I can take my domain anywhere with minimal stress. It's a decent compromise.

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

#280

Post by awinter-py »

email is totally broken. this article is right but the answer isn't let goog read your messages, it's invest in new communication protocols

tons of serious players don't trust email at all today

some, like my health insurance + bank, are dinosaurs who are all but licking the molten shockwave of a meteor. But still -- they have real reasons they email me that my 'secure message inbox' has a new message. Oscar uses 'secure email powered by virtru' to tell me they're not going to reply to my reply to their email, wtf, huge indictment of oscar, but also indictment of email.

but it's not just dinosaurs -- amazon, who has had a tough month but is generally savvy, doesn't trust email. they won't send me itemized receipts because they don't want google to read them.

I half believe we're about to see a renaissance in self hosting for individuals + businesses. this article is calling the bottom.

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