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Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
291–300 of 519 posts
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#292Also, 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…
> I ran mailinabox for a year or two ... the documentation seemed actively hostile
Maintainer of Mail-in-a-Box here. I'm sorry you had that experience. Definitely was not the intention of the project to be hostile (but I can see how it might come off that way).
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#293Zoho has a 1 dollar a year plan.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#294It'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…
> There are plenty of issues, but there are also plenty of solutions. You're having issues sending because your netblock sucks and you don't have money for something better? Pay a few dollars to smarthost, for instance.
I do and outlook.com still gives a shit and doesn't accept incoming emails. There is also no way to get their attention for this issue, as they simply don't reply to complaints about that. How to solve issues like that?
> We should encourage MORE people to self-host email, not less. We should never just assume the monopolies are the best we can do.
That's something I can wholeheartedly agree with.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#295Earlier 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…
I've been running my own (and other) email servers for over 25 years. About four years ago I switched mine over from sendmail (with a bunch of add-ons like spamd/spamassassin, rbl, etc.) to mailinabox. Mailinabox is full-featured, secure, and reliable. It doesn't take anywhere near the level of effort required to maintain vs. other solutions.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#296I 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).
Using sendgrid would seem to have similar or worse privacy implications to using gmail, outlook and their ilk.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, rath…
That safesenders list thing sounds insane. How many companies add their own domain to that?
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> $6 a month
Zoho has a $1/yr plan.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#299Last year I was forced to migrate my 90 year old neighbour to webmail. We initially chose Gmail but ended up with outlook.office.com due to horrible IT policies at the University where she is emeritus. Walk through a computer interface with a 90 year old sometime. It is eye opening. Both webmail systems were utter design hell. The list of stuff that tripped my friend up is long. Two examples: Gmail has pencils everyw…
Don't use webmail. It's a bad user experience.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#300It'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…
I've said elsewhere in the thread, but everyone has a circle of influence. Big Mail needs to maintain a reputation of being reliable. I can and have convinced people that e.g. Yahoo mail is not reliable for receiving mail and to stop using it. And those people will do the same with their people. I think that's why it's important for people to keep at it with these "artisanal mail servers" (with the help of mail packages that do automatic configuration). More people can pressure Big Mail and demand that they let us deliver our (legit) mail as smoothly and easily as possible.