Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 519 posts

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

#321

Post by dqv »

Dunedan wrote: post #294
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…

> 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 solv…

What kind of mail are you sending? Are you getting anything on your abuse@ address? Are you getting any feedback on JMRP [0]? If all else fails, the mailop mailing list [1] can get you closer to someone on one of these networks to help.

>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?

At one point, after getting one-too-many rejections for a particular recipient, I started sending the postmaster of the recipient’s service an email every time I needed to contact the recipient. That resolved the issue pretty quickly. You can always try annoying the postmaster.

[0]: https://postmaster.live.com/snds/JMRP.aspx

[1]: https://www.mailop.org/

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

#322

Post by kw-maller »

Is the article sponsored by Google or Microsoft? We're not in 1995 still, and I would say that it has become practically more doable for each year, given the affordable (sometimes even free) and easy access to software, hardware, and internet connectivity required to put up an e-mail server.

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

#323

Post by walrus01 »

I just did a ctrl-f here for "IP space reputation"

not mentioned yet?

One of the very important things is choosing what ISP to host your self-hosted email at. And the spam blacklist (or opaque/impossible-to-know) likely blacklist status of your IP at things like office365, gmail, etc.

Assuming for a moment that you are a person who is perfectly capable of setting up your own postfix and dovecot server.

No matter how perfect your rDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup is, and how flawless your theoretical postfix or other smtp daemon configuration is... If it's not hosted in the right place, outbound mail deliverability is the main problem you'll run into.

For the persons who are not ready to host their own SMTP and mail storage, I'm going to second the other suggestions made in this same thread that say a good first step is to control the authoritative DNS for your own domain, so that you can choose where to point the MX records at, and make an educated/informed choice of third party mail service provider.

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

#324

Post by authed »

quesera wrote: post #306
authed wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so I know where spam/leaks come from unless they use BCC

Deliver to address is always in the headers, even if message is Bcc'ed to you.

that's good to know.

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

#325

Post by wpietri »

joshdata wrote: post #287
wpietri wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think artisanal is necessarily "bad", but we should all acknowledge that it will be more work for a result that's maybe better but probably worse for most people. I ran my own mail server for 20+ years, finally giving up a couple years ago. I strongly disagree that it has gotten easier. As the article makes clear, it's a much more complicated world. Things that have happened in the last 20 years include SPF,…

> Things that have happened in the last 20 years include SPF, DKIM, DMARC Right, of course. The protocols are more complex. (Add TLS, MTA-STS...) But whereas 20 years ago you _had_ to start from scratch and understand the whole stack, today that's just not necessary. There are numerous projects that make running a mail server readily possible without knowing e.g. the sendmail configuration macro language. And there a…

Sorry, I think "undeniable" is way too strong.

I wrote the email chapter for the book "Internet Secrets" in 2000, and I ran my own mail server 1997-2019, so I have a pretty good sense of what the landscape was like then versus now. QMail and Postfix were both out before 2001, so you didn't need to know sendmail at the time. You just had to be able to configure the mailer to get things up and running. And given that there were decent Linux distributions available, the technical challenge wasn't high.

The difference now is that from there, there's a lot more to understand if you actually want your email to get anywhere reliably. It's complicated, subtle, and much harder to resolve problems when you get it wrong. At the time, the biggest problem was bounces. Now deliverability has become a dark art.

Just out of curiosity, when did you start running your own mail server?

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

#327

Post by dqv »

michaelt wrote: post #165
caymanjim wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this all the time, but I question how true it is. I've been running my own mail servers for decades, and I've never had any problems with sending or receiving mail. I suspect anyone who properly configures their server will be fine.

The problem is delivery problems are almost undetectable. If I send an email to a corporation’s customer support, or to a distant relation, or to an open source mailing list, and I don’t get a reply, it could be a delivery problem - or it could just be that they didn’t decide to reply.

For corporate support, that’s totally on them. Checking the spam folder is customer support. The “oh sorry your email went to spam!” is one of the few times I express dissatisfaction to a company. It’s not my responsibility to make sure my email doesn’t go to their spam folder. Not when I’ve taken all the right steps to make sure my emails are not marked as spam. If you have customers, you have to check your spam folder! It’s not foolproof.

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

#328

Post by kureikain »

I ran an email forwarding service https://mailwip.com (former hanami.run) that also support SMTP and IMAP.

IMHO, gmail is the best company out there that can accept your emails. The most common issue with gmail is email land in spam but they learn quickly and very rare just outrage reject IP. as in, gmail won't relying solely on reputation of IP but based o sender domain or so.

Compare with hotmail or icloud or some random email hosting service, they will reject your IP just outright.

I would say it's definetely tough and stressful to run an email services for everyone, but if you run it for yourself only(so you know you're good and won't send out random spam), I will say it ins't that bad.

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

#329

Post by Ginden »

chefandy wrote: post #282
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 think #1 is a super solid idea. I'd love to go beyond that— I'm familiar with the tech and love the satisfaction of a more DIY approach— but other end users preclude my doing so. The author mentions quality in big email service but only passingly mentions what that encompasses. Smooth, responsive, well-worn, ceaselessly preened, and smoothed-over end-user UIs are important. Unfortunately, the open-source alternativ…

> most open-source interfaces are like eating on a diet.

Because there aren't open-source contributing UX/UI designers. Almost all open source interfaces are quick work done by mostly backend developers.

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

#330

Post by daneel_w »

rmdes wrote: post #6

Someone 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…

My own experience from running a private e-mail server the past 5-6 years is that the problem more than anything else is garbage "e-mail gateway" products, like e.g. Cyren GlobalView and Proofpoint, that gets in the way.

There's a tendency to perma-reject e-mail coming from "not seen before" domains despite the e-mail passing FCrDNS + SPF + DKIM + DMARC validation, which makes it difficult for private e-mail server users to get through to people.

Post reply on HN