Still waiting for Fabrice Bellard to write a bullet proof stand alone imap smtp server in 5k lines of c. When that happens I'll self host!
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
331–340 of 519 posts
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case. If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works. In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No,…
You need control of the entire netblock you send email from. Everything was going smoothly for me for 7 years until the entire Digital Ocean netblock my static IP was in landed in a permanent blacklist due to enough of the other IPs in that block having repeated complaints. I don't remember the mailing blacklist it was on but unblocking that single IP required the netblock owner (Digital Ocean) contacting the blackli…
this is why persons self-hosting email servers are much more likely to have success using a small to medium sized, trusted local ISP where you can establish a relationship with the persons who run the ASN. And determine for certain that the ipv4 /24 your mail server's /32 is contained within does not contain random other $5 to $30/month people buying VPS/VMs/low-budget-dedicated-servers with credit cards.
If you can have a high degree of confidence that no outgoing smtp spam traffic has ever been emitted from any of the other IPs adjacent to where you're hosted, the opaque blacklists of the big mail receiving providers (gmail, etc) are much less likely to consider your legit traffic as spam.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#333I ran my email server (several domains, a dozen or so accounts) for over a decade. This year I caved in and switched to hosted (gmail and fastmail).
For most of the time it's been smooth running, but I did have to do maintenance on the server every year or so, just in time to forget the intricacies and having to relearn them again.
Yeah, a few hours a year on that is not much. But there are many such small "auxiliary" things/chores and it adds.
There's so much things I would and could want do myself, and nowhere near enough time to do them. I have to pick my battles.
And figuring out how to fix sender rewrite to enable mail forwarding with SPF without accidentally allowing spam is not very high on my list of important things in life.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#334I am happy with this docker-based solution:
https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/
I am running it and require very little mantenance.
The documentation is very well done and I was able to setup all the stuff needed in a short time.
Also paid hosting solution tend to be very pricely if you need more than 3-4 accounts.
My solution instead required only some setup effort, less than one day.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#335It'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…
In my dealings with outlook postmaster my experience is as follows:
They ignore any argument you make or proof you show them that their servers are accepting emails and then silently dropping them. So that's basically the experience you mention.
However they will immediately unban your IP when you mention that you will recommend your customers switch away from Outlook email since it is unreliable.
That's for a totally clean IP with no spam issues.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#336Personally, I use email less and less, thanks to Matrix. I wish websites would stop requiring an email address for signing up though (and phone numbers for that matter).
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And Yandex has a $0/yr plan (unless they got rid of it and I’m just grandfathered, not sure..)
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#338The latest edition of Nemeth, et al., Unix/Linux System Administration says basically the same thing. Spam filtering, for example, is a whole horrible thing that will be essentially a full-time job for anyone running a mail host.
Hell, about two years ago I gave up on self-hosting. Unwanted email got to be the vast majority of what I was receiving and spam filter software ate more memory than my itty-bitty host had, meaning I would have had to get a bigger, specific mail host. (As it was, the IMAP server was the biggest process running on my host.)
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#339It'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…
unfortunately as long as you’re sending email to other people you’re subject to Google’s filtering rules, so it may be easier to work with a provider that operates at a scale google cares about… it’s all a racket if you ask me… their algo can doom any individual self-hoster to perpetual spam hell and they’ve got zero service
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#340It'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…
"Pay a few dollars to smarthost, for instance."
Do you mean pay a few dollars to use someone else's email infrastructure? Or do you mean pay a few dollars more to set up a dedicated mail host in a better neighborhood?