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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

#351

Post by charcircuit »

dqv wrote: post #300
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…

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 packa…

They also need to have a reputation of being able to block spam.

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

#352

Post by greggsy »

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…

The suggestion that they will try muscle you out to maintain their monopoly is a bit alarmist. If you’re not sending spam, and your email infrastructure includes strong DMARC and SPF policies, then it’s unlikely that your reputation will be tarnished simply because it isn’t part of the Gmail or Exchange Online ecosystems.

I’d argue that the vast bulk of email is sent from dedicated providers like Sendgrid which are built on the same tech that might be found in any given ‘artisanal’ on-prem service.

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

#353

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

Yep! I do #1 despite researching controlling the whole stack. I still like the idea of doing it someday, if only with a development domain.

I pay $12 a year for email hosting, $10 a year for the domain. I use name.com and I presume (though I have not tested) that if I needed a human to talk to, I would have much better luck than with Google. I also don't have to worry about a snarky Youtube comment getting me locked out of Youtube, Youtube TV, Gmail, GDrive and everything else.

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

#354

Post by rsync »

jms703 wrote: post #199
lixtra wrote: post #20

> … general security will not be as good as they have. > Entirely "on premise" email is now an inferior thing for almost everyone. I disagree on this one. Placing your email with a big player means that by definition, they have access to your mailbox (with sensitive stuff hopefully encrypted). To allow that you have to trust the big player and the countries where they reside. They can drop you any time for political…

Once you’ve sent or received email containing “sensitive stuff” you no longer control your data. Folks need to come to grips with the fact that email security is dead and hosting it yourself doesn’t fix this. The author of the post should have included that in his post.

"Folks need to come to grips with the fact that email security is dead and hosting it yourself doesn’t fix this."

Sort of, but not entirely true ...

If you run your own mailserver then users of that mailserver can send and receive mail, to each other, without traversing a network. The mail never goes out on the net. That can be valuable/interesting.

This is true in both the webmail use-case (the text goes to the browser, ephemerally, encrypted with SSL) or the terminal/console (alpine) use-case (the text goes to the terminal, ephemerally, encrypted with SSH).

There's a certain cloud storage provider I know of whose internal / intra-company emails have never traversed the Internet ...

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

#355

Post by andix »

arichard123 wrote: post #341
andix wrote: post #140

It’s not so bad to run your own email server. Im doing it, because email is very sensitive data, and I don’t want to share it with Google or Microsoft or any other cloud provider. The worst part is, that you can’t use any fancy email clients, because they all use proprietary protocols and once again cloud services. But imap and activesync works well enough too. The most important thing is, to get a clean IP address.…

I've had real trouble with digital ocean as they just don't want to get involved in helping email providers at all. They don't want to do anything with managing IP reputation.

I know. I think there is a study, that showed digital ocean is the provider that sends the most spam emails, and just doesn’t care. As self defense, some providers just block their ips because of that. And if you try to unblock such an ip, they require you to do a lot of erfrort. You can skip it, if you get an IP from a provider with good reputation. AWS for example doesn’t kid around if you send spam. You need a special permission in the first place to even be able to use port 25 outgoing.

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

#356

Post by bsder »

denton-scratch wrote: post #278
chriscjcj wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> [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.

This. So much this.

I will happily run my "artisinal" mail system for myself. Would I put customers on it? Oh, hell, no.

I, sadly, always recommend that companies pay money to Microsoft for email. You are really paying for the customer support service rather than the email service.

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

#357

Post by atum47 »

I'm a well versed software engineer and even I had trouble setting up my email. After a while I realized it was not worthed, so I keep using Gmail, hoping I don't violate any of their policies or get tangled in the algorithm. As I see here, it's a hard thing to recover once this go wrong with big tech.

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

#358

Post by gruez »

dmw_ng wrote: post #171
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…

> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound, while continuing to handle inbound a different way. Obviously SES doesn't count as fully self-hosted, but it does solve (or at least significantly ameliorate -- zero issues here) the reputation problem

>It's possible to punt on this by using SES for outbound

How does this work? Do you just sign up for aws, then set your outbound SMTP to whatever SES provides?

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

#359

Post by tommek4077 »

fareesh wrote: post #344

If I have business outcomes that are dependent on people receiving my emails, it's difficult for me to be in a situation where the other person may need to, at some point, be told that they aren't getting my emails because I'm on some kind of "hipster email system" which they are no doubt going to perceive it to be. They're probably going to wonder why they are wasting their time with me when I can't even get somethi…

Hipster mail system. Also known as "mail like we've done it the last 4 decades". Strange!

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

#360

Post by CogitoCogito »

dheera wrote: post #320
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…

Yes. I want to create a mail server that auto-rejects e-mail with externally hosted tracking pixels and returns a Mailer-Daemon error that tells the sender to re-send without malware. Of course with Gmail I disable automatic image loading to avoid being tracked, but I want to take a more active stance against the practice.

What’s your method of detecting tracking pixels? Is it just as simple as scanning for size 1x1 images?

I mean this as an honest question. I don’t really know variety of tracking pixels out there. Are there other similar things one should block?

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