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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

#371

Post by dqv »

charcircuit wrote: post #351
dqv wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue is the spam still gets through on every single one of these providers, so that reputation isn’t nearly as important. Reliably receiving emails is. If that aspect of their reputation is damaged, it may never recover.

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

#372

Post by Animats »

hannob wrote: post #70
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…

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,…

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, it has no unsubscribe link. These are people that agreed to be put on the newsletter by clicking on some ToS they never read, and they can unsubscribe by some arcane mechanism that we will make as complicated as we can. But we're definitely not spammers.")

Yes. I do get that impression from most complainers.

I send from my own domains, and if I sent it, I wrote and addressed it personally.

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

#373

Post by jpalomaki »

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…

Security of your own domain depends a great deal on the security of your domain registar and dns provider.

If you are going this route for security purposes make sure they have proper policies and are not a susceptible to social engineering.

At least Cloudflare is offering such thing, but it’s enterprise option [1]. I would assume many others have similar offerings as well.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/custom-d...

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

#374

Post by jacquesm »

rsync wrote: post #342
jacquesm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse. This may be because they blacklist your provider en bloc, your IP address or some subnet, because they feel like it, it's Tuesday or because their spam filters suck. But it happens and it happens often enough that running a business in that way will cost you money, sometimes lots of it…

"By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse." Correct. I'd like to describe how badly this is implemented: I run my own mail server and I have a 15+ year history of emailing (mywife)@gmail.com. On a regular basis (mywife)@gmail.com will email me, and I will respond to her email and my response will go to her junk/spam folder. And there is no alert, no bounce, no notification. Let's unpack this: Googl…

Same here. And I can't even forward mail from one inbox to another because it invariably gets marked as spam. Two mailboxes, same browser, same IP.

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

#375

Post by dheera »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #365
dheera wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you do this you might not be able to go on a "paperless" billing plan with your bank or insurance company. I disable images too but financial institutions interpret "no tracking image requests" as "client's email address doesn't work" and they start mailing me paper again. Took me years to figure out the reason for this brain-dead lossage.

That's their fault then, I'll start returning their postal mail as undeliverable and if they give me further troubles I'll find another institution to do business with.

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

#376

Post by dheera »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #360
dheera wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would just block all images loaded from external URLs, since any of them could be used for tracking, but the newsletters are less my concern, it's more the individuals that I would be concerned about, and they tend to be a almost-fully plain text e-mail with a 1x1 image from one of many well-known domains for tracking.

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

#377

Post by mrich »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #364
mrich wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 totall…

How are you going to make that recommendation to your customers if they can't receive your emails? (Of course I'm being facetious; other communication channels exist. But the idea made me think of the interrogation scene in The Matrix with Microsoft in the role of Agent Smith.)

:)

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

#378

Post by epaulson »

My email is still the free/legacy version of Gsuite, from before it was called Gsuite and it was just a way to have your own domain but serviced by Gmail.

It's kind of a pain, because it's both not really a Google account, but also not a real Gsuite setup, and Google keeps quietly removing features from the legacy version of Gsuite. (You used to be able to use an external SMTP server to send as a different domain, but Google removed the UI to configure that in the free version)

I've been really hesitant to upgrade to modern Gsuite, because I'm worried about upgrading and having something go wrong in the process - Google support doesn't have the greatest reputation.

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

#379

Post by iamtheworstdev »

stiray wrote: post #230
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…

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…

> And you would be surprised, how many sites sell email addresses to others, and I know it as every one gets its own email address.

So much this. I've actually contacted companies to tell them they've been compromised because I started getting phishing emails. I quit after the third time of reporting it and being told "we haven't been hacked, someone in your friends group has and you just can't read email headers".. right because someone in my friends group emails "mylocalgym.com@mypersonaldomain.com" to schedule group activities.. then six to twelve months later I get an email from HIBP telling me said website was hacked and my email was compromised.

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

#380

Post by ip26 »

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 was determined to make #3 work for years. But despite a golden reputation for my IP, perfect dkim, dmarc, dns, and everything else, plus exclusively personal mail (no bulk mail ever) I could never get out of the spam box at several major providers. Never could figure it out, even with all the tools. Finally gave up.

I have come to suspect new MX servers are spam-holed by default until enough people click “Not Spam”, which is an absurd hurdle for a single user hobby server.

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