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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

#391

Post by Zopieux »

danlugo92 wrote: post #298
charwalker wrote: post #279

Earlier 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.

Can't find anything below ~1/month at zoho for just mails; care to share a link?

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

#392

Post by kiwijamo »

grishka wrote: post #138
hamilyon2 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if your ip address/domain is not in the blacklist right now, it only takes a few people marking your correspondence as spam for it to be blacklisted. Since everyone is on these big free providers, nobody will ever see a single email from you any more. With less centrally controlled email, that would not be possible. I think that is the problem everyone is talking about.

People generally know to check their spam folder if they're waiting for an email but it doesn't arrive.

I generally don't check my personal spam folder. I've honestly not seen any false positives with Fastmail. But I certainly do have to check every now and then for my work O365 account which is pretty bad at marking legitimate mail as spam. YMMV of course.

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

#393

Post by lytefm »

ip26 wrote: post #380
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”…

> 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.

Yes, a fresh (or: previously sending spam) IP requires some warmup time until providers like GMail will let you anywhere near the inbox.

And if you're not sending out a high enough volume of emails, no chance.

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

#394

Post by kiwijamo »

pjc50 wrote: post #93
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server. Speaking of which, how long before it won't be possible to host your own web server? On another note: the biggest source of spam is gmail itself, and guess what, that makes it to my inbox just fine, because wh…

> biggest source of spam is gmail itself [citation needed]; is this actually going out from gmail or does it just use gmail return addresses? I too used to run my own email from about 2000-2010, but the maintenance overhead is quite stressful especially because it always happens for critical times or critical emails.

When I ran my own mail server some years ago I was shocked at the amount of spam originating from Google. Definitely their IP addresses as I would routinely get other legitimite mail from the same IP ranges. Was quite a challenge dealing with these spam as it wasn't as simple as blocking their ip ranges as the vast majority of my personal contacts use Google. Never saw the same from Microsoft, Apple, etc.

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

#395

Post by nimbius »

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…

you could argue dmarc, dkim, and SPF were all invented as barriers to entry for small mail servers as the majority of internet SPF is permissive and the majority of DKIM is misconfigured. imo, senderbase and other reputation/policy proprietary shit-lists used by anyone with a Symantec or Cisco email product only served to convert the unwashed to a corporate license as most of these mechanical turks just paid the same spammers by night to show up in a delhi office complex day job to identify their own campaigns. DMARC and DKIM/SPF just wrapped email in a mandatory layer of arbitrary complexity to "solve" a problem that RBL's had largely managed to tackle as an independent entity.

that they exist in part to force the hand of small companies and users to simply submit to a big player for their email is something i have long considered.

DISCLOSURE: I proudly run my own email server.

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

#396

Post by lytefm »

tjoff wrote: post #197
spadros wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part No, having quality spam and fraud filtering, and quality security, that you host yourself, is by far the much harder problem. I would argue that outsourcing your email to Proton or Tutanota is not running your own "artisanal" email server. By the way, even with those email providers, I still have terrible spam and fraud emails getting through filters that I never wou…

Well, on the flip side unless you constantly check your spam folder (which pretty much completely defeats the purpose of a spam filter) you most definitely have lost important mails thanks to gmail. I just don't see what people see in gmail part from the google brand - which surely isn't a good thing anymore.

For me, this was the main reason to move away from MSFT/GMail to Mailbox.org where I could set the Spam filter to as low as they'd allow.

So far I've been lucky to rarely receive actual spam, but I've often missed out on important emails too often.

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

#397

Post by einpoklum »

bsder wrote: post #356
denton-scratch wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, sad…

Please don't recommend to people to pay money to have all their email communications read and stored by Microsoft, the US government and possibly other parties.

There are plenty of other email providers which are worth considering, and I'm sure some of them have half-decent customer support.

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

#398

Post by lwn »

FemmeAndroid wrote: post #388
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"..…

It's funny to hear this experience. I've been doing this consistently for about 5 years now and have noticed 2 instances where this occurred, and in both there were prior disclosures about a security failure. I tend to sign up for a lot of things (I'm seeing over 150 unique email addresses I receive emails from using this scheme), but I guess I'm just getting lucky. Also, just out of curiosity, where does one sell em…

I used to trade e-mail addresses with various banks, some 15 years ago. I'd just call up their marketing departments and offer those as 'financial leads'. I had a network of people who had various ad campaigns running where a customer could win something if the'd leave their personal (financial) data.

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

#399

Post by Talanes »

3np wrote: post #181
judge2020 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other mail servers on the internet can catch your mails in flight This also shouldn't be a problem most of the time if your email server supports TLS; Google currently sees 81% outbound email encryption[0], so you can imagine roughly 4/5ths of email servers support it. 0: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safer-email/overview?h...

Indeed. It was more of an inb4 of the common reply of “there is 0 privacy gains of self-hosting email since most of the people you’re mailing with will be on one of the big providers anyway”, which is tired and defeatist.

Tired, defeatist, and giving way too much credit to the big guys. No matter how good they are at assembling a profile on me from indirect data, it's still going to be more effort and likely lower quality than if they had a giant store of data labelled as mine.

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

#400

Post by pbhjpbhj »

bsder wrote: post #356
denton-scratch wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, sad…

Microsoft's email behaviour seems like anticompetitive abuse - you can whitelist an address and they overrule you and block incoming email for obscured reasons.

Customers still have problems occasionally _sending_ email to one domain, which is over 15 years old and sends Some years ago, I was lead to believe, you could pay a third-party to add you to what was effectively MS's whitelist.

Aside: back then I was doing some webdev and supporting IE5+ so I already hated MS about as much as one could.

Never paying to enable interoperability that is part of being a reasonable web citizen/company. Paying them just reinforces the negative behaviour.

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