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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

#411

Post by StreamBright »

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…

Exactly this. You make the wrong comment on Youtube and they take down your entire company's infra. Is this an acceptable risk to anybody?

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

#413

Post by rattray »

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.

Is zoho email any good? I've never heard anything about it.

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

#414

Post by pyrale »

spadros wrote: post #186
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 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…

> I would argue that outsourcing your email to Proton or Tutanota is not running your own "artisanal" email server.

That's not a claim I'm making. The goal of my message was merely to help people see that there are several steps you can take from using a gmail account to relying on no third party. When I talk to people, they often don't realize this, and especially, how easy it is to set up #1.

> No, having quality spam and fraud filtering, and quality security, that you host yourself, is by far the much harder problem.

Handling spam is not an easy problem, but it's one where you have all the cards to take actions. On the other hand, having your mail properly delivered is something where people have wildly different outcomes, and for people with bad outcomes it's "impossibly hard, and there's no action you can take about it, unless you personally know the right people at the right places".

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

#415

Post by iav »

charwalker wrote: post #279
koolba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a midpoint at #1.5 where you control the domain and rely on an external host, but also have a continuous archive of your historical mails on your own server. Otherwise with a standard IMAP setup, if your provider locks you out, you’re limited to only the most recent N messages on connected devices.

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.

I used to do this but switched to iCloud Beta for custom domain this year. It’s $1/month (free with any paid iCloud plan) and integrates with iPhones/Mac, supports push email for iPhone, and is free of Google spying.

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

#416

Post by ip26 »

lytefm wrote: post #393
ip26 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had the IP for probably five to seven years- but my outbound mail volume was less than ten emails a week. Which, of course, was tough to increase when delivery was poor - chicken and egg.

I monitored all the blacklists, filed ownership attestations with receiving domains, the whole nine yards. It’s sad that a microscopic MX server can’t be default trust instead of default spam for the first two messages a week.

(I want to repeat, this was a single user exclusively personal domain. Writing to a friend, to grandma, to a colleague)

I was probably in a bad ASN, but at that level trying to find a good block you’re just rolling dice. I wasn’t willing to play anymore.

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

#417

Post by pyrale »

kiwijamo wrote: post #362
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…

I still have a @gmail.com account and every time I check it there's a whole lot of spam sitting in the inbox waiting to be classified as spam. Very strange as my main address (which I've had as my main address for almost 20 years) is on FastMail and hardly gets any spam despite the address being much more exposed e.g. it's found on many public mailing lists and it's been part of more data breaches than I can count. Y…

At this point, I suspect the pattern firstname.lastname@gmail.com is so common that spammers just blindly target it.

My experience is similar, I receive much less spam on my actual mail than I do on gmail.

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

#418

Post by raphman »

SteveNuts wrote: post #221
tzs wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see something to make it easy to address the case where you are doing #1, but your provider does unilaterally kick you off with short notice for some reason. The email equivalent of a bug out bag [1]. This would be something that provides in a single package an SMTP server, an IMAP and POP server, pre-trained spam filtering, and maybe a web server with a web-based email client, and a simple setup program…

iredmail does this pretty well https://www.iredmail.org/

Indeed. I set up my personal email server on a Hetzner VPS using iredmail. It just took a couple of hours and everything actually works pretty well with very little maintenance. Even Hotmail/Outlook.com accepts my emails.

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

#419

Post by jraph »

mcguire wrote: post #347
stiray wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are the memory requirements for postfix, dovecot, and rspamd these days?

Very low for one person with a few emails per day. They almost never appear in top on a 3€/month VPS server (2 vCPU, 2G RAM).

They probably work well on quite limited hardware. But I guess it largely depends on traffic / on the number of hosted users.

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

#420

Post by eps »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #92
hannob wrote: post #70

Earlier 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,…

> If you put some decent effort [...] it works Well, I put in more than some decent effort, and I didn't get it "to work". I detailed my efforts here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser... Please stop spreading falsehoods. If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.

Easy on generalizations, mate.

I've been running my own mail server since mid '00s. Initially hosted with one of West coast Canadian colos and subsequently moved to an EU colo. Had some deliverability issues with Outlook and Yahoo, but these were episodic and rare even though I set up DKIM only last year and have been running with just SPF and DNS/PTR before that.

I know at least a dozen of others with similar setups and timelines. But we all use dedicated colo'ed boxes on IPs from clean netblocks that weren't previously used for shared hosting. I strongly suspect that attempting to run a mailserver on Digital Ocean, OVH, 1and1 and similar mass-hosting providers will not go well. Just like it will be an uphill battle to run it on a residental IP.

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