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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

#451

Post by hda2 »

scoot wrote: post #447
cutler wrote: post #445

One thing running your own SMTP/IMAP protects you from is faceless lockouts. My partner was locked out of her Hotmail account and no matter how much evidence she provided Microsoft's shame-faced automated system refused to give her access. No court of appeal, nothing. Turns out she has an important email regarding her Indefinite Leave to Remain in the account containing a UAN she now needs access to in order to apply…

Since from your comment she appears to be in the UK, GDPR right of access still applies. She can get a copy of the data, even if not access to the account.

Your comment raises an interesting point: If I, a non-EU citizen who doesn't live in the EU, get locked out of my gmail account, would traveling to the EU and invoking GDPR be a viable way for me to force google to hand over my emails?

If yes, then I sense business potential. I for one would be willing to pay a lot of money to access my inbox.

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

#452

Post by oblib »

throwaway27727 wrote: post #198
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Lots of sister comments here saying that they've been running a mail server for X amount of years, where X is a rather large number. That will obviously come with some reputation for your mail server, reducing the curve of being classified as down. I would be interested in hearing from someone who tried to setup a new mail server in the last 1-2 years who was able to run it without a hitch.

I've been running my own email server for around 7-8 years and just setup a new email server on a DigitalOcean vps earlier this year using "Mail-in-a-Box".

That's about as easy as it gets but it still requires some work and you need to check the IP address DigitalOcean issues to see if it's blacklisted before you set it up.

Google makes it easy to get whitelisted. Microsoft email services (Hotmail/Outlook) are a pain though. I tried to get through their process but got nowhere. Other services I had to submit a request to get de-listed. So it does take awhile to go through all that.

Still, I prefer that to hitching that wagon to a 3rd party provider like Google, or any other.

Before I set mine up the 1st time I'd been screwed a few times by 3rd party providers. The last one, I can't recall which, but it was either "MailChimp" or whomever bought them, that I'd configured an app to use and almost as soon as I'd released it they announce they'd been acquired and I would have to use the new services APIs, and of course they cost more, and their services were geared towards mass mailing, and that's not what my apps do, and their API sucked for my needs.

It was about 12 years of dealing with 3rd party bullshit that motivated me to set up my own email server.

If you just want to fiddle around with one to get a feel for it Mail-in-a-Box is a good place to get started: https://mailinabox.email/

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

#453

Post by Seirdy »

nimbius wrote: post #395
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…

Huh? SPF, DKIM, and DMARC along with mta-sts/DANE require running some scripts and entering DNS records. If you are already capable of hosting a mail server at your own domain, then this should be rather straightforward.

How is this a "barrier to entry"?

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

#454

Post by AnonC »

cubesnooper wrote: post #363
kaetemi wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if... the TLD owner decides to 10x the domain price?

For personal domains, I bite the initial cost and buy the domain for 10 years, then every year top it up to 10 again. For a $20/yr domain that’s only $200 up front, and if the cost suddenly goes up or some other TLD policy changes that I hate, I have plenty of time to gradually move to a cheaper/better domain. One thing I’m not sure of is what happens if I want to switch registrars in that time—will the full 10 years…

Like you, I have domains registered for 10 years and extend it every year so that it always remains at 10 years.

If you switch registrars, your domain validity continues as before. Your registration information is with the registry for your TLD, not with the registrar alone. So your 10 years of (future) ownership will carry over. Two caveats to note. The first is that you can’t transfer a domain within 60 days of purchase or renewal. The second that I’ve seen is that a transfer to another registrar requires a one year renewal for the domain. So I’m guessing you may not be able to transfer a domain that’s already at 10 years (even taking into account 60 days after the renewal to keep it at 10 years). But if your domain is at nine years, you’d surely be able to transfer, and it would become 10 years at the time of transfer.

The expiry date never changes through all these actions.

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

#455

Post by chefandy »

Ginden wrote: post #329
chefandy wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think #1 is a super solid idea. I'd love to go beyond that— I'm familiar with the tech and love the satisfaction of a more DIY approach— but other end users preclude my doing so. The author mentions quality in big email service but only passingly mentions what that encompasses. Smooth, responsive, well-worn, ceaselessly preened, and smoothed-over end-user UIs are important. Unfortunately, the open-source alternativ…

> most open-source interfaces are like eating on a diet. Because there aren't open-source contributing UX/UI designers. Almost all open source interfaces are quick work done by mostly backend developers.

Firstly, I am one. I have ten years of full time back-end web dev experience and other types of coding for over a decade before that. I also know others— UX designers generally start in another field and dev work is a pretty common start.

Secondly, that few contribute as designers rather than developers is definitely a chicken and egg situation. Designers time and effort is universally seen as less valuable than developers’ and therefore more readily dismissed or minimized. People are worse at taking critique for things they’re not confident in, and as you note, most open source projects are maintained by developers. Ever give a brand new developer a code review? Yeah. That’s about what it’s like critiquing an open source project’s beloved “quirky” interface.

I’ve seen eager designers post issues in repos— some with complete wireframes and rationale having done a good amount of work already, asking for specific types of feedback— only for their system to be instantly bikeshedded into oblivion rather than productively discussed. Unsolicited contributions are often viewed as superfluous expenditures of dev time, or even viewed with outright suspicion or hostility. If it’s not submitted in the form of bite-sized PRs ready for production with the understanding that existing devs can veto any changes without any real justification. Going from a haphazardly assembled UI to a properly designed UI requires fundamental change, and that’s a lot of work. Would you contribute code in a project with those competing requirements?

Before any of that, any designer interested in open source software has almost certainly made the mistake of griping about the interface for gimp, or git. It’s a good preview for what lies ahead.

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

#456

Post by oblib »

pseudalopex wrote: post #285
zbuf wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This matches my exprience. I switched recently after 10+ years, and was cautious that this might be a problem but it hasn't been at all. I think it has more to do with the choice of ISP.

I think they meant servers with no reputation are punished. Other comments said so at least. What ISP should someone choose?

>What ISP should someone choose?

What matters most is if the IP address they issue you has been blacklisted for spamming. DigitalOcean is fine but you need to check the IP address before you do the work of building a mail server. Some of their IPs are on a lot of blacklists.

If it's only on a very few you need to look into who's blacklisting it. There are some that offer a way to get delisted and make it easy, there are others that block pretty much every IP address DigitalOcean has (or large ranges of them) and they won't de-list anything within them. Many of those blacklists are managed overseas and not used much in the U.S.

No matter the ISP you should check the IP address they issue for a VPS before you build the email server.

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

#457

Post by cloudedcordial »

necovek wrote: post #3

I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days. I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to tho…

What you've described is common among many first adopters. I know someone who has a common first name and last name combo, signed up for gmail in mid-2000s and use the firstname+lastname@gmail.com.

He got many "weird" messages over the years from messages addressed to a religious minister, to a pro-gun individual and to NSFW account that he didn't sign up for.

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

#458

Post by tentacleuno »

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…

> I don't want or use webmail (sluggish)

Serious question: what if you're on a network that blocks non-HTTP[S] traffic? How would you read your mail? This is a problem I hear of quite regularly.

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

#459

Post by kiwijamo »

pyrale wrote: post #417
kiwijamo wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is possible, my Gmail is indeed firstname.lastname@gmail.com.

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

#460

Post by hkt »

nimbius wrote: post #395
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…

It is a pretty solid example of market power at play - nobody but a big player would have the scale to force a change like that.
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