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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

#461

Post by hkt »

Seirdy wrote: post #453
nimbius wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

It is surprisingly hard to get the cryptography right, and the cost of misconfigured DKIM in particular is nothing gets delivered to most providers.

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

#462

Post by sgarman »

dheera wrote: post #376
CogitoCogito wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since it's an email isn't every image from an external url? Do you just mean blocking all images?

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

#463

Post by rocho »

codazoda wrote: post #193
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…

I use a domain, registered at Namecheap, and I forward to my gmail account. If gmail “goes away” I simply configure my email to forward elsewhere. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap forwarding, I point my DNS at another forwarding provider. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap, I transfer my domain to another provider. It gives me all the flexibility I need with almost no work or maintenance. There are enough mail providers that…

Do you use Namecheap's email inbox or is that accomplished just with DNS records?

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

#464

Post by Clubber »

rnotaro wrote: post #196
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…

https://mailinabox.email/ does most of that. I have my own domain since when I was about 15 years old and used that for a while on a digital ocean droplets. It's incredibly easy to set-up. The only issue I had was that other people were not getting my mail and I sometimes it was not even reaching their spam folders. Probably because Google/Microsoft were blocking that IP range of Digital Oceans. Nowadays I just pay f…

Microsoft has blacklists the entirety of Digital Ocean and won't whitelist any IPs, even if it's a legit mail server. If I didn't know better, I would say that's anticompetitive behavior.

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

#465

Post by bigiain »

tentacleuno wrote: post #458
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…

> 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.

That’d alert me to the fact I didn’t have my vpn running.

Im happy to pay for my own cellular data and vpn to avoid networks like that. Including tethering my laptop if needed.

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

#466

Post by bigiain »

jraph wrote: post #419
mcguire wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn’t even need that. I’ve run pretty much that stack on an original Raspberry Pi. You wouldn’t want to be trying to do a lot else, and GB sized attachments are gonna be limited by the usb Ethernet speed, but it’ll run just fine.

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

#467

Post by bigiain »

StreamBright wrote: post #411
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…

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?

While that’s true, and crazy…

Everybody know you show never even read YouTube comments. Posting them is just insane…

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

#468

Post by BbzzbB »

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…

Might be a silly question, I own a domain that is my first initial + last name dot dev for my portfolio. What's a decent, or usual, prefix to use with such a domain as a personal email for job applications? Bonus point if it is English-French bilingual.

contact@ sounds off, like I'm a corporation. email@ or mail@ I kind of like, but I'm afraid it sounds "confusing" (is that in my head?). application@ or job@ is not bad, but a bit specific and not one I could use all around.

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

#469

Post by ListeningPie »

BbzzbB wrote: post #468
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…

Might be a silly question, I own a domain that is my first initial + last name dot dev for my portfolio. What's a decent, or usual, prefix to use with such a domain as a personal email for job applications? Bonus point if it is English-French bilingual. contact@ sounds off, like I'm a corporation. email@ or mail@ I kind of like, but I'm afraid it sounds "confusing" (is that in my head?). application@ or job@ is not b…

I use me@my-domain.com, and I am playing with the idea of different versions per language, Ja, watashi, moi, mig, and so on.

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

#470

Post by boogies »

kaetemi wrote: post #237
codazoda wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a domain, registered at Namecheap, and I forward to my gmail account. If gmail “goes away” I simply configure my email to forward elsewhere. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap forwarding, I point my DNS at another forwarding provider. If I’m unhappy with Namecheap, I transfer my domain to another provider. It gives me all the flexibility I need with almost no work or maintenance. There are enough mail providers that…

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

Epik lets you buy domains more or less permanently for a large upfront cost (~$600 for a typical otherwise $10/year domain IIRC). Anyone know any other registrars that do?
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