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

Post by hericium » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:15 AM UTC

iamtheworstdev wrote: post #379

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…

> 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"..…

Post by hericium » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:35 AM UTC

Post by int_19h » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

flir wrote: post #426

jwalgenbach wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet was meant to be used by people who knew how the internet worked. Herein lies the problem. This might sound like gatekeeping, and maybe it is. When these systems were designed, they were not designed to be used by everyone. They were not designed to be commodities that are bought and sold, with the most valuable trinket available being the attention of the user. But this is where we are. Few are capable o…

> Decentralization limits monetization of anything, so that is going to be a non-starter for investment of resources. Unless you are trying to have your infrastructure survive a nuclear war, no one is going to provide the means to build anything big unless you can sell it or the users of it. I'll go further: centralised systems can emulate decentralised systems, but not vice versa. Thus, ultimately, the only USP of a…

Post by smt88 » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 11:01 AM UTC

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…

Post by feanaro » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

saltminer wrote: post #433

fareesh wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technical folks will just tell you that they don't have this problem with anyone else, and will likely get more annoyed when you present it that way. Since it's 2021, depending on which part of the world you are in, you may even be accused of "gaslighting".

Especially since some systems will just silently drop messages that seem "too spammy" instead of just sending them to the spam box. From your perspective, your email was delivered successfully. But to the recipient, you claim to have sent an email that is nowhere to be found in their inbox or spam folder, and if they contacted IT (keep in mind that 90% of people won't even bother doing this much), they'd say it was n…