Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 519 posts

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

#501

Post by pyrale »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #442
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…

Qualifier to add to #3. Sending mail to other recipients who are running their own mail server (for themselves not for others) is not "real hard".

Unfortunately, most outbound mail I send these days end up at Google or MS.

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

#502

Post by flir »

int_19h wrote: post #485
flir wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They can pretend to be decentralized, but they can't emulate the lack of centralized authority. People certainly care enough about centralization once it's consistently abused in ways that hurt them (which always happens eventually, given enough time). Our existing anti-monopoly laws came about like that.

Signal jumps to mind.

Plus I don't see much evidence people care. This argument reminds me of Accelerationism, which doesn't seem to work either.

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

#503

Post by Nasrudith »

jacquesm wrote: post #82
tdrdt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on…

> 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…

You are still hosting it fine. They just decide that you or your messages are suspect.

Also one thing - if people actually want your email they will contact you if they don't get an expected email. If they don't want your messages it is spam.

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

#504

Post by zbuf »

shartte wrote: post #265
zbuf wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does gmail actually trust the incoming forwarded email? Or mark a lot of it as spam. My understanding is that SPF makes forwarding like this no longer possible if the original sender's address is to be preserved.

If they are using GMail for work, the DNS just points to GMails actual server and authenticates using DKIM as well. Google for Work will provide you with the necessary DNS entries to set. Obviously this will not work with their free offering, you'll need to fork over $6/month for this.

Yes, though this isn't forwarding. The mail is actively being delivered into gmail, who must be programmed to accept mail for that domain.

Forwarding, on the other hand, made it possible to do a simple redirect of one address to another (eg. ~/.forward) but strict SPF rules will deny the forwarder as a valid source for the mails.

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

#505

Post by int_19h »

flir wrote: post #502
int_19h wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can pretend to be decentralized, but they can't emulate the lack of centralized authority. People certainly care enough about centralization once it's consistently abused in ways that hurt them (which always happens eventually, given enough time). Our existing anti-monopoly laws came about like that.

Signal jumps to mind. Plus I don't see much evidence people care. This argument reminds me of Accelerationism, which doesn't seem to work either.

People start to care on the edges (e.g. social networks), but there simply isn't enough abuse wrt email yet for opposition to register.

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

#506

Post by toomanybeersies »

evandwight wrote: post #429
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…

How hard is it to actually get mail delivered? I have the dumb idea of trying to make SMTP as cheap as http. Make spam expensive using proof of stake. I find it frustrating I have to pay Amazon to send text for me. I was going to setup my own SMTP server but it seemed like too much work.

> Make spam expensive using proof of stake

That's already a thing. Hashcash [1], the PoW algorithm underpinning Bitcoin, was originally conceived as a method to prevent email spam.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

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

#509

Post by selfhoster11 »

Clubber wrote: post #464
rnotaro wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If true, that is probably the last excuse I needed to migrate my own email server off Digital Ocean to another provider. Oh well, it's been a very good run, DO.

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

#510

Post by patja »

vineyardmike wrote: post #497
patja wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have the best of both worlds with self-hosting received mail and achieving good deliverability by using a service such as Amazon SES. SES will probably cost you less than $10 a year for personal email sending volumes. I use it for my business and it is less than $15/yr. Rarely get a bill for more than $1. They hold you accountable for any abuse/complaints, which is a good thing.

How do you use SES for this? It seems to only allow receipt of email conveniently. Sending seems to require using an api which is not something most people want to do to email others.

You can create smtp credentials for use in any email client. The api is optional.
Post reply on HN