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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

#511

Post by patja »

iggldiggl wrote: post #499
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.

For a private mail server operator, Amazon SES is somewhat annoying because if your mail server is down, they're only keeping mails in the delivery queue for something like eight hours or so, which is way too short if you're not a big provider who can commit to round-the-clock support for the mail server.

I keep a backup postfix server in a different location from the primary. It all kicked in once about 3 months ago and worked beautifully.

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

#512

Post by southerntofu »

southerntofu wrote: post #73
moltar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you host it on vultr? Just $2.50/mo for half a gig of RAM instance.

This defeats the entire point of selfhosting whether it's for security concerns or autonomy. The ecological impact of VPS hosting every single service you need is also not negligible: datacenters require huge amounts of resources and infrastructure which a simple second-hand machine at home doesn't. (also worth mentioning: email protocols were explicitly conceived so that uptime is not a worry)

If someone who downvoted has better arguments than the industry's propaganda, i'm all ears.

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

#513

Post by mcguire »

jjav wrote: post #476
mcguire wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What are the memory requirements for postfix, dovecot, and rspamd these days? Approximately nothing. I run all my email infrastructure on the smallest available $5/mo Linode and it's way overprovisioned even so. I'd take a smaller VM if they offered one.

Hmm. Admittedly, I didn't use postfix, but dovecot was the largest process running on my 1G server and adding rspamd resulted in it doing the Out-of-memory mambo a couple of times a week. This was just for my domain, but I do get a crap ton of spam.

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

#514

Post by collinmanderson »

hericium wrote: post #481
iamtheworstdev wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"..…

Side note: I've seen some MTA systems having weird filters for receiver's domain name or company name being part of sender's local-part. When I'm opening an account at Example Bank which uses example.com domain, I avoid creating dedicated mailbox or alias with words "example" and "bank". exmplbnk@ , xmplbnk1234@ or similar seems to have better deliverability when I'm attempting to contact the other side.

> weird filters for receiver's domain name or company name being part of sender's local-part

Likely to help cut down on phishing.

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

#515

Post by collinmanderson »

sgarman wrote: post #462
dheera wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Emails can have "inline" attachments, where an image can be attached in the body of the email itself. So the image shows up without any network access, but it's generally base-64 encoded (costing 4x space) and ends up using a lot of email storage space.

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

#516

Post by sfoley »

collinmanderson wrote: post #515
sgarman wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Emails can have "inline" attachments, where an image can be attached in the body of the email itself. So the image shows up without any network access, but it's generally base-64 encoded (costing 4x space) and ends up using a lot of email storage space.

Base64 costs 1.3x space, not 4x.

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

#517

Post by BlueTemplar »

floren wrote: post #239
BlueTemplar wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, guess it's time for a counter-attack : "Sorry, but it's too much hassle to send e-mail to gmail/outlook, please use another provider if you want to communicate." ?

I post on a mailing list where one member has configured his server to reject all emails from Gmail. Inevitably we end up getting messages sent to the list which begin, "Direct emails to are being rejected, so I'm sending it via the list, sorry for the noise!" The unspoken "you silly prick" gets louder every time this happens.

So, you just give up and leave control to bad actors ?

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

#518

Post by collinmanderson »

sfoley wrote: post #516
collinmanderson wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emails can have "inline" attachments, where an image can be attached in the body of the email itself. So the image shows up without any network access, but it's generally base-64 encoded (costing 4x space) and ends up using a lot of email storage space.

Base64 costs 1.3x space, not 4x.

Ohh, I was thinking 256/64 = 4x, but it's apparently it's 8 bits / 6 bits = 1.3333x. Thanks. Plus for email a little extra for a =\r\n on every line, so more like 1.4x.

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

#519

Post by danlugo92 »

Zopieux wrote: post #391
danlugo92 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $6 a month Zoho has a $1/yr plan.

Can't find anything below ~1/month at zoho for just mails; care to share a link?

Yeah it's $1 a month, got confused, still a good deal!
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