After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
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Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#2All that "security" just to fight spam. IIRC it was estimated that globally spammers make $300M per year from their spam. It doesn't seem like much. Somebody joked that it would be better if we just paid them that much to do nothing.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#3This was a great read. Thanks for posting it here!
I found this line to be especially intriguing:
> Hellbanning everybody except for other big email providers is lazy and conveniently dishonest. It uses spam as a scapegoat to nerf deliverability and stifle competition.
The big tech firms criticized in this article are guilty of these sorts of transgressions in other arenas, as well. It's always been my contention that the "hellbanning" of user-generated content by big media and big tech alike comes from the same motivations. YouTube and CBS alike want to make niche content difficult to consume in order to stifle any competition that might get vaulted up as a result of that niche audience finding the new distribution endpoints. This comes with the added bonus of reducing cost of goods sold, by reducing the firehose of new content to process. Or, as the article puts it:
> Unfortunately, the computing power required to filter millions of emails per minute is huge. That's why the email industry has chosen a shortcut to reduce that cost. The shortcut is to avoid processing some email altogether. Selected email does not either get bounced nor go to spam. That would need processing, which costs money.
I would be very curious to learn if there are any proposed explanation as to why this phenomenon is so commonly spread throughout the big tech space. Do we get the same kind of behavior out of other enormous multi-national firms like oil producers, ocean freight companies, defense contractors, and chemical suppliers?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#4Is there actually a "big tech" email provider that accepts a message with a 2xx SMTP code and then deletes it? The only one I personally know of never does that. That one also does not use anything like an IP address blacklist. This article doesn't name names, it just waves its hands and throws around some innuendo. But as far as my own personal experience goes, this author has no idea what they are talking about.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#5All that "security" just to fight spam. IIRC it was estimated that globally spammers make $300M per year from their spam. It doesn't seem like much. Somebody joked that it would be better if we just paid them that much to do nothing.
For Poor country 300 million is a huge sum of money.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#6For those interested, I made a post related to this topic a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#7bashblog!
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#8I love the idea of self-hosting my email, but there's no way I'm going through all that work if getting my mail delivered will be a toss-up. Complete motivation-killer.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#9All that "security" just to fight spam. IIRC it was estimated that globally spammers make $300M per year from their spam. It doesn't seem like much. Somebody joked that it would be better if we just paid them that much to do nothing.
For Poor country 300 million is a huge sum of money.
Kinda makes the point even more valid.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#10I have had the exact opposite experience, I used mail in a box and set it up on digital ocean on a 5$ droplet.
Have not had any spam or blacklisting issues and it was super easy to setup.