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After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

cfenollosa.com

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Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#11
post #5
post #2

All 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.

I think they mean 300 mil isn't a lot in the scope of an entire market. The entire spam market isn't centralized in one poor country

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#12
I started hosting my own email in 2004 before finally giving up and migrating my email to Fastmail last year.

Besides the problems mentioned in this post the real problem I had was dealing with spam. The open source community around spam has really degraded over time, to the point where most solutions are extremely high maintenance and require regular tweaking. Methods that used to work, like greylisting, cause problems when dealing with GMail because google doesn't play nicely with it. The big spam blacklists have also gotten a bit less trustworthy over the years.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#13
Have around 100 users on my self-hosted mailserver. Works alright for the most part. Once or twice a year, there are connection issues to small companies with weird settings. I just route those over an external ESP.

Then there is also mxroute.com, which is an indie email provider. He seems to do fine too. Didn't use them yet.

So I think having at least some sending volume is key to running an indie server. You can't do it just for a few mailboxes/users.

I still wouldn't recommend to learn or start with email in 2022. There are better uses of your time.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#14
RBLs and other blacklists have been annoying for decades, even more so when they were maintained by annoyed individuals rather than corporations like today. You had to beg a single person to remove you off a list that an ISP somewhere used without thinking twice about it.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#15
post #2

All 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.

I wonder what the underlying problem is.

Gabe Newell once said that "Piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue". I believe this has been proven by netflix/spotify as well.

Is spam just a symptom of a much deeper problem? If so what is it? Or is it naive to think of spam this way?

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#16
I relate to this. I also stopped hosting my own mail server for this exact reason.

However I do think it’s a case of damned if you do damned if you don’t. As a consumer of big tech email I become equally frustrated when spam makes it past the filter and I expect them to do more.

If it’s easy for the average person to setup a mail sever with high reputation then it’s easy for spammers to do the same. I can’t think of a great way to manage this at scale for the average person using a $5 a month Digital Ocean VPS sending One thing I have noticed is that there’s still a load of large organisations failing to implement basic deliverability best practices like SPF records. These organisations have themselves to blame.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#17

I 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.

I am somewhere in the middle. Have been running my personal mail server for 15y, it mostly works but my emails do get often flagged as spam by the major providers (but not deleted). Though those very same providers are themselves a major source of the spam I receive. Do as I say, not as I do.

The nice thing if you control your domain is to be able to create unique email aliases, which is a way to cut spam to zero. A company starts spamming or leaks your email address, just delete the alias.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#20
Totally agree with the tone & premise, but

> At some point your IP range is bound to be banned, either by one asshole IP neighbor sending spam, *one of your users being pwned*,

feels like a hint that

> My current email server IP has been managed by me and used exclusively for personal email with zero spam, zero, for the last ten years.

Might not be entirely accurate.

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