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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

#43
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?

> I wonder what the underlying problem is.

The underlying problem is that a sufficiently motivated spammer can target tens or hundreds of millions of people with their spam without too much effort.

As a result, every possible scam and spam with even the slightest possibility of converting 0.00001% of recipients can now be a viable spam campaign.

The underlying problem is that it’s so easy to scale spam to a lot of targets.

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

#44
post #30

> ... [They use] spam as a scapegoat to nerf deliverability and stifle competition. Disagree. It was a way too open protocol to begin with. From a time of innocence best suited for places with inherit trust like inside a business. And it's not just spam. Phishing is also a huge issue. As much as I want to sympathise, Email for the big WWW is unsalvageable IMO. Too many bad actors are out there. > [Solution:...] * The…

> This is the same Big tech story. They want to cut cost, you want a human touch. You can see a similar story here in HN every week.

Dang, sounds like our monopolized tech dystopia is probably inevitable. If only there was some state level mechanism to help balance the interests of industries maximizing profits and those of users who need a robust system which doesn't harm them.

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

#45
Oddly enough I do not have these problems after self-hosting for close to 27 years now (i.e. from before spam became a problem). I hardly ever get any spam and my messages seem to arrive where they need to be even when that destination lies in Microsoft- or Google-land. I have the usual assortment of DKIM/SPF configured for my domain, I send mail through a smart host operated by my IAP (at no extra charge) but for the rest I do not do anything special. Am I the exception to the rule, am I just lucky that my IAP's smart host has not been blacklisted by the likes of Microsoft and Google or is the perception of self-hosting mail to be fraught with problems erroneous? I suspect the latter to be true, self-hosting is neither difficult nor bound to fail just as long as a) you have some good spam filters (easy), b) your MTA is set up with the correct SPF and DKIM records (also easy) and c) you send outgoing mail through a smart host (easy to configure once you've found one).

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

#47
post #21

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or C…

> It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on

Dont know about you, but I have setup my mailserver years ago, and outside of regular OS updates, havent had to touch it.

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

#49
post #21

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or C…

> It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on Dont know about you, but I have setup my mailserver years ago, and outside of regular OS updates, havent had to touch it.

Where is it hosted? Isn’t the primary issue being blocked by the major providers due to spam filters?

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

#50
post #21

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or C…

> It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on Dont know about you, but I have setup my mailserver years ago, and outside of regular OS updates, havent had to touch it.

How do you make sure your emails don't end up in spam?
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