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

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

#51

Post by dsr_ » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

I can't send mail to mit.edu addresses. It gets rejected with a message that says I should talk to Microsoft.

I frequently end up in GMail's spam folders. No idea why.

I see no more than one piece of 'spam' a week; everything else is caught by a combination of a 15 minute greylist, the zen spamhaus BL, and SpamAssassin evaluating things. There are a bunch of spammers who send from accounts with valid SPF and DKIM, by the way.

Spam is a reasonably solved problem, but SPF and DKIM aren't much help.

(I get lots and lots of business spam, where the sender clearly believes that they have a right to try to sell me crap. The difference is that if I respond to business spam, someone will answer, trying to sell me crap.)

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

#52

Post by drchiu » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:25 PM UTC

A big problem with the way the big companies fight spam is that sometimes it is a bit too aggressive. Happened a couple of times where legitimate government-agency emails had trouble getting through.

Personally, I prefer defining my own spam list rather having an algo decide what pops into my inbox.

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

#53

Post by seomint » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

Completely agree this is anticompetitive and worthly of examination under the light of antitrust laws. Of course the defense that will be offered and one which is partially true will be one of providing safety from spam, phishing, and other evils prevalent in the email system today. Maybe texting is the new email after all...

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

#54

Post by yonixw » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #44

yonixw wrote: 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.

A previous thread (5m old) here showed it is not that cut and dry, a good read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788681

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

#55

Post by eikenberry » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:27 PM UTC

jasode wrote: 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…

There is also a happy medium. Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. You have complete control over the incoming mail but dodge the filters by using the established business for sending mail.

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

#56

Post by secabeen » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:28 PM UTC

The general rule of thumb for my home server is that messages to people I've contacted before, or to addressees that were in a thread that I'm also part of get delivered reliably. Messages to new people I've never emailed before often go to spam. I've learned to accept this.

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

#57

Post by TekMol » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

It would be possible to solve the spam problem once and for all with a crypto currency:

    if (Sender is whitelisted by receiver):
     All emails arrive in the inbox
    else:
     Sender has to send $1 for their email to arrive in the inbox
     The $1 will be returned if the receiver replies

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

#58

Post by usefulcat » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:29 PM UTC

jasode wrote: 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…

Yeah, I've been doing exactly this for over 20 years. The only problem I can recall is related to the fact that the hosting provider uses a single SSL cert for the machine that hosts my domain (and many others, presumably), so of course the cert doesn't match my domain name. It's pretty easy to work around, and I only have to deal with it every few years when they do a hardware upgrade, which sometimes means moving my domain to a different machine.

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

#59

Post by robertlagrant » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:30 PM UTC

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #15

okasaki wrote: 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 think the deeper problem is sending an email (or a billion emails) triggers someone else's servers to do most of the work. Email is beautifully cooperative computing, but that means it can easily be taken advantage of.

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

#60

Post by secabeen » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 6:31 PM UTC

greatjack613 wrote: post #10

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.

Part of the problem is silent deliverability issues. You can send to someone @gmail.com that you've never messaged before and it won't get rejected. It will probably end up in their Junk folder. You don't know it, they don't know it, and unless they check, which many people don't, it will be as if you never sent it.