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

cfenollosa.com

61–70 of 744 posts

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

#61
post #57

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

I will stop replying to my mail for sure

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

#63
post #57

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

This was a bad idea when it was first proposed 30 years ago

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

#65
I'll keep going with my private server (on a vps). I just moved it to another hoster, meaning new IP block. This caused blocking issues: Some but not all gmail address delivered to the spam folder. Another big mail provider asked me to set up a web page with contact info on the same domain I use for mail. And another self hosted mail server from a public service agency had me on block list.

This caused me some headaches and I was thinking this could be the end and I have to use one of the big players. But I did not give up, invested time and it works now again!

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

#66
post #51

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…

SPF/DKIM are not intended to prevent people from sending spam.

They are intended to let a domain owner tell other email providers what servers have the right to send email from that domain (and sign email).

I can send email all day from joboffers@google.com. But most email providers will check SPF and see that my VPS IP is not authorized by google.com to send email, and it will go to spam.

Those standards wouldn't keep me from registering example.com, setting up SPF correctly, and then spamming. There are other techniques to filter out that kind of behavior.

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

#67
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 m…

The MX servers cert in my experience does not need to include your email domain name .

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

#68
post #34

Hosting an email server on a consumer IP does seem to a losing proposition, Hosting an email server on a cheap (reputable) cloud server and doing the basics (PTR records, SPF etc) still works well.

How do you know? SMTP wasn't designed for reliable delivery. You don't know if your emails are being received, and even i they are, you don't know if they'll be received tomorrow.

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

#69
Sending email out is a royal pain. Trying to deal with a Microsoft ban on my IP even though it’s sparkling clean for several years. DKIM, DMARC, SPF etc all ser up, reverse dns, you name it. Looks like Linode is being blocked as a whole pretty much?

Hate the level of centralization, particularly since there’s still a shit ton of spam still around. Sorry for the rant.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/674558/55...

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

#70
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is different. With Piracy people want something (product/service/media). The quote from Gabe is about the fact that they are willing to pay for it, if it is convenient and affordable. Nobody wants spam or the things promoted in the spam. The companies want attention from the users. I think the better version is targeted ads on Facebook, etc. Maybe that’s the closest analogy to Gabe’s quote.

> Nobody wants spam or the things promoted in the spam. Lots of people want Viagra without having to see a doctor. There definitely is a market for it, and now there are companies that do provide it, I wonder if this will cause spam to shift to other products.

Many also wants to be heir to a Nigerian prince worth a few million ...
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