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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

#101

Post by yomkippur »

zahllos wrote: post #71

I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…

was just gonna ask how you would handle DKIM and SPF stuff. Hetzner? Digitalocean?

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

#102

Post by barrkel »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #88

It was a huge mistake for email receivers to take on the cost of filtering spam. Of course given the evolution of the internet and email it is easy to see how that mistake happened. Nobody had a crystal ball. But the only solution here is to raise the cost of sending email to the point where spam is no longer profitable. It seems like one solution is to bcrypt hash (or some similarly expensive algorithm) the email an…

Something different: a hash which is expensive to calculate but cheap to verify. E.g. calculating a string of bytes to append to a hash stream on order to produce a hash with a certain number of leading zeros; you provide the hash and the bytes, and it's trivial to verify.

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

#103

Post by spijdar »

ShowalkKama wrote: post #77

>I implemented all the acronyms, secured antispam measures, verified my domain, made sure my server is neither breached nor used to relay actual spam, added new servers with supposedly clean IPs from reputable providers, tried all the silver bullets recommended by Hacker News, used kafkaesque request forms to prove legitimity, contacted the admins of some blacklists. I cloned a repo, edited two lines in a yaml file,…

You can deliver email to gmail and outlook until you ... can't. Whether the IP block your mail server is on gets blacklisted, some heuristic shifts against you (domain name becomes "bad" and shifts a point score over a threshold for being spam), or some other external factor happens, your perfectly configured mail server will suddenly and possibly with no warning or sign that it's failed, fail.

For even personal mail this is pretty annoying, but if you're relying on mail for business reasons, this is completely unacceptable. You need to be able to assume that mail you send reaches your clients/customers. The chance of your private mail server getting banned might be low, but it's not low enough, and over time that chance only increases (especially if you're hosting from a server on big shared IP blocks with naughty tenets like on most major cloud providers).

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

#104

Post by npteljes »

I agree with the pains, but the options are not juts Big Tech or self-hosting. There's a myriad of not-big-tech email providers out there, for example there's Posteo, who use open source software and green energy. They are going strong for 13 years now with 400+k accounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posteo

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

#105

Post by heckelson »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #88

It was a huge mistake for email receivers to take on the cost of filtering spam. Of course given the evolution of the internet and email it is easy to see how that mistake happened. Nobody had a crystal ball. But the only solution here is to raise the cost of sending email to the point where spam is no longer profitable. It seems like one solution is to bcrypt hash (or some similarly expensive algorithm) the email an…

yeah, I believe it is called "HashCash" and works similarly to "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies

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

#106

Post by pcai »

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.

> Somebody joked that it would be better if we just paid them that much to do nothing.

I know this is in jest, but in economics there's this concept called "induced demand" that comes to mind.

"Public extortion" would be an interesting challenge, as it would be difficult to solve the problem of "Hey why don't you also pay ME to do nothing too?"

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

#107

Post by peter_retief »

I tried to host a home email server a few times and it was a pain to say the least. Finally I created a droplet on Digital Ocean and used Mail in a Box https://mailinabox.email/ with a glue record to act as a name server. So far so good

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

john_minsk wrote: post #33
cm2187 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wanted to get my own email specifically for this. Is it possible on one of the serviced emails?

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by hammyhavoc »

m3nu wrote: post #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…

He? Is it a one-man-band? If so, that's a scary single point of failure for something as critical as your email.

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

#110

Post by pretext-1 »

usefulcat wrote: post #58
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 m…

Certs for MX servers are supposed to have the MX as subject or SAN, not your email domain. It's important when the sender enforces encryption with a valid cert (e.g. MTA-STS, or config in the mail server, or many hosted solutions like Google Workspace also support enforcing this for selected or all domains).

Example:

example.com. MX aspmx.l.google.com.

Cert should have aspmx.l.google.com as subject or SAN.

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