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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

#111

Post by teddyh »

gingerlime wrote: post #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…

> Trying to deal with a Microsoft ban on my IP

https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/index....

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

#113

Post by frostwarrior »

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,…

Maybe it's a joke, but a problem I see in every "open source self hosted alternative" is that people tend to underestimate how much work is to self-host everything.

It's either paid hosting like AWS, some intermediate docker-compose solution or your own personal server machine. In every case someone has to do the gritty work. It's either a paid service, a volunteering open-source contributor, or you.

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

#114

Post by sylware »

Wrote my smtp server 5 years ago. Still running.

BTW, did you know the smtp protocol works without DNS?

You just need to puth the ipv4 between brackets @[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] and for ipv6 @[ipv6:...].

spam? simplicity and freedom has a price (personnaly, I have have very, very little spam since I am self-hosted), and don't think corpos won't try to force you to use their servers one way or another... Whose coding the virus? It is sane to presume it is the seller of anti-virus software...

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

#115

Post by palata »

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,…

I guess try to use it as your main e-mail for a few years and you may see...

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

#116

Post by gingerlime »

lamontcg wrote: post #75
gingerlime wrote: post #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…

I have my personal e-mail on linode for probably 15 years or so and haven't had any issues with e-mail delivery (knock on wood). Had the same two static IPs there for years, and have always had things locked down so I couldn't be used as a relay for spammers.

mine is maybe 10 years? I don’t recall. No issues so far, but started seeing those Microsoft blocks when I moved my brother’s domain over to my server. I hardly send email out, so it could be unrelated to his domain, just that he sends much more email out.

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

#117

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

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…

"The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name"

You would think. The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life(at least). Otherwise, as soon as you lose your domain you lose ownership of your email. Any one that has control of the domain has control of your e-mail.

This dawned on me after a place I worked at reactivated the email I used for work when I worked there. It has my name but I have 0 control over it. Lucky for me I never used the email for things other than work so it's not a big deal. It is still bothersome that they can do that and I have no say so on its use.

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

#118

Post by LinuxBender »

eikenberry wrote: post #55
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.

Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy.

[1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...

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

#119

Post by hammyhavoc »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #84
aimor wrote: post #46

Funny thing happened to me today: Gmail sent its own Google Fi customer support email to spam. Haha, wish I noticed that before spending my morning going in circles with chat support.

gmail also puts mails from mailing lists into spam, despite repeated "not spam" tagging. Wondering whether mail getting flagged as spam is even a problem anymore as people get used to erratic results, at which point we can get rid of spam filtering, or what's left of it, altogether when on balance it does more harm than good, such as preventing SMTP self-hosting.

I see this same behaviour. It's infuriating. At this point, I'd almost rather be able to disable all their spam filtering and simply run an App Script, or email client with its own rules that then syncs changes back to the server.
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