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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

#131

Post by matheweis »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #117
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 you…

> 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

Is there a registrar that will allow you to do this? Most of the ones I’ve looked at have an upper limit of around 15 years or so

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

#132

Post by m12k »

LinuxBender wrote: post #118
eikenberry wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-thund…

I'm sorry to say, that's nowhere near a medium stance or ask.

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

#133

Post by kazinator »

> So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers.

A MX records don't have to point to an IP; it can point to a host name.

My MX record is a dynamic DNS host name.

> Big email servers permanently blacklist whole IP blocks and delete their emails without processing or without notice. Some of those blacklists are public, some are none.

OK, but if you're having trouble sending, that's no reason to do anything with your MX record, which is for receive only. Just route outbound SMTP through someone forwarding service.

I've run my mail domain for twelve years. In that time, I've not sent SMTP directly to anyone; always through the SMTP forwarding host run by my ISP.

Well, you know, the mail is going through that ISP anyway! If I could directly connect to port 25 of various hosts around the net, I would still be routing through that ISP's hardware. So the fact that mail is routed at a higher semantic level through their SMTP server, rather than just at the IP level, just almost just a footnote.

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

#134

Post by lisper »

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…

> point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want

You can even have a hybrid solution where incoming mail goes directly to your self-hosted server and (some) outgoing mail is relayed through a third party.

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

#135

Post by gingerlime »

tsukikage wrote: post #123
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've been running a private mailserver for myself and a couple of friends since 2002. I hit a similar issue with Microsoft last year. I route outgoing mail to hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com and msn.com domains via email-smtp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com. I started doing this when I noticed a large portion of e-commerce email I was receiving originated from amazon vms and they clearly had no deliverability issues. The…

office 365 hosts a bunch of domains though. My bounce was to a .berlin domain hosted there. Yes, I could route all smtp via a ESP and pay for it, but that’s centralization.

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

#136

Post by hammyhavoc »

renewiltord wrote: post #19

Honestly wish there were a mode where you pay me $x to send me email and I can sort by spend.

The name evades me, but this was a thing a few years back. IIRC, it was the equivalent of what a stamp for an envelope would cost, and the recipient got a chunk, as did the service provider. Will try and find the name for you, but AFAIK, it's no longer doing business.

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

#138

Post by mmsnberbar66 »

lisper wrote: post #134
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…

> point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want You can even have a hybrid solution where incoming mail goes directly to your self-hosted server and (some) outgoing mail is relayed through a third party.

What would be the advantage?

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

#139

Post by kmeisthax »

>In many countries politicians are forced to deploy their own email servers for security and confidentiality reasons. We only need one politician's emails not delivered due to poorly implemented or arbitrary hellbans and this will be a hot button issue.

"I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday!", as Ted Stevens would say.

Unfortunately the man said this as part of a massive, uninformed speech[0] about why big tech[1] needs less regulation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

[1] Comcast inclusive

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

#140

Post by LinuxBender »

m12k wrote: post #132
LinuxBender wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-thund…

I'm sorry to say, that's nowhere near a medium stance or ask.

It could be we have different circles of acquaintances. I have managed to get non technical friends to GPG encrypt their emails. I also talked 2 lawyers into using this and the two lawyers are not only non technical but have nearly zero patience.
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