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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

#161

Post by m3nu »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #109
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.

Nah, he should have some staff. I just know the founder ("Jar") from forum posts.

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

#162

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

matheweis wrote: post #131
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

You don't have to do it all in one shot but you should make sure it gets paid so you don't lose access.

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

#163

Post by AlbertCory »

I managed 3+Mail at 3Com 35 years ago, and in fact, it gets its own subplot in The Big Bucks (https://www.albertcory.io/the-big-bucks), back when email was brand-new (well, for most people).

However, nowadays I'm bored with stuff like this. PITA. So I totally sympathize with the author.

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

#164

Post by gpapilion »

lolinder wrote: post #79
type_Ben_struct wrote: post #16

I relate to this. I also stopped hosting my own mail server for this exact reason. However I do think it’s a case of damned if you do damned if you don’t. As a consumer of big tech email I become equally frustrated when spam makes it past the filter and I expect them to do more. If it’s easy for the average person to setup a mail sever with high reputation then it’s easy for spammers to do the same. I can’t think of…

The paradox here is the same one patio11 discussed in "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero", on the front page yesterday [0]. The more non-tech people have an email address, the more we have to prevent fraudulent email, and the harder it becomes to run your own email address. The original email users were much more savvy and needed less protecting against fraud. Now my grandma has an email, and if we're not caref…

I actually would rephrase it as there weren’t enough users with money to make using email a worthwhile scam medium.

Email is low trust and almost any user is susceptible to being scammed, because there aren’t good trust markers in emails, and companies use it in ways that make it indistinguishable from spam.

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

#165

Post by SoftTalker »

kevincox wrote: post #146
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…

The problem to adding a cost to email is that it affects everyone. The amount of CPU power you need to waste to make most spam not viable is so much that it isn't worth it.

Most spam is sent by hijacked machines and botnets is it not? They don't care about wasting CPU power; they aren't paying for it.

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

#166

Post by deltree7 »

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…

ok, this is the text book definition of "out of touch"

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

#167

Post by azinman2 »

tedivm wrote: post #12

I started hosting my own email in 2004 before finally giving up and migrating my email to Fastmail last year. Besides the problems mentioned in this post the real problem I had was dealing with spam. The open source community around spam has really degraded over time, to the point where most solutions are extremely high maintenance and require regular tweaking. Methods that used to work, like greylisting, cause probl…

I’ve noticed since switching to Fastmail from gmail my spam filtering is very problematic. I always end up with legit emails in spam, and I just can change if I want even more legit in spam or more spam in inbox, which still gets through.

I think it’s both a tough problem, as well as something that only becomes easier when you have both talent and scale to have a wide perspective.

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

#168

Post by oynqr »

LinuxBender wrote: post #140
m12k wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess a lawyer might know a thing or two about confidential messages.

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

#169

Post by jeffbee »

kazinator wrote: post #133

> 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…

According to Hoyle, MX records must point to a domain name. The cannot contain addresses or point to aliases. Some mailers can tolerate IP address literals in MX records, but that is not universal and will cause problems.
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