Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cfenollosa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 744 posts

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

#171

Post by briandear »

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…

Apple mail support GPG easily. No need to use Thunderbird.

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

#172

Post by chx »

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.

Whose SMTP service you'd recommend?

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

#173

Post by gist »

There is even a much larger problem here other than not being able to self-host your own email. The issue is that large providers and large companies have no accountability. No way to ever have a conversation with an actual person (email or by phone) to resolve a simple problem or mistake in an algorithm or automated process (or even a manual process if that's what it is). Canned replies not reply to follow up question not a care in the world or a conscience. And the fact that the service is free (to someone) does not mean a company should be able to so easily do what they want and cause aggravation to others.

And it happens even with paid services at large companies.

That is not 'just business' and has never been the way business operated pre-internet except in a few super rare (and perhaps rare monopoly) situations.

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

#174

Post by PinguTS »

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…

I completly agree with you. While Hetzner is my actual neighbor as their headquarters is right in the neighboring town, I still use a server at very small scale provider. I have no problem with my email server. I receive some spam here and there, mostly from Russia. But I immediatly block the according IP addresses for some time.

For years I avoided to use any external service to decide whether its Spam or not. But about 2 years ago I started to rely on some of the external Blocklists.

Till today I have no problem sending Email. Even as I don't use DKIM or DMARC.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

conradev wrote: post #72
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.

You can also use an MX backup service which will accept mail when your server is offline (and it will resend it when the server comes online) You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by leohonexus »

johnklos wrote: post #122
warent wrote: post #6

For those interested, I made a post related to this topic a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180379

You start with the premise that you can't host your own email, which is problematic. I don't know why the people who fail at self-hosting email are so adamant about telling others that nobody should self-host, but it seems more like a squeaky wheel problem than a real one. In every scenario, deliverability problems can be solved by smarthosting through a reputable email provider. Period. You get all the benefits of y…

> In every scenario, deliverability problems can be solved by smarthosting through a reputable email provider. Period.

Could you provide an example of such a smarthost email provider that has the benefits you mentioned?

Not challenging you, just genuinely curious.

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

#178

Post by Avamander »

jeffbee wrote: post #4

Is there actually a "big tech" email provider that accepts a message with a 2xx SMTP code and then deletes it? The only one I personally know of never does that. That one also does not use anything like an IP address blacklist. This article doesn't name names, it just waves its hands and throws around some innuendo. But as far as my own personal experience goes, this author has no idea what they are talking about.

Microsoft and maybe sometimes very rarely Google does it.

> But as far as my own personal experience goes, this author has no idea what they are talking about.

He's not very informed about being on the receiving end.

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

#179

Post by manquer »

mikece wrote: post #93

“ This concept may sound familiar to you. It's called a racket.” Wouldn’t RICO statutes apply then?

The author is confusing not being independent one person setup friendly to an oligopoly.

There are plenty of ISPs that offer email services , plenty of small businesses, government orgs, universities host on their own, most have no problems .

Email is still very much small business friendly, it is no longer easy for indie one person setups anymore.

Many industries are not one person shop friendly , that is just nature of the industry, doesn’t make it a racket

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

#180

Post by Avamander »

briandear wrote: post #171
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…

Apple mail support GPG easily. No need to use Thunderbird.

Can you please provide a few references to that claim?
Post reply on HN