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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

#231

Post by thaumasiotes »

joecool1029 wrote: post #219
Animats wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I…

>I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a sc…

> I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them!

https://web.archive.org/web/20030412191437/http://www.penny-...

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

#232

Post by jeffbee »

nvahalik wrote: post #223
skywal_l wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am ashamed to admit that I have no idea how email works. Is there a dumb down explanation of what are the moving parts and how you can achieve that sweet spot?

You send your email through a client. That client then sends (transfers / SMTPs) that email through an MTA either bundled with it or provided by your mail server. The MTA parses the message, figures out who it needs to go to (To, CC, BCC headers), figures out what servers receives mail for those recipients, and then transfers (SMTPs) it to the server. What OP is referring to is that the MTA essentially does a DNS loo…

There is no such thing as a BCC header. That's the entire point of the BCC.

What you've described might be correct in some cases but is not universal. The mainstream way that messages are sent is your "email client" or MUA speaks the ESTMP protocol to a mail transfer or submission agent (MTA or MSA). The client directly specifies the envelope recipients, which are not, generally speaking, parsed out of the formatted message. That is why it is possible for me to send a message to myself but the message is subsequently delivered to hundreds of unnamed recipients.

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

#233

Post by xanaxagoras »

Animats wrote: post #207
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.

> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I…

I do this too with a different provider whose whole business is relaying for self hosters. I have had exactly 0 problems since I started a couple of years ago. Its kind of perfect.

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

#234

Post by Kim_Bruning »

It should be possible for everyone to participate in internet systems equally as peers.

Somehow it seems like the Overton window has shifted such that people find it acceptable that ordinary individuals can no longer take part in the email infrastructure as equal peers.

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

#235

Post by dhosek »

mordae wrote: post #222
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…

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

Indeed. I host my domains with dreamhost and it turns out that outgoing mail from their servers will get marked as spam by Google. The exact same mail sent through a gmail address (whether under gmail.com or a custom domain) will be delivered no problem (although after the sudden closing of legacy free email, I found that emails that I had been sending via gmail with my own domain that had been getting blocked by spam filters were being delivered when they came from a gmail.com address).

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

#236

Post by Avamander »

teddyh wrote: post #228
Avamander wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the catch - VMCs are not a mandatory part of BIMI. Though if you want to establish trust , someone has to be willing to put their name on the line and verify everything required. If you have a better approach in mind, I'm sure a lot of people would love to know.

Trust (by way of VMC) is the whole point of BIMI; it’s what’s in all the marketing copy: The fact that nobody else can send mail with your logo. If you merely wanted to send e-mail with your icon on it, that already existed: the X-Face header has been around for decades.

Absolutely not, BIMI is a way to provide brand identity for recognition/marketing purposes. Trust or security is not the standard's goal. Being able to trust the logo is an optional extra.

Also nobody really uses X-Face, it's irrelevant.

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

#237

Post by zootboy »

barrkel wrote: post #102
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.

There were proposals for this sort of thing a while back, but they never caught on:

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

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

#238

Post by dhosek »

joecool1029 wrote: post #219
Animats wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I…

>I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a sc…

I remember in grad school, one of my classmates being upset about getting a porn spam email in Chinese and saying, “but don’t they know that I’m a girl?” I pointed out to her that I got the same emails (but had no idea what they were saying) and explaining to her that they send them to everybody.

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

#239

Post by pixl97 »

Animats wrote: post #207
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.

> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I…

It can very much depend on your domain. In the early 2000s I ran a domain for a firm and the domain had 'UT' in it. Well spammers thought it was related to university of Texas at some point and we went from around 10 messages a day to over quarter of a million. The immediate issue I has was poor back scatter protection so I had to configure that in a few days. That stopped 99.99% of the spam, but still caused massive issues with the mailboxes that did exist getting hundreds of messages per day even though we were blocking tens of thousands of mails per valid email addresses.

Spammers are miserable, I don't fault anyone for giving up.

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

#240

Post by eikenberry »

chx wrote: post #172
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.

Whose SMTP service you'd recommend?

I use zoho.com, $12 a year and I haven't had any issues with blacklists.
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