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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

#241

Post by DrudgeCorporate »

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…

While this is true I don't see it as a huge deal. Treat it like any other annual bill (e.g Insurance, property taxes) and you will be fine.

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

#242

Post by pixl97 »

orev wrote: post #191
oynqr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you’d be very surprised at how much lawyers don’t know or care about any of that. They store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents).

After doing work for lawyers for years, they really are the worst when it comes to understanding computers.

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

#243

Post by klabb3 »

klibertp wrote: post #203
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…

This indeed looks like a good direction. A decade ago Freenet (not sure if it still exists?) had a problem with spam on its equivalent of USENET. It was pretty bad, until they changed the protocol so that it's the sending node that keeps the message, which is then pulled (or not) by the recipients. It made a lot of sense to me: I'm the one sending you the message, I want you to see it, while you don't even know wheth…

Wow that's ingenious - and obvious when you think about it. I guess evolving the email standard is a much bigger obstacle though, no matter how clever the proposal.

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

#244

Post by teddyh »

Avamander wrote: post #236
teddyh wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re talking nonsense. What is the improvement of BIMI (without VMC) over X-Face? The only things I can think of are:

1. BIMI logos are in color.

oh yeah, and:

2. BIMI logos are inherently a tracking pixel so the sender can see when readers read the mail.

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

#245

Post by gwnywg »

I host my mail for around 12 years so only half as long as the author of the article, I faced the same problem- that my emails land in spam for some people. In most cases it's those people who care to receive my email and I always tell them it's their provider who is at wrong and that they should switch. We have some laugh together, exchange some jokes and continue with our lives. I'm one of not many who love postfix and dovecot enough to use it to self host, but I'm fine with that, I won't throw towel and will continue to run my email, hopefully I'll be lucky enough to run it for next 12 years :) Peace everyone :)

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

#246

Post by Avamander »

teddyh wrote: post #244
Avamander wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re talking nonsense. What is the improvement of BIMI (without VMC) over X-Face? The only things I can think of are: 1. BIMI logos are in color. oh yeah, and: 2. BIMI logos are inherently a tracking pixel so the sender can see when readers read the mail.

You are free to read the BIMI standard's section 2.1 containing its high-level goals.

The next section also literally says "This document does not cover the different verification and reputation mechanisms available, but BIMI relies upon them to be in deployed in order to control abuse." It's not a standard meant for establishing trust, it does not mandate requiring a VMC.

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

#247

Post by Fuzzeh »

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…

SPF and DKIM no longer have any real value. Just look at SA and the values it assigns by default to mail with those headers. Couple that will the fact that spam now has valid SPF and DKIM - just makes them pointless.

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

#248

Post by intelVISA »

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.

Yep SMTP relay is the only sane choice nowadays sadly. Sending your own mail is a losing battle against the email blacklist cartel.

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

#249

Post by the_third_wave »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #136
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.

Would that be Hashcash you're thinking of?

http://www.hashcash.org/

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

#250

Post by jwr »

I've been hosting my mail for 20+ years now, with minor issues. I guess I've been lucky.

Reading the comments here makes me incredibly sad. Every answer that tells me to use a provider misses the point. The Internet was created so that there could be many independent nodes, not so that everybody has to rely on one of several blessed providers. I should be able to run my own E-mail.

The real problem is lack of incentives. The big corps do not care about e-mail. It doesn't make money and isn't easily controllable. You can't turn it into a walled garden and lock users in. So, it gets minimal attention, and only defensive measures are developed.

Either we solve the spam problem, or things will get worse. The big tech corps won't solve it for us.

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