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

cfenollosa.com

251–260 of 744 posts

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

#251
I've been self-hosting since 2004. I currently route via a VPS. The only issues I have seem to be with outlook.com/hotmail.com/etc - free Microsoft accounts. That goes to junk, though replies seem to work fine. Paid Outlook365 seems fine.

Even after speaking with Microsoft's email admin team on the phone a couple times, I still have issues. It's kind of infuriating.

I have properly configured SPF+DKIM (selector rotated daily)+DMARC, and I've gotten set up with dnswl.org.

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

#252
Here’s an idea

Make a new protocol for this decade, that isn’t email.

HTTP is supported nearly everywhere SMTP is. Just build something over that, and this time around make sure to avoid SPAM bullshit.

People shouldn’t be able to just message you based on your address. They receive a capability to email you. People can be empowered to give out your capabilities. If a particular such branch leads to spam, you simply cut off that branch and boom, no new user can reach you with that capability anymore. Hashes of Public keys can identify users.

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

#253
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…

If you're sending through someone else then you're not self hosting!

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

#254
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just like with e-mail, it doesn’t matter what’s in the standard, what matters is what the big providers actually do. If Google (Gmail), Microsoft, etc. will simply show any BIMI logo without VMC verification (which will never happen), then I will concede that BIMI is not a monopolizing standard. It’ll just be a tracking pixel.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure! I would never recommend, for instance, Dreamhost, but I set up a company's smarthosting with Dreamhost because the company was already using them. Dreamhost in general, though, is quite spammy.

Linode and Panix come to mind.

Really, though, many hosting companies won't necessarily list "smart hosting" / "smarthosting" as a service. If they offer a cheap VPS and offer outgoing SMTP, you can set up smarthosting through a VPS.

One can even smarthost through Outlook / Gmail, if you really want.

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

#257
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…

> It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on Dont know about you, but I have setup my mailserver years ago, and outside of regular OS updates, havent had to touch it.

For me, the issue wasn't that I had to fix it frequently, but that when I did it was urgent, stressful and disruptive. Eventually the VDS I was renting had a fatal HD crash and I gave up.

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

#258
post #143
post #42

Very interesting, I've self hosted my e-mail since 1999, which incidentally is 23 years ago. My current server is at Hetzner in Germany.

do you have your own asn? The entire Hetzner network has been banned by Microsoft, so you can't send to Hotmail addresses

Not at all, just a /29

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

#259
post #222
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.

It’s just because of spam. All open systems that do not impose a cost to participate are destroyed by spam.

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

#260
post #247

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…

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.

DKIM and SPF, along with DMARC are more about authentication - they let you know that the message has come from where it says it does. This makes spoofing harder, not necessarily spam. Greylisting deals with most of the "spray and prey" spammers, though it does have it's own issues.
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