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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

#261

Post by Avamander »

teddyh wrote: post #254
Avamander wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Showing any BIMI logo is an absolutely unreasonable thing to demand from a large-scale BIMI implementation. It does not make it "monopolizing", I don't think you even know what the word means.

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

#262

Post by johnklos »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #253
johnklos wrote: post #122

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…

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

Actually, yes, you are still self-hosting:

You're in control of all deliveries to you, so you can grep through your logs and see any and every delivery attempt, which you can't do with, say, Gmail.

You can store your data however you like, with as many (or as few) security considerations as you please. Want full disk and OS encryption with a Yubikey that has to be physically present when you boot the system? Sure! Want to encase it in a cube of concrete? Install your server at the top of a tree? Why not? Want to store all of your email encrypted in memory? Go for it!

You can back it up as you like, you can make sure nobody else sees or indexes it, you can access it via command line, webmail, IMAP, POP, whatever. You can more (less) your spool file directly. You can overwrite the disk where the mail was stored when you delete it. It's up to you.

Smarthosting does mean you have less control at delivery time, though. For instance, I can choose to refuse to deliver email to domains that don't negotiate TLS. Smarthosting doesn't easily allow this (or at least I don't know of any way to do this).

But every other part will still be 100% in your control.

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

#263

Post by sbuk »

Avamander wrote: post #180
briandear wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you please provide a few references to that claim?

https://gpgtools.org

GPG Mail is a paid for add-on, but it works and it works well.

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

#264

Post by sys_64738 »

1999 was a pretty late adopter to the self-hosting email cause since it was pretty apparent since 1997 that free email was going to win out. As Gmail filters get smarter then it becomes an altogether more fruitless cause. Email hosting at the individual level died out for most due to this and the pointless rivers of spam you had to deal with. If you've only now come to the realization that you can't make it then you've been wasting a lot of your life.

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

#265

Post by Fuzzeh »

rkwasny wrote: post #209

After 19+ years of hosting my own email - It's worth it! Imagine someone revokes your access or deletes all your emails because of an error, at the scale of gmail or outlook.com it just happens. For spam there is one solution: - implement greylisting. It just solves the problem.

..or imagine if google just shuts down your account. Gives you no reason and suddenly stuff on your phone, your email and all those related services stop.

The issue with greylisting happens when you receive a lot of email from Google or Outlook servers. Different one each time, unless you're whitelisting them all - which defeats the purpose.

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

#266

Post by SoftTalker »

dn3500 wrote: post #225
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…

Unless you're doing something special, there is a big difference between sending your mail to the recipient's smtp server and relaying it through you ISP's smtp server. The difference is that if you send it direct the ISP can't read it, because it's encrypted. If you relay it, the ISP can read your mail, and even tamper with it, unless the message itself has been encrypted with something like pgp.

Your ISP can log and analyze all SMTP traffic if they want to, whether it's being processed by their mail relays or not.

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

#267

Post by killjoywashere »

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.

> It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

Or maybe it's an overly competitive protocol? Like playing Monopoly. Even a neophyte can end sweeping the game despite not understanding any of the underlying mechanics that drive the game's outcome. Those remaining mail providers are also fighting back the insanity. They 'just' won.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

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

#268

Post by hammyhavoc »

the_third_wave wrote: post #249
hammyhavoc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Alas not! Much more recent, had a very polished of-its-era SaaS style website. IIRC, you might have even been given a specific email address for it, which then forwarded to your chosen personal address.

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

#270

Post by ratata »

api wrote: post #259
mordae wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True. But they are not calling for a completely open system. I like this proposal from the author.

> Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty. After spam is detected from an IP, it should be banned for, say, ten minutes. Then, a day. A week. A month, and so on. This discourages spammers from reusing IPs after the ban is lifted and will allow the IP pool to be cleaned over time by legitimate owners.

> There should be a recourse for legitimate servers. I'm not asking for a blank check. I don't mind doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit. Spammers will not do that, and if they do, they will get blacklisted anyways after sending more spam.

But Big Tech will not do that because they will gain more from eliminating the competition.

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