we shold come up with a more universal approach to tackle spam
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
271–280 of 744 posts
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#272For those who are still self-hosting, what tools & services do you use and find useful?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So VMC isn’t optional?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#274I've been hosting my email on my own server since the 90s, but got tired of dealing with keeping up with spam filters. Updated the MX to deliver inbound to mailroute.net and have them do the filtering before forwarding to my server and that's been working great for years. Not free, but not expensive and still gives me 99% of the control i want with very good spam filtering too.
Outbound mail is relayed via mailroute too, which solves the tainted IP delivery problem.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#275This isn't actually that hard to fix, it's just that for whatever reason, we seem to frequently have this blindspot that we don't seem to have in other industries. Namely that "do it yourself at home" and "massive oligopolist" aren't the only two options. It's like saying "You can only have hamburgers two ways, cook them yourself or McDonalds." I do the third and it's been great. I let my paid webhost handle it. (hos…
> like saying "You can only have hamburgers two ways, cook them yourself or McDonalds." and your comment seems to be saying it’s OK if we lose the ability to cook hamburgers at home, because there are other (more ethical) restaurants that aren’t McDonalds. am i misunderstanding?
The metaphor is kinda good. It's okay for people to refuse your home-cooked burgers because they don't trust them to be safe. There are actual small food vendors that comply with sanitation rules and you can have them provide catering services, professionally. And that is okay.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#276Earlier 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 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.
A normal company could engage in these practices, but it is settled law that a monopolist may not. A monopolist may not use their monopoly in one are to supress activities in another area.
You can't put these big tech monopolists into the same bucket as normal companies. They have way too much power, and even when they do not intend to smash things, they end up smashing things.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#277Big email companies were never threatened by self-host. Spammers ruined it, not big email companies. Spam is an incredibly difficult problem to solve.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#278I know of some small servers that get a lot of spam and hacking attempts, and their most effective tool against abuse is an IPv4 block ban. Increasingly this became more and more difficult, and I assume email servers are at the same point. Thanks to VPNs, people appear to be able to spawn insane numbers of random IPs.
One solution this decentralized server system came up with is the concept of accounts that have some barrier to entry to create (which involves a delay and proving identity). This account has a private key and it uses this to access the servers through any IP. Abuse on this account and any connected accounts of course leads to the key being temporarily revoked. Lots of positive interactions with well established accounts increases your credibility. Lots of reports decreases you credibility.
If you have been sending credible emails with multiple hosts for 10 years, even if you did get flagged, you would be given the benefit of the doubt. Hell, it should be easy to email the host and give them the headers and the reason why the email was flagged.
About the email space now being owned by big tech, it could simply be time for a boycott until they improve their practices. There is far too much centralization on the web now, and we all contribute to it every time we use an external service rather than host our own.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#279Earlier 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.
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Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
You can always use a different email address to manage the domain if that's the issue?
I would imagine the issue is someone else buying the domain, and subsequently receiving any email meant for you (such as a password reset request).