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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

#311

Post by pas »

DanAtC wrote: post #210
flyinghamster wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been self-hosting email for years, and the only deliverability problem I've ever had has been with AT&T. If I try to send something to an AT&T customer, I get an automated "your message has been eaten" notice, and following its directions accomplishes precisely nothing. At this point, I can only guess they're hellbanning the IP block in which my VPS resides, because it does not show up on any public DNSBLs.…

At least you get notified. Microsoft/Outlook on the other hand silently drops emails leaving you and the recipient in the dark.

that seems new, or maybe a different beast from the MS zoo of madness.

gmail on the other hand does what others said, report smtp 250 and silently discard some emails. (mostly those that lack DKIM)

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

#312

Post by cowtools »

pas wrote: post #308
cowtools wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we ought to move email (or some future incarnation of email, like matrix) to a completely whitelist (opt-in to receive messages) basis.

signup confirm emails are like that. similarly, any "hello pls add me to your allow-list" emails could be made auto-disappear to the "will be deleted in 30 days" folder in ~10-15 minutes, so even if you get a 100 spam messages per day you only see the last of those, you can easily pick what you are looking for, and don't worry about the rest, they'll just disappear. (and you still have 30 days to look for messages th…

signup confirm emails are not what i'm describing, because you need to establish and filter the initial offer that they send you via email itself, which is still prone to phishing.

What I'm describing is a situation where users themselves have to proactively subscribe to a connection using some sort of out-of-band mechanism. For example, if a website wanted to send you emails, they could produce some sort of "connection ticket" that you can give to your email client in order to subscribe to them.

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

#313

Post by mechanical_bear »

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…

It isn’t about what’s convenient for you. It’s an individual cost benefit analysis. Your needs are different than mine.

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

#314

Post by skywal_l »

zahllos wrote: post #310
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?

I can type out an explanation relatively easily. Let's imagine I'm sending from user@zahllos.example to user@skywall.example. I'm doing it from say Thunderbird or Outlook, and you're using the same. I need to send, and to do this I typically use an SMTP server. This is something configured, probably on zahllos.example, maybe with the domain smtp.zahllos.example. My mail client contacts this and 'logs in' with my deta…

So in the example of the parent, he's got a domain name registered somewhere (mydomain.com) and he set, in its MX records, the gmail server. But how does gmail make the connection between that address and your gmail address then?

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

#315

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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.

This should be made a standard practice.

Third party email providers, the so-called "established businesses", get a free pass as sending SMTP servers that are accepted by almost all receiving STMP servers. Everyone just assumes everything coming from those SMTPs is legit. Establishing this "legitimacy" and getting the "free pass" is difficult and some have suggested, the third parties may employ anticompetive tactics.

However, IMHO the receiving SMTPs is a different issue. Why do we let these third parties receive and store our email. (Why do our homes have their own mailboxes. Why not use a "P.O. Boxes" instead.) Eventually we could move away from letting third parties control the receipt of our mail. Neither "POP3" nor "webmail" was part of the original concept of email.

Today, it is easier than ever to set up overlay networks where we can assign our own IP addresses and run our own SMTP servers that can communicate directly with other SMTP servers on the overlay network. These networks are not open to the world, they may only be open to people we know. Much of our mail is between people who know each other, e.g., friends, family, colleagues. Or businesses that we contact first. We can separate different social and business networks on different overlay networks.

Anyway, the sending and receiving of mail can be separated. We do not need to let a third party control both.

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

#317

Post by amelius »

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.

Not good from an energy-wasting perspective.

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

#318

Post by dane-pgp »

rekrsiv wrote: post #303
userbinator wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the few means of online communication that isn't a proprietary walled garden?

So in the few other means of online communication that aren't proprietary walled gardens, what else we got?

IRC, XMPP, and Matrix (in increasing order of support for E2E crypto).

I'm not sure how well those protocols (as implemented, in practice) support clients that go offline for long periods of time.

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

#319

Post by neop1x »

jwr wrote: post #250

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 incenti…

I have also been self-hosting email for 15 years and only had couple of problems at the beginning, mainly until my IP got enough reputation. I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though. It has reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM, TLS, MTA-STS and even DANE with DNSSEC (on a self-hosted BIND but that's another story). It is implemented using Exim, Dovecot, SpamAssasin, DNSBL and Roundcube with OpenLDAP auth. I can recommend this awesome hand-on guide provided by Netherlands Domain Registration Foundation as a basis of a nice configuration https://www.sidn.nl/en/news-and-blogs/hands-on-implementing-...

I had some troubles with IMAP search. I set up CLucene, it was easy and enough for me (no need for Java Lucene). It just took me a long time to figure out why it wouldn't search a domain part of email addresses. It just required to set up the tokenizations in such a way to split words also on @ character, i.e. don't consider a full email address as a word. :P I also had some troubles with OpenLDAP until I finally decided to read the docs and examples there properly. Since then I have been using this setup happily and it appears I will continue to do so! I also share the LDAP with NextCloud btw.

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