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

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

#341

Post by megous » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

nvahalik wrote: post #223

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?

You send your email through a client. That client then sends (transfers / SMTPs) that email through an MTA either bundled with it or provided by your mail server. The MTA parses the message, figures out who it needs to go to (To, CC, BCC headers), figures out what servers receives mail for those recipients, and then transfers (SMTPs) it to the server. What OP is referring to is that the MTA essentially does a DNS loo…

> The MTA parses the message...

That may happen, but not for the purpose you stated. MTA just uses addresses you told it to use in the SMTP dialog. It doesn't use addresses from the message. In fact the addresses in the message may be totally different.

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

#342

Post by chrismeller » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:45 PM UTC

prox wrote: post #300

killjoywashere wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wonder if we can’t build a far simpler postoffice app on http (self hosted domain space) and have a whitelisted encrypted exchange.

Substitute “HTTP” with “SMTP” and you already have that today… SMTP in plain text isn’t generally used anymore, it’s always transported over TLS. Of course you can run whitelist-only, but how is that ever going to work?

SMTP is text based and we’ll defined, so I would also argue that the transport being “simpler” is nonsense.

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

#343

Post by capdeck » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:47 PM UTC

My fear is that something similar will slowly happen to everything "compute". How long before my bank's website won't let me login if I don't use a computer with secure boot and a browser installed from an app store? McDonalds app on Android won't run on a de-googled or rooted device... At this point one may argue that there will always be computers that you can compile and install your own Linux. Yes, that is true. But just like I am not likely to have un-googled andorid for some apps and googled one for others, the same way it won't be practical to have one computer for some apps and the other one for others. And the one that will win will be the one that lets you login into your bank account, for simple and practical reasons.

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

#344

Post by prox » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:50 PM UTC

chrismeller wrote: post #342

prox wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we can’t build a far simpler postoffice app on http (self hosted domain space) and have a whitelisted encrypted exchange.

Substitute “HTTP” with “SMTP” and you already have that today… SMTP in plain text isn’t generally used anymore, it’s always transported over TLS. Of course you can run whitelist-only, but how is that ever going to work? SMTP is text based and we’ll defined, so I would also argue that the transport being “simpler” is nonsense.

Whitelist is easier. If I added an mail of a friend in this system, we can communicate. Everything else goes blackhole.

Nothing is easy about email! Having worked for years just to get reliable in and outboxes is definitely not trivial. Also SMTP is a system out of your control if you want anything verified and actually delivered.

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

#345

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

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).

[deleted]

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

#346

Post by recroad » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

Couldn’t agree more. I had to leave Zoho even though I didn’t want to. Google just blocked emails to my Gmail customers and left me with no choice.

Write about it here https://bitbytebit.substack.com/p/customer-hacquisition

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

#347

Post by KennyBlanken » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #156

I support the author but let me tell you a counterargument I don’t think he devotes enough to: Spam is a real issue. The amount of spam emails which get sent are absurd and likely orders of magnitude more than non-spam . And spammers do a lot to mimic real emails, including just hacking legitimate addresses and adding them to botnets. Even on gmail, I still get spam sent to my inbox. Fortunately very rarely, but it s…

Spam is an issue, but it's not the one that impacts me the most. I rarely get true 'spam' in my inbox.

What impacts me the most is a never-ending problem with Gmail classifying messages as spam that were actually important to me. Time sensitive announcements of meetings or events, for example. Many are coming from senders I've been receiving email from for years.

Gmail is convinced that almost every technical-related email mailing list I'm on is a spam source, despite my constantly going into my spam folder and telling it dozens of messages from those mailing lists are not actually spam.

Meanwhile, what I do get is a barrage of promotional emails - what I consider very much to be spam - from corporations that at some point have had my email address and now email me multiple times a week. Those sail right past the spam filter into my "promotions" folder and accumulate...

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

#348

Post by pas » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #338

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…

>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. any community that grows large enough needs some mechanism to manage trust, this is a universal issue. The early internet was more permissive and less differentiated simply because it was smaller. The big corps do an alright job at managing spam given the sheer size of the pr…

spam is solved between the big players, they already use various feedback mechanisms ... it's just not enabled for small fish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email)

gmail silently drops emails (while reports smtp 250 accepted) - they could just as easily report that it's blackholed. spammers already do get through their fancy AI filters.

microsoft proactively blocks half of the world, rejects the incoming mail, and sends the sysadmin on a wild goose chase to get the IP/domain/whatever allowed. then you diligently register, and wait. and then no signal from them, and the problem still persists.

so big corps, small shops, everyone and their dog flocks to the good old microsoft/google duopoly.

and at this point if someone asks what to use for email knowing ... well, it's hard to not recommend folks to just use google workspace and have some kind of backup ready for when G bans their whole account just because.

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

#349

Post by no_time » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #41

how many of posters here have used mailinabox ? or something similar? how was your experience? i am almost 2 years into it now and beyond the first months hiccups, it just works

MIAB user here. I pay ~$4 for a small VPS hosted here in Hungary. The company did a pretty good job of keeping it's IP range clean apparently. I only had to request whitelisting from 2 spamlists. One being Outlook's. I filled out their form and my mail was delivering a few days later.

I wonder how the ubuntu 22.04 upgrade is progressing though. The EOL of 18.04 is getting pretty close.

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

#350

Post by tacon » Sun, Sep 04, 2022, 9:56 PM UTC

toun wrote: post #198

The topic often comes up. Can't say I share the experience. My servers have never been put on a blacklist in the 7 years they've been running, and one of them operates from my residential DSL connection. Standard postfix+dovecot stack on an Archlinux VPS, I log in once a year to update the packages and make sure there is enough disk space left.

Essentially all residential IPs are blacklisted for email servers, at least on port 25. Many ISPs blackhole any traffic on port 25 to residential IPs. Do you have port 25 working on your residential connection?