Maybe the approach is all wrong? Maybe we should be educating users to scan their spam folder regularly because spam filters will never be perfect. Then it will not be as big an issue if self-hosted email gets marked as spam, and the users of providers like Gmail can complain and push for filter improvements.
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
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't mind doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit. Then how about this: The big email companies all declare one day that any newly registered domain (with an MX record) needs to post a bond for good behaviour in escrow somewhere. If any of them find the domain being used to send spam, they can slash the bond (sending it to some charity or something). This has the advantage that it doesn't affect…
I can just imagine the headline. “Ask HN: Google sent my mail bond to charity for no reason and has torpedoed my small business, and I can’t get in touch with anyone to make it right”
I can imagine headlines like that too, but the idea of electing 5 (or some other odd number of) entities is that they would be able to share among themselves the cryptographically signed evidence of the spam they detected, and then the bond slashing would require a majority vote.
So instead, the headline should be something like "Ask HN: Google, Amazon, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation forced me to send $100 of Ether to UNICEF and I couldn't send any new emails until I sent another $100 payment to my domain registrar. How do I take them to the World Court to force them to reimburse me?". That's not a great situation, but it's slightly better than the status quo.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#393E-mail is complicated, sure. But I’ve had it up to here with people who give up running their own server and then go on to vastly exaggerate how infeasible it is, in order to placate their own conscience. It’s not that they’ve gotten tired of doing it, oh no; (they say,) it’s entirely the fault of Google, Microsoft, etc. who’ve made it literally impossible to run your own e-mail server. Except it’s not impossible – l…
I’m genuinely interested. Where would you recommend a newcomer starts?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#394I gave up self-hosting ages ago. For a while I even used the old Google for Families grandfathred in setup. That also went the way of the dodo a few years ago for me.
I signed up for ImprovMX, setup my domains there, and just route my emails to whatever service I want. I use a random gmail account that I use for my login and Google services, but the email itself is never exposed anywhere, I only give out the custom domain one.
ImproveMX handles routing for my whole family. My mom uses Outlook, and it routes there for her. If google, microsoft, or whatever give me trouble or ban me, I just quickly switch the email and nothing lost.
If you pay for their service, since they have a super generous free tier, you also get SMTP servers to use as outbound, which lets me send emails through them and not have the `on behalf of` email thing. Also they do all the work to make sure their IPs aren't blocked and in good standing with MS, Google, etc.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#395I 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…
email spam is not a real issue. big uncooperative gigacorps fucking it up for everyone is. responsibility for spam (and other kinds of abuse) can be delegated via simple reputation scoring for netblocks, sender authentication and a proper feedback mechanism along the chain. when the user clicks "spam" gmail already uses that to train their fancy AI and if you are not a small nobody, then they already alert you that o…
> responsibility for spam (and other kinds of abuse) can be delegated via simple reputation scoring for netblocks, sender authentication and a proper feedback mechanism along the chain.
Are there any real-world examples of this? I know other decentralized networks like Tor and BitTorrent have some sort of reputation and feedback system. What type of "spam" do they deal with and how well do they deal with it? Are there any systems more similar to mail with mechanisms to prevent spam?
Spam is a serious issue, not just in email, not just in decentralized systems - it's one of the main issues in technology today. If there's a solution, even a proof-of-concept in a smaller system would be great
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#396Earlier 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…
> 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 But that's true for any delivery endpoint in any medium, including physical mail and phone numbers. It's pretty easy to set up auto-pay for domain names so that all you really need to do is keep the billing info up to date. After that it all runs on autopilot.
Unless your registry messes up and forgets to renew your domain. It’s happened to me before (don’t use them anymore though).
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#397I am not a Google employee, but I do work with email anti-spam at scale. There's a lot to critique here but it boils down to three points:
1. Spam filter behavior has changed because spam has increased in volume and sophistication, not because ISPs want to save money, or to eliminate competition. Some techniques that worked well 5 years ago aren't as effective anymore. One of the consequences of this has been a reduction in the value of IP reputation, from a spam signal perspective, particularly for low-volume IPs.
2. IP range reputation does matter. The increase in the value of IP range reputation, as a spam signal, has paralleled the decline in value of low-volume IP reputation. In practice, this means you need to either send enough volume to outweigh the reputation of your IP range (exact quantity varies based on a lot of variables, but as a very rough approximation, 1000 messages a day), or find an IP range with good reputation.
IP range reputation is not easy to assess, sometimes even for email professionals. So you can either gamble with a residential ISP IP, or a VPS IP, or you can find a provider that spends time, effort, and expertise on managing IP range reputation. The practical solution for most senders is the latter. Many of these offer a free tier, and many options are available among providers of all sizes.
3. The filtering behavior reported here is either misunderstood or misrepresented. First, no, no major ISP (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft/Outlook, icloud) is going to permanently block an IP range; filters are designed to be dynamic. In severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenarios, you could see a 2-week block, maybe occasionally 30 days. But never "one strike".
Mail deletion without a bounce also cam happen, particularly at Microsoft, but again it's almost never seen for legitimate mail - that response is reserved for long-term, severe spam scenarios, where anyone reasonable would agree that a block is warranted. And, again, this is dynamic.
So it looks like OP is either exaggerating, or has been trying to send from IP ranges with unusually bad spam problems.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#398Wrote my smtp server 5 years ago. Still running. BTW, did you know the smtp protocol works without DNS? You just need to puth the ipv4 between brackets @[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] and for ipv6 @[ipv6:...]. spam? simplicity and freedom has a price (personnaly, I have have very, very little spam since I am self-hosted), and don't think corpos won't try to force you to use their servers one way or another... Whose coding the vir…
>BTW, did you know the smtp protocol works without DNS? //
I did but assume no-one uses that as it's not practical because most IP addresses serve more than one domain? Or does SMTP handle that, like some extra "really-to:" header to encode the user@domain if you use IPvX for delivery?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Deliverability problems sending from VPS providers like Linode are common. The article mentioned using a VPS.
Sending via a VPS is not the same as sending through the VPS provider's email servers. Providers usually have their own outgoing SMTP servers for their clients with people who make sure that deliverability is always working, so sending through those is much more likely to work than sending directly from a VPS.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#400I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…
I completly agree with you. While Hetzner is my actual neighbor as their headquarters is right in the neighboring town, I still use a server at very small scale provider. I have no problem with my email server. I receive some spam here and there, mostly from Russia. But I immediatly block the according IP addresses for some time. For years I avoided to use any external service to decide whether its Spam or not. But a…
> Even as I don't use DKIM or DMARC.
I wouldn’t expect sending email to be the problem. But I’d be surprised if it’s delivered.