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After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
401–410 of 744 posts
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#402to me, the root cause of this is just money. a LOT of people have zero scruples when it comes to money, so they consider sending email to every email address they can find, in order to hopefully make a sale, to be a perfectly valid tradeoff.
these people deny that they are causing a problem, or that they ever caused a problem, because admitting that would mean they are a bad person, and they're not a bad person! they're "just trying to feed [their] kids, man."
making decisions based on money alone is always a bad idea. ALWAYS. I do not care if it is one person and one decision, or if it is a business making a decision on behalf of their stock holders, or anything else.
if money alone is your decision-making criteria, you are making a bad decision, or you are making a decision on bad criteria.
someone always pays for everyone's scramble for money. someone always pays, and it is always an unjust payment.
in this case, spammers have cost us our ability to self-host email, which is a very significant problem, as described by the author of the linked article, with rather severe consequences if you hope to have any freedom on the internet.
so, if you work for a company that will, over time, do just about anything to get people to click on ads, you are slowly destroying the internet as it was intended to be, and was, for 2-4 decades, depending on how you define that.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh I know. The point is something hard that the sender needs to do. Ideally it wouldn't waste lots of power, but it must consume some scarce resource, or else it wouldn't cost anything, and the cost should be borne by the sender, so e.g. a RAM-intensive hash function wouldn't be right.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is your outbound mail server does not have a good reputation. You also probably do not have a large enough swath of IP space to prevent bad neighbors from becoming your problem. Lots of tricks to getting your email sent reliably to most mail servers. What got me out of hosting mail was trying to send an email to a potential lead I met at a local meetup. His email was hosted at some very small and relative…
I'm guessing dreamhost has a decent chunk of IP space...
All of which they’ve rented out to multiple spammers over the years…
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There were proposals for this sort of thing a while back, but they never caught on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
That's almost exactly my off the cuff suggestion. Of course my brain is seeded by both bitcoin (finding a hash as proof of work) and HLL (which counts leading hash digits to estimate set cardinality).
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy. [1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thund…
ok, this is the text book definition of "out of touch"
Yep. On any other site I’d assume that comment was satire. Nothing’s changed in the last decade:
https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#407How about each email recipient has an Absolute Whitelist and messages from addresses or domains on this list are always delivered come hell or high water?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Of course whitelist is easier, but how valuable would your email be if you only allowed your friends to email you? Goodbye order confirmations, subscription reminders, recruiter emails, notifications…
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Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ther…
As a practitioner, I can tell you that this proposal would be quite a bit behind state of the art for email spam filter accuracy. For example, there's a surprising amount of legitimate mail that gets sent without authentication, and which you don't want to block because your end users will get mad if it goes missing.
I may also point out that "reputation scoring for netblocks" is the exact problem the original blog post was complaining about. He was trying to send from residential ISP and VPS netblocks that had poor reputation, and saw delivery problems as a result.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#410Yup. I have to pay Google a chunk of change every month to do something I used to be able to do for myself for free. Because suddenly they flagged my domain and no one would get any of my e-mails.
And there ain’t nothing I can do but pay.