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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

#431

Post by massaman_yams »

pas wrote: post #420
massaman_yams wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

if netblock reputation were known small non-spam senders would congregate, this would help weed out the spammers. but google et al. don't provide any feedback. nor any way to build reputation for your IP. (where are all the staking blockfoo chainbar solutions? or at least let people pay a one time fee for some exception) anyway, since we already have certificate transparency, we could have a similar one to look up MT…

> "... small non-spam senders would congregate" Congratulations, you've invented the email service provider. Most small non-spam senders don't want to spend the time figuring out IP reputation, DKIM, or SPF already, so they pay someone to do it for them. What makes netblock reputation different?

Reputation isn't public because then spammers game it and you get worse filtering outcomes. ISPs learned this the hard way.

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

#432

Post by erdos4d »

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…

How does this get me unlimited accounts for my shady biz? Every provider I know of wants money to make new ones, those bastards.

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

#433

Post by dn3500 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #266
dn3500 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're doing something special, there is a big difference between sending your mail to the recipient's smtp server and relaying it through you ISP's smtp server. The difference is that if you send it direct the ISP can't read it, because it's encrypted. If you relay it, the ISP can read your mail, and even tamper with it, unless the message itself has been encrypted with something like pgp.

Your ISP can log and analyze all SMTP traffic if they want to, whether it's being processed by their mail relays or not.

Well sure, but if you're worried about traffic analysis you've got bigger problems. The difference here is that if you relay through your ISP they can read the contents of your messages. If you don't, they can't.

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

#435

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

massaman_yams wrote: post #397

I 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 reduc…

> 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".

You say you're knowledgable, but I also ran my own email server for a couple of decades, and gave up for precisely this reason. Maybe this is even true, but when you're trying to get mail sent, YOU NEED THE MAIL SENT, and you can hardly wait 2 weeks or a month. Besides, your email server is going to give up and report it as undeliverable by that time. So you have to do the legwork to get off the block regardless of how long the "bigs" have the timeout set to. And that's happens so often, and is so onerous, it's not worth the hassle any more. Like many others here, I could have written this article.

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

#436

Post by akira2501 »

rnd0 wrote: post #367
mordae wrote: post #222

Earlier 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. yeah, but in this climate what are you gonna do? It's not like there's any kinda recourse for monopolistic behavior that has any teeth to it.

Sure there is.. unless you mean no recourse in this environment. The natural recourse would be to force Google to divest GMail from it's core business.

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

#437

Post by sbuk »

zikduruqe wrote: post #417
sbuk wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gpgtools.org GPG Mail is a paid for add-on, but it works and it works well.

It's not a paid add-on... GnuPG is open source. They are selling a support plan in case you need help with open source. Here is the same thing, without the paid support. https://github.com/Free-GPGMail/Free-GPGMail - GPG Suite was released under an Open Source license in the past. Is that stil the case? You GPG Suite including GPG Mail is still going to be released under an Open Source license. - Am I still allowed t…

To be pedantic, the version I linked to is a paid addin. However, you are correct - there is/are unofficial unpaid and unsupported versions available that I was unaware of, per the FAQ and the repository that you linked, which has nothing to do with GPGTools GmbH; from the repo, “This does not constitute any endorsement or promotion of our releases by the respective copyright or trademark holders.” Thanks for sharing this.

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

#438

Post by noobermin »

rnd0 wrote: post #367
mordae wrote: post #222

Earlier 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. yeah, but in this climate what are you gonna do? It's not like there's any kinda recourse for monopolistic behavior that has any teeth to it.

GDPR worked.

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

#440

Post by soheil »

Hey [0] built a very successful email business in only a couple of years with no deliverability issues. There are hundreds of thousands of happy Hey users who continue to pay for email. So much for anticompetitiveness. There may be a difference between a guy with a server and a real business serving thousands of customers.

[0] hey.com

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