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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

#441

Post by IgorPartola »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #368
IgorPartola wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any actually money to be made in hosting email for people? I genuinely don’t know but my suspicion is that GMail, Yahoo, Outlook, et al are loss leaders for their owner companies. I suspect people at those companies would be quite happy if the protocol got unfucked enough that it small players could participate without negatively impacting the network.

O365 web costs me 5 bucks per month and I only use it for a few emails a week so I doubt it's a loss leader. If I'd actually use all of it a lot, sure but I don't.

Do you just get email with that? Or maybe is there an office suite also?

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

#442

Post by IgorPartola »

0x445442 wrote: post #336
IgorPartola wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any actually money to be made in hosting email for people? I genuinely don’t know but my suspicion is that GMail, Yahoo, Outlook, et al are loss leaders for their owner companies. I suspect people at those companies would be quite happy if the protocol got unfucked enough that it small players could participate without negatively impacting the network.

I gladly pay for Fastmail and I assume they’re not running a charity. Also, I think hey.com is charging $100 per year.

I am not saying there aren’t paid options. But Fastmail isn’t who we are talking about being a bad actor here and is much smaller than GMail.

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

#444

Post by rubyfan »

We have lost the old internet where you could have a first class host and interoperate with others. I just shared photos with my family and it was super easy… except my sister who uses Android. Everything is like this now. Big Tech is playing gate keeper and the days of rapid innovation are gone.

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

#445

Post by dang »

mordae wrote: post #222
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…

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.

> You are totally missing the simple fact that

Please make your substantive points without swipes. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#446

Post by lysp »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #109
m3nu wrote: post #13

Have around 100 users on my self-hosted mailserver. Works alright for the most part. Once or twice a year, there are connection issues to small companies with weird settings. I just route those over an external ESP. Then there is also mxroute.com, which is an indie email provider. He seems to do fine too. Didn't use them yet. So I think having at least some sending volume is key to running an indie server. You can't…

He ? Is it a one-man-band? If so, that's a scary single point of failure for something as critical as your email.

The owner is from the lowendtalk.com hosting forums.

It was a side project for a few years and has been full time for last couple of years now.

He's very hands on. Has very strict rules about spam - both from sending and receiving perspective.

When he brings in new ip ranges, he babysits them by slowly warming them up until they have a good enough reputation to be accepted by major providers.

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

#447

Post by gerdesj »

The real problem is and always has been "reputation". Now the big boys fuck that up by definition from the start and require you to do the heavy lifting: DNS, SPF, DMARC, DKIM and so on.

I run several email domains quite happily in the UK. I know why it works and I don't resort to magical thinking. My ISP is considered a business one and my IPs are static. I've owned both my work and personal ranges for a while.

Feel free to contact: furtle@blueloop.net - I'd love to hear your ideas.

Cheers Jon

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

#449

Post by waz0wski »

arriu wrote: post #393
teddyh wrote: post #147

E-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?

There's alot that goes into a mail server stack, but it's no more complicated than k8s or other stacks these days. My preferred setup is rspamd/postfix/dovecot/roundcube. The docs are good and the mailing lists are active & archived for easy searching

For a pre-packaged mailserver environment, take a look at mailcow or mailinabox

https://mailcow.email

https://mailinabox.email/

There's a variety of ansible/chef/puppet up on github that can also be used to setup the invididual component

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

#450

Post by shirro »

I have self hosted for 20 years. If you want perfect delivery then completely self-hosting isn't for you. It is a good learning experience and once setup it does not require much attention.

A compromise solution is to outsource delivery which is by far the shittiest part of self hosting because of bad business practices and lack of regulation. It is the least interesting bit anyway.

My email server is setup with policies commented out to send outbound emails through another host I maintain if required. When a very large company hosting lots of email for many domains mass ip blacklisted my hosting provider late last year I used this to maintain connectivity while the companies sorted out their dispute.

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