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

#471

Post by koheripbal » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:13 AM UTC

jimmydorry wrote: post #428

PinguTS wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are using external blocklists, you are perpetuating the problem here. Small mail operators end up on blocklists through no fault of their own, and it sounds like your server would reject them just like the big servers do.

Not using block lists will inundate mail servers with spam. It's a necessary evil.

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

#472

Post by kagronick » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:14 AM UTC

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…

I think the problem was this guy was providing email accounts for other people. Other people who probably reused their passwords and had their email in the same DB in the apps they used. That DB was compromised. Hackers got an account to send spam. Then the domain was blacklisted.

He alluded to this in

> At some point your IP range is bound to be banned, either by one asshole IP neighbor sending spam, one of your users being pwned

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

#473

Post by doubledad222 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:15 AM UTC

Did you properly set up DKIm, Dmarc and SPF? I have been hosting my own email through a VM in Texas for about two decades. Whenever I had problems with rejected deliveries, they were solved by moving to the new standards the internet invented to fight spam. Did you use a dmarc analyzer to verify you were set up correctly?

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

#474

Post by phendrenad2 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

A bit crazy to call this unethical. By that logic McDonalds is unethical for not building a restaurant in the middle of the amazon rainforest. Hey, I want my chicken tenders! Well tough cookies, friend, if there's no economical way to support a customer, said customer shall not be supported. Nothing personal. Nothing unethical.

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

#475

Post by dddddddd111 » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

No post body was provided.

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

#476

Post by 29athrowaway » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:38 AM UTC

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…

Not only they don't care about other e-mail providers, they often don't care about supporting widely used e-mail clients.

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

#477

Post by kaushikc » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:39 AM UTC

As someone who was actually looking into utilising my own mail server for building my technical knowledge and understanding, I am dissuaded a bit that my efforts would end in a host of hinderances caused by some auto moderators and filters.

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

#478

Post by zbird » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:51 AM UTC

jdnordy wrote: post #421

> We are all experiencing what happened when politicians regulated the web. I hope you are enjoying your cookie modals; browsing the web in 2022 is an absolute hell. This. Just This. Seriously though, as someone fairly uneducated in the space of how standards, protocols, and regulations get set in place, how can the ship be moved on this issue? Tech companies will likely only move / allocate resources if there is fin…

Regulate them.

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

#479

Post by fsckboy » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:51 AM UTC

seems to me that email transport is by now a fairly robust and universal delivery mechanism at least just above the IP layer, and it's utility decline creates the perfect opportunity to piggyback a new system on top of the existing infrastructure:

high concept: encrypted email with cryptographic postage stamps paid directly to the recipient.

Want me to read your email, pay the postage, and the same vice versa. Who cares what gmail is doing, I don't want them collecting my postage anyway.

this would simultaneously bootstrap a universal micropayment currency

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

#480

Post by RockingGoodNite » Mon, Sep 05, 2022, 2:53 AM UTC

I've hosted for several decades as well and intend to continue to exercise my right to do so. Whenever one of these monthly or bi-monthly doom and gloom woe is me posts shows up on HN; I wonder if there are any other motivations behind them.