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

cfenollosa.com

481–490 of 744 posts

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

#482

Nah. I'm glad that people like the OP are squeezed out of sending their own email. I have no problem with an email oligopoly at this point. For every "good" email server owner, there's probably a million bad ones. And the problem of spam is a big one. If you want to send your own email, get used to telling people to check their spam lists and/or add your email account.

The same philosophy could be applied to retail and other areas, forget small time hospitals, let the U. S. Government take care of your health.

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

#483

The address 929@homeaffairs.gov.au, which must be used by Australian permanent residents to update their personal details, refuses to accept email messages unless they are from big tech. Shame on you, Australian Department of Home Affairs. And shame on Telstra, which provides the service. --- Remote-MTA: dns; dibp-ibmail2.msng.telstra.com.au Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554-mx.msng.telstra.com.au 554 Your access to this ma…

That might be something worth talking to a journalist about.

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

#484
The competition argument is getting weaker and weaker, IMO. The point of competition, in theory, is to facilitate a kind of darwinian process that iterates toward an optimal solution. We have basically found that: Gmail pretty much just works for 99% of people. I sympathize with the 1% it doesn’t work for, but appeals to competition are not the way forward.

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

#485

The address 929@homeaffairs.gov.au, which must be used by Australian permanent residents to update their personal details, refuses to accept email messages unless they are from big tech. Shame on you, Australian Department of Home Affairs. And shame on Telstra, which provides the service. --- Remote-MTA: dns; dibp-ibmail2.msng.telstra.com.au Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554-mx.msng.telstra.com.au 554 Your access to this ma…

> The address 929@homeaffairs.gov.au, which must be used by Australian permanent residents to update their personal details

You update personal details with the government via email? That's interesting. I would have assumed they would use at least a secure web form.

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

#486
post #464

I 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 d…

Another very happy (paying) customer of ImprovMX here. I have a dozen or so domains for family and friends configured this way, using ImprovMX for both inbound MX and outbound SMTP (using Gmail as the 'front end' mailbox, but using the custom domain/addresses everywhere). I too gave up self hosting this all a few years ago - especially when hosting domains for others (family) who aren't tech savvy, I got sick of havi…

Well I'm slowly seeing competitors a alternatives pop up, so if it falls apart, we might have places to go. Even Cloudflare now offers a similar service. Minus the SMTP part.

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

#487
I have been self hosting email for just over 23 years and I am more emboldened than ever to keep doing so. Even with SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup, I am constantly asking people to check their spam folder, add me to their contacts, etc. I refuse to pay an email tax to one of the larger players to solidify their hold over the protocols.

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

#488
post #285

In fairness, things like postfix usually ship with very poor (not to say “moronic”) defaults. Like, postfix won’t even try to connect to tls-enabled smtp for outgoing email by default, and you have to explicitly point it at the certificate bundle it’s supposed to consider valid. And you have to tell explicitly to reject incoming plaintext connections from the public internet. And quite a bit more… Like, why doesn’t p…

Are you referring to this? http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtpd_tls_security_le...

" encrypt

Mandatory TLS encryption: announce STARTTLS support to remote SMTP clients, and require that clients use TLS encryption. According to RFC 2487 this MUST NOT be applied in case of a publicly-referenced SMTP server. Instead, this option should be used only on dedicated servers. "

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

#489

Seems like we need to write a law (draft a bill).

No, we don't need to do this because more laws will be piled on top and only FAANG will have the lawyers and people required to comply with those laws, forcing more control of the Internet out of our hands, the people, and resting control with the last people on Earth who should have any power whatsoever...politicians.

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

#490
post #393
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?

I've found that Mailinabox provides a pretty much turn-key setup. (https://www.mailinabox.email)
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