Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cfenollosa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 744 posts

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

#541

Post by zapataband1 »

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 real problem is how bad most e-mail interfaces are (makes you want to use it less) or that there is not a dead simple way to do it other than a provider. It should be easy enough that I can download an app on my phone and be sending messages.

I think matrix might get rid of a lot of the infrastructure barriers, but I don't have much experience with it.

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

#542

Post by DangitBobby »

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…

> IP range reputation is not easy to assess, sometimes even for email professionals.

The article is about a man who has been sending emails from the same address for the last couple of decades, and it has always been in his control. Is it difficult to assess the reputation of his address? You seem to be deflecting some blame onto the victim of the shortcomings of your system.

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

#544

Post by baskethead »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #482
baskethead wrote: post #376

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.

I'm very much a proponent of Universal Healthcare. I think whatever we currently have for health care is a mix of the worst of both worlds.

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

#545

Post by jjav »

koheripbal wrote: post #471
jimmydorry wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't use any kind of block list on my mail server, as I find the concept to be fundamentally flawed. I accept all incoming email as long as basic sanity on the connection is met and then apply bayesian filtering after the email has been accepted.

I get just about no spam at all (<10 per month, maybe).

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

#546

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

no_time wrote: post #349
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #41

how many of posters here have used mailinabox ? or something similar? how was your experience? i am almost 2 years into it now and beyond the first months hiccups, it just works

MIAB user here. I pay ~$4 for a small VPS hosted here in Hungary. The company did a pretty good job of keeping it's IP range clean apparently. I only had to request whitelisting from 2 spamlists. One being Outlook's. I filled out their form and my mail was delivering a few days later. I wonder how the ubuntu 22.04 upgrade is progressing though. The EOL of 18.04 is getting pretty close.

my point exactly. was your experience an exercise in futility as the OP wants us to believe?

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

#547

Post by Nemo_bis »

hpcjoe wrote: post #426

I've been debating whether to do this myself (throw in the towel on mail). I am getting tired of fighting all the assorted battles. This said, my concern is that the big players seem like they could, at a whim, drop you as a customer, with no recourse. This is what is giving me pause going to the big providers. I've been looking at mail distributions like Mail-in-a-box, and modoba as an intermediate, though none of t…

Modoboa? https://modoboa.org/en/

I was skeptical about running a mailserver but a friend set up a few mailboxes with Modoboa and so far it's going better than expected. (Mostly we just needed a mail relay.)

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

#549

Post by DangitBobby »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #525
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #521

Giving large providers a taste of their own medicine might be interesting, let gmail spend 24 hours on a black hole list, make sure the removal forms have a captcha so they can’t be filled out by automation, when people complain on social media then let people know what it’s about. Social media really gets Google’s attention, it draws them out from behind their algorithms and silence when nothing else will. Utilizing…

Gmail wouldn’t care at all, they know the pressure would go the other way. Racketeering doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Racketeering is when the only solution offered to you out of a problem someone created for you is to pay the person who created the problem. In the context of email: "you have to pay us to send your email because we have created a system in which only we can send email." Seems pretty close to racketeering.

Anyway, telling someone they don't understand what something means is almost never a good way to start a conversation.

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

#550

Post by Nemo_bis »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #460

For those who might choose to run their own email these days, you don't have to postfix + dovecot: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/ These options are much easier to set up, will do things like generate DKIM for you, etc. I talk about this a lot[0]. There are positively awesome tools for email out there. [EDIT] - Since I'm repeating myself I've collected all the options into a post[1]…

Good point but maddy's README says "IMAP storage is beta" and AFAICT some of the other suggestions don't support SPF+DKIM out of the box.
Post reply on HN