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

cfenollosa.com

561–570 of 744 posts

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

#561

I'd like to consider migrating from my self-hosted solution but it seems like all major email providers want $ per month per user|mailbox. Are there any providers out there that charge a reasonable fixed amount for say 50 mailboxes?

OVH MX plan? The so-called "pro" mail is just outsourced to Microsoft though. 50 mailboxes is an odd spot, too much for personal providers and too little for others.

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

#562
If some group wants to get serious about self-hosting email, first they need to define a new subset of the email standard for them all to conform to. Unencrypted C2S, unauthenticated senders, and outdated protocols like POP shouldn't be included. Make it simple to self-host.

XMPP has similar flaws except even worse. Too many different feature sets floating around, too many weird/insecure defaults. It also lost the federation game.

Think of HTTPS, a success story of self-hosting. The weird cases are just out of the question. You basically can't use encryption without signing, or old versions of TLS.

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

#563

> Email is now an oligopoly, a service gate kept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality. While I understand what they're getting at here, I disagree. There are certainly other providers you can go with - You just need to pay up. Happy customer of FastMail here. All of my personal domains, and multiples businesses are tied to it. Wonderful service, no deliverability issues, great…

> So - clearly other companies are able to get it right.

These companies are part of the oligopoly.

One can become part of said oligopoly, but it requires an outsized effort for an individual to keep the service running just for himself.

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

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And for most people, using a large mail provider is the necessary evil. I don't see much difference between a small mail provider using block lists and a large mail provider using the same block lists + their own proprietary lists and metrics. Both result in other small mail providers getting blocked for arbitrary reasons with limited recourse.

Using large mail provider is not necessary evil in my book. It is just so much more convenient than self hosting. Today, with ready-made containers and stuff we start having a fighting change, but the moat is possibly too big to fight with email falling out of favor

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

#565

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.

Government department accepts mail from the providers that basically everyone uses, details at 0300.

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

#566

I was with the author up until the end. Why not have have regulation that makes the big company's spend money on processing? The can surely afford it.

If you believe the hype, the Digital Markets Act is that regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act

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

#567
post #350
post #198

The topic often comes up. Can't say I share the experience. My servers have never been put on a blacklist in the 7 years they've been running, and one of them operates from my residential DSL connection. Standard postfix+dovecot stack on an Archlinux VPS, I log in once a year to update the packages and make sure there is enough disk space left.

Essentially all residential IPs are blacklisted for email servers, at least on port 25. Many ISPs blackhole any traffic on port 25 to residential IPs. Do you have port 25 working on your residential connection?

Isn’t port 25 used for unencrypted traffic as opposed to port 465? I’m pretty sure I had a working mail server back in 2012 behind an ISP that blocked port 25.

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

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a happy medium. Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. You have complete control over the incoming mail but dodge the filters by using the established business for sending mail.

This should be made a standard practice. Third party email providers, the so-called "established businesses", get a free pass as sending SMTP servers that are accepted by almost all receiving STMP servers. Everyone just assumes everything coming from those SMTPs is legit. Establishing this "legitimacy" and getting the "free pass" is difficult and some have suggested, the third parties may employ anticompetive tactics…

Feel free to do this, nobody will join you so the spam will be virtually nonexistent!

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

#569
post #191
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a lawyer might know a thing or two about confidential messages.

I think you’d be very surprised at how much lawyers don’t know or care about any of that. They store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents).

It does no such thing, that’s absurd. See carpenter v. United States (among many, many others).

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

#570
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…

It’s a misnomer to say you can “own” a domain name. You cannot. The better word would be “rent”. Because of that you should think about what could happen if your domain name registration lapses and someone else registers it.

I think everyone knows this who owns a domain. Probably people say this because (like I do too) they have all the control over the name. If I rent an apartment, I do have to consult the owner to make major changes.
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