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

cfenollosa.com

571–580 of 744 posts

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

#571
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's definitely an anticompetitive practice. yeah, but in this climate what are you gonna do? It's not like there's any kinda recourse for monopolistic behavior that has any teeth to it.

Sure there is.. unless you mean no recourse in this environment. The natural recourse would be to force Google to divest GMail from it's core business.

No, the recourse is to force net neutrality. You must process all emails the same way and they must go through the same filters. In fact if spam processing is part of modern email it should be part of the standard and then all mail servers must be forced to conform to the standard.

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

#572
G'Day Carlos We started hosting own SMTP servers on IBM OS2 using a BBS. Long before retail NET was in Oz. Fast forward to today and we have a DB with millions of IPV4 address and have never used IPV6, cloudflare or a 3rd party to 100% stop spam like we do day in day out. You are absolutely right, there are a lot of criminals you are wearing suits who are selling snake oil. We have X simple rules, one is that inbound port 25 sessions from spammers are put to sleep and we give them a very poor service. Our servers seem overworked and they often go away never to return. I read your blog post and from approx. 30 years experience including SMTP at gov.au and gov.nz content filtering does not work. Our NoSpamAccepted ( NSA ) AI powered SMTP servers use the network to stop spam. How many domains & sub-domains are you self hosting ? TIA KG BTW - We have never been in the BLs as we only relay our outbound

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

#573
post #71

I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…

Agree completely. To those that still persist, there is a page I found recently that helps you make sure that your outgoing mail is configured correctly: https://appmaildev.com/en/dkim . They generate an e-mail address, you send a mail to them, they do the check and display results (not affiliated, just a happy user).

I used this one: https://www.mail-tester.com/

I will check out your recommendations. Thanks

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

#574
Been self-hosting my email since 2018 on my homeserver. Luckily my ISP's static IP block is not blacklisted by any public list. Only had one instance so far where I couldn't register to a website because they were only allowing 10 or so domains from big providers in your address.

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

#575
Another compromise between self hosting and using "big tech" email providers is to use smaller email providers. I have been using https://kolabnow.com/ for a five years or so and am a happy customer. Of course it's more expensive, has less bells and whistles, etc, but I'm glad I don't have to participate in the surveillance capitalism machine of big email providers.

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

#577

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]…

Mailinabox is much simpler https://mailinabox.email/

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

#578
post #551

Maybe there needs to be a self-hosting association/union that self-hosters can join? It could advocate for adherence to open standards, and an equal standing for small servers. It could also be a repository of advice for current best practise in small server administration and configuration. Should it be under the auspices of an existing group such as FreedomBox?

This sounds like a great idea. Email is not something you can drop from one day to another, there's no real alternative as most services require it.

This would require certain rules to avoid SPAM, but the outcome is totally worth for me.

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

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep SMTP relay is the only sane choice nowadays sadly. Sending your own mail is a losing battle against the email blacklist cartel.

No...it isn't the only sane choice. If it works for you, great. Forunately for Internet freedom, there many of us small timers left who have no issues hosting our own email.

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

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure victim-blaming. The problem is that bulletproof hosting exists, not that people are sick of spam.

I don't follow. I am pointing out that using the same kinds of lists that the big providers use will result in smaller providers being arbitrarily blocked with little recourse. Do you disagree with that assessment?

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