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

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

#601

Post by emsixteen »

jgsaau wrote: post #596
femto wrote: 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?

G'Day Femto Over the past 15+ years I have joined a number of groups like a web site 'web hosting talk' and all of them jumped all over my privacy and passed on my details to spammers / hackers. I know what you are thinking -> how would he know that ? Well its really simple I use DedicatedEmailAddressing ( DEA ) and our system tells me when a 3rd party tried to deliver a spam message using one of these DEAs. Some of…

Yeah, the host I use sells on webhostingtalk and I'm 99% sure they're selling my info on. My cPanel username there is the only place that I have that username, and that's what a massive chunk of my spam is directed to.

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

#603

Post by reidrac »

jhugo wrote: post #458
neop1x wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also been self-hosting email for 15 years and only had couple of problems at the beginning, mainly until my IP got enough reputation. I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though. It has reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM, TLS, MTA-STS and even DANE with DNSSEC (on a self-hosted BIND but that's another story). It is implemented using Exim, Dovecot, SpamAssasin, DNSBL and Roundcub…

> I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though. This is a key difference. Many people who have a bad time self-hosting mail set up with a minimum-effort major provider like Hetzner or DO — you're guaranteed to have spammers as neighbours some of the time, and other networks will behave accordingly when deciding whether to accept your mail. A real server in a proper datacentr…

I don't agree, but it is true that some aggressive DNS RBL may include Digital Ocean, for example, just because [1].

The point is not that much that there are such blocking lists, the point is why admins use them. Surely that's blocking a good chunk of spam, but also legit sites.

1: "As you should know now: It is not you, it is your complete provider which got [redacted] listed."

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

#604

Post by teddyh »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #533
teddyh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to deal with a Microsoft ban on my IP https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/index....

Wow that is a wonderful link, they really seem to be improving on interacting with the public in these matters.

The link used to be https://postmaster.live.com/snds/index.aspx>, and has existed since at least 2018.

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

#605

Post by GTP »

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 think that gray listing is a great idea to filter out spam. Here's how it works: the very first time an email server get an email from a new IP it answers with a "temporary unavaiable" error. According to specs, a server should retry to deliver the email after a while, so a legitimate server will retry and it's IP will be put in a "withelist" (here in quotes because you can still do further processing of the emails to determine if it's good or bad). But a spammer will most likely not retry to send it, as their goal is to quickly send a big amount of mails. I didn't try this personally as I'm not hosting my own emails (I tried but gave up soon), but I heard it works very well, no third party blocklist needed.

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

#606

Post by b112 »

ryeguy wrote: post #424
b112 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam has been a thing forever. Literally forever. Yet people have been dealing with spam far better than the big boys, and doing so for decades. Want to talk about anti-competitive? Gmail will accept mails, provide a 250 SMTP response, then drop the email internally. That's not right. At all. You can reject the email easily during SMTP exchange, and people have been doing that literally for 20+ years. No valid excuse…

I'd imagine they do this to not tip off spammers when a message goes through. It's the same idea behind returning a 404 when trying to access a resource you don't have permission to, or not telling users if an account actually exists under an email when doing a password reset.

It's simplistic for a spammer to tell if mail is getting delivered to end point. EG, just have a gmail account, and spam that account. Simple. Done.

Breaking reliable mail delivery for everyone, is inline with "there's no excuse, ever". It's inline with "making it worse", not better.

If you 250 accept, you deliver the email. Worst case, it ends up in a spam folder. You do not drop it on the floor. Ever. No excuse, no reason is valid here.

And I certainly won't accept "But it's so hard!", considering how easy it is to handle email, including SPAM, for everyone... until Google purposefully breaks it.

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

#607

Post by whiplash451 »

jjav wrote: post #545
koheripbal wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail)

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

#608

Post by whiplash451 »

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…

Massive corps that have a clue about how the internet works today badly care about email.

Email is your identity in many cases (for lack of a better solution).

Email -> identity -> tracking -> advertising revenue

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

#609

Post by hkt »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #524
jhugo wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Find a clueful small provider, local to you if possible. On huge providers like Hetzner and DO, you are guaranteed to have spammers as neighbours some of the time, even if the provider rapidly shuts them down. On the other hand, a good-quality small provider may rarely if ever host spammers.

Counterpoint, our mail admins spend a lot of time trying to convince small-scale providers to shutdown the spam email coming from them. Lots of people who host at small scale providers don’t care about patches, so they send tons of spam.

I suppose that's why the person you're replying to specified clueful!

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

#610

Post by hkt »

pas wrote: post #348
Barrin92 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. any community that grows large enough needs some mechanism to manage trust, this is a universal issue. The early internet was more permissive and less differentiated simply because it was smaller. The big corps do an alright job at managing spam given the sheer size of the pr…

spam is solved between the big players, they already use various feedback mechanisms ... it's just not enabled for small fish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedback_loop_(email) gmail silently drops emails (while reports smtp 250 accepted) - they could just as easily report that it's blackholed. spammers already do get through their fancy AI filters. microsoft proactively blocks half of the world, rejects the incomi…

I hope at some point the routine crushing of smaller providers gains the attention of the competition and markets authority, or its equivalents. It is crazy how Google and MS use their market power in this way and get away with it.
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