Email is a protocol from the seventies (unmixed, unencrypted by default), not surprised if it leads to centralisation.
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
611–620 of 744 posts
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recommend people do it themselves or not at all, these are my tools: postfix/dovecot/mysql/opendkim/opendmarc.
I agree with you, but I think that stack you're using is actively harmful to newcomers at this point. Something like Maddy is much easier to set up, comes with workable SMTP + IMAP, saves to object storage. If you pair maddy with Thunderbird/Outlook/Mail/whatever else, I think we can actually get new people self-hosting without getting discouraged. [EDIT] I misunderstood the earlier comment as a recommendation -- it'…
Is Maddy's IMAP+object storage setup mature now? Last time I tried it I was testing against minio and trying to get my 25gb inbox synced over. The transfer was in b/s, would've taken forever. I love the project but haven't checked in on it for over a year now.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#613At what level of the net does IP address reputation operate? Do the blocklists ban whole ASNs based on some measured volume of spam?
More transparency (or more likely, less ignorance on my part) here would be helpful.
Can anyone recommend a one stop tool / script for looking oneself up in the reputation services? (And on that note, it is abhorrent that Big Email providers don’t have open reputation databases, or at least ones where I can look myself up.)
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#614Not to mention that your email is tied to your online identity in many ways when mostly every account you make asks for an email to use as your username, verify your account, or recover access to your lost account.
Handing over control of your online identity like that to a centralized third party when you could be cut off at any point [insert here any recent news about people wrongfully losing access to their Gmail account and not getting it reinstated] seems like the wrong solution to be allowed the privilege of sending email.
I guess the very least we could do to keep some control is to own (read: rent) your email domain you could move elsewhere in case you lose access, but then you gotta make sure you don't also lose access to your email domain.
Is there an actual solution to all of this?
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
The metaphor is kinda good. It's okay for people to refuse your home-cooked burgers because they don't trust them to be safe. There are actual small food vendors that comply with sanitation rules and you can have them provide catering services, professionally. And that is okay.
Public health is not at stake. I want to cook my own damn email burger thank you.
If you're trying to deliver to others, it is.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I heard [gray listing] works very well
Mostly. But then you get the "click the link in the email within 10 minutes" problem. There's also a non-zero number of "our mail didn't get through first attempt, oh well, give up" people. From running GL on my servers over a couple of years, it mildly cut down spam (on top of blocklists and fail2ban) but I'm now wavering over whether it's worth the hassle.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, but I think that stack you're using is actively harmful to newcomers at this point. Something like Maddy is much easier to set up, comes with workable SMTP + IMAP, saves to object storage. If you pair maddy with Thunderbird/Outlook/Mail/whatever else, I think we can actually get new people self-hosting without getting discouraged. [EDIT] I misunderstood the earlier comment as a recommendation -- it'…
Is Maddy's IMAP+object storage setup mature now? Last time I tried it I was testing against minio and trying to get my 25gb inbox synced over. The transfer was in b/s, would've taken forever. I love the project but haven't checked in on it for over a year now.
I use IMAP+on-disk SQLite, and make sure to take backups, I haven't run it purely off of object storage yet so can't comment on whether it's better with such a large inbox!
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#618Earlier 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).
I use block lists, fail2ban, gray listing, most of rspamd's widgets, and Bayesian filtering. Still getting 10s of spams a day just to my accounts.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#619Not to mention that your email is tied to your online identity in many ways when mostly every account you make asks for an email to use as your username, verify your account, or recover access to your lost account. Handing over control of your online identity like that to a centralized third party when you could be cut off at any point [insert here any recent news about people wrongfully losing access to their Gmail…
Email issued by your government, in addition to authentication services needed for online banking etc.
Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel
#620This thread is quite enlightening. It seems the engineering community predominantly would like to be able to self host email (and presumably other services). By proxy of that I guess that email hosting is not just for one user but maybe also friends and family or some community that you are part of. It's quite clear that managed centralised services accelerated the adoption of the internet, email, etc and the majority of consumers don't really care about self hosting but it also speaks to the fact that we've given up ownership of this aspect of our lives without clear understanding of how it will affect us in the long term. If no one but large corporations own all the services we use then it puts us in a pretty precarious position.