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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

#631

Post by PinguTS »

GTP wrote: post #605
koheripbal wrote: post #471

Earlier 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 have greylisting enabled for years. But recently some Russian spamers were able to circumvent those by using compliant SMTP servers. They even support proper SPF, DKIM, DMARC and all that stuff what you can think of.

That is the reason why I switched on some external block lists into the mix.

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

#632

Post by fakedcake »

gingerlime wrote: post #81
electric_mayhem wrote: post #24

The fix here is use a commercial provider for outbound smtp but continue to self-host inbound. Not ideal, but it works.

what do you use for outbound SMTP? do you need to add/authenticate each domain or from address with it? (I host several domains and mailboxes)

For my personal mail server I ended up using the free tier of SMTP2GO as outbound smtp relay. You can just register your domain as a whole, and the setup was pretty painless. They let you send up to 1000 mails/month for free, which is plenty for my own personal use, but if you need any more than that, these relay services can get quite expensive. You usually end up paying the same price as the fully hosted solution that most of those providers offer alongside the relay service.

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

#633

Post by dredmorbius »

EGreg wrote: post #252

Here’s an idea Make a new protocol for this decade, that isn’t email. HTTP is supported nearly everywhere SMTP is. Just build something over that, and this time around make sure to avoid SPAM bullshit. People shouldn’t be able to just message you based on your address. They receive a capability to email you. People can be empowered to give out your capabilities. If a particular such branch leads to spam, you simply c…

https://xkcd.com/927/

The problem isn't the port. The problem is the behaviour.

HTTP itself is on its way out, you should be recommending HTTPS if you're going to go this route.

Increasingly, I find HTTP(S) requests are blocked by various mechanisms, typically CAPTCHAs or similar.

And the problem ultimately with email isn't the network requests, by and large, it's the spam. Reimplement some universally-accessible messaging protocol over another port or service and you'll simply find you've kicked the can and inherited the old problems.

I'm not saying SMTP is faultless (for a rather tongue-in-cheek take, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587346> and responses within that subthread and elsewhere on the post, particularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591880>). But you'll have to do more than just swap port numbers to fix it.

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

#634

Post by dredmorbius »

rekrsiv wrote: post #299

Why are we still using email? No, I'm serious, why?

First, yes, it sucks. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32587346>

But:

- It exists.

- It's ... kind of ... not owned. (Though as TFA notes, this is only vanishingly true any more.) But compared to most alternatives, it is less owned by any one entity.

- It's supported over a wide range of devices, from smartphones to mainframes.

- It has extensive mindshare, use-culture, associated processes, etc.

- It is largely agnostic as to content. Yes, plain text is most native, but through the majick of MIME, et al, it'll manage just about anything.

If you're going to call for email's end, you'd best have a highly viable alternative or replacement in mind.

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

#635

Post by KronisLV »

daitangio wrote: post #202

I am still hosting my emails via docker mailserver[1] I got some trouble with outlook.com bans, but Linode helped me to switch to a “good” ip address and it is working fine for now. I will try ti resist as much as possible, because email is your primary identity “link” on the Internet, and you deserves to own it if you want. [1]: https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/

Here's the GitHub link, not just the blog post (although it mentions it): https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

And the container image: https://hub.docker.com/r/mailserver/docker-mailserver

I'm also using this solution very efficiently myself! So far I haven't had many issues with receiving or sending e-mails and what's especially nice is that I can easily set up as many accounts as I need, for example, one for Zabbix, one for Drone CI, one for OpenProject etc.

Even a cheap VPS is enough to run this setup (though you might need to selectively disable certain components) and the administration could be web based, but frankly the scripts that are present are simple enough and there's nothing unusual about, say, connecting Thunderbird to it.

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

#636

Post by fasteo »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #88

It was a huge mistake for email receivers to take on the cost of filtering spam. Of course given the evolution of the internet and email it is easy to see how that mistake happened. Nobody had a crystal ball. But the only solution here is to raise the cost of sending email to the point where spam is no longer profitable. It seems like one solution is to bcrypt hash (or some similarly expensive algorithm) the email an…

Isn't this DKIM bh= ?

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

#637

Post by dredmorbius »

sneak wrote: post #182
LinuxBender wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy. [1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thund…

Most of my friends and family don’t own computers, only phones and sometimes tablets.

K-9 Mail is an app available for Android which supports PGP (if clunkily).

https://k9mail.app/>

I'm not going to remotely pretend that this would make PGP attractive or viable for the greater public. I do want to address your valid point that the general-purpose computer seems to be a dying breed, but that there are still options for mobile devices.

I've used K-9 Mail, though rarely do these days (it went poorly-maintained for a while).

There seem to be some options for iOS as well, such as iPG Mail, though I've no experience at all with it.

https://www.openpgp.org/software/ipgmail/>

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

#638

Post by chmike »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #498
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]…

I recommend people do it themselves or not at all, these are my tools: postfix/dovecot/mysql/opendkim/opendmarc.

Add to this list spamassassin with amavis and clamav.

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

#639

Post by GekkePrutser »

IgorPartola wrote: post #441
GekkePrutser wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O365 web costs me 5 bucks per month and I only use it for a few emails a week so I doubt it's a loss leader. If I'd actually use all of it a lot, sure but I don't.

Do you just get email with that? Or maybe is there an office suite also?

There's an office suite included yes but only web based which really sucks. Half the office features are not supported.

It also doesn't work properly on Firefox on FreeBSD.

Even though on other OSes it works ok, it's so limited I can't imagine anyone using the web version of office 365 for any serious activity.

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

#640

Post by iggldiggl »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #500
sneak wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my friends and family don’t own computers, only phones and sometimes tablets.

there is definitely software to help with pgp on ANY tablet, phone, or PC your friends and family have access to. The universal problem is no one cares to encrypt except a few computer nerds, spooks, and journalists.

It means you now have to worry about key management or else lose access to all your old mail, it possibly complicates logging in on new devices or via webmail, partially breaks server-side (spam) filtering, breaks server-side full-text search… so there are some definitive trade-offs there to be made.
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