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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

#651

Post by sneak »

dredmorbius wrote: post #637
sneak wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-mai…

Most of my friends and family don't have Android devices.

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

#652

Post by nibbleshifter »

gwd wrote: post #599
kagronick wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem was this guy was providing email accounts for other people. Other people who probably reused their passwords and had their email in the same DB in the apps they used. That DB was compromised. Hackers got an account to send spam. Then the domain was blacklisted. He alluded to this in > At some point your IP range is bound to be banned, either by one asshole IP neighbor sending spam, one of your use…

> one of your users being pwned Wow, good catch! He really buried the lede there -- "I kept getting blacklisted because my servers kept sending out spam ." I don't know what to tell you pal -- spam is a serious problem, and if your users are sending it out, you're contributing to that. If you can't keep your users in line, other providers don't have any choice but to blacklist you.

Except that's not what he said happened to him.

He has that there as an example of things outside your direct control that can lead to blacklisting.

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

#653

Post by iggldiggl »

r2_pilot wrote: post #412
chrismeller wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course whitelist is easier, but how valuable would your email be if you only allowed your friends to email you? Goodbye order confirmations, subscription reminders, recruiter emails, notifications…

Sounds like a dream, really. And you could always have it be user-driven action, like "Copy this line and paste it into your email provider's whitelist", framing it as a positive win for the user since they have total control over who is allowed to communicate with them.

I do want arbitrary people to reach out to me regarding my home page, so any just-allow-whitelisted-messages proposals are useless in that regard.

And in practice some minimal address obfuscation has been enough to block any address harvesters, and setting up a contact form or something comparable (and I guess especially also subsequently keeping it spam-free!) would have been much more of a hassle.

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

#654

Post by jgsaau »

emsixteen wrote: post #601
jgsaau wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a newbie to YC, can't c 'Edit' button, so I'm assuming it is like Twit. I'm not saying I wouldn't be interested, I think it is a really good idea, but really concerned that I don't find it is a waste of time after my privacy was again splattered

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

#655

Post by indigochill »

I've been trying for the past week or so to break into the self-hosted email game since I had a VPS and found some tutorials and documentation for postfix + dovecot. I did eventually get inbound and outbound email working although I was using an alias when I think I needed to use a virtual mailbox (to both receive and send email from a user with a different name from the unix user behind it, as right now outbound still leaks my unix username).

But then I looked at Protonmail's cost and it's less than I'm paying for my VPS (which is already cheap for the use I get out of it) so I'm on the fence whether I keep hammering away at that (and then have to wrestle with the big players treating me like a spammer and do my own spam filtering) vs just pay for that convenience. The VPS is staying in any case so it's just a question of whether I pay a little more every month for convenient secure mail.

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

#656

Post by ivanstame »

I am running my own mail server for 3 years now. There were some issues (outlook pushing emails to spam folder) and an IP change (not sure how that affected things but I resubmitted the IP to the Microsoft email tools, can't remember the name of the service). I would like to join some movement or a class-action lawsuit against big tech for anti-competitive practices regarding private mail servers if such thing exist, and if not i would suggest we make one.

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

#657

Post by HenriTEL »

jhugo wrote: post #456
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…

Also 20+ years, only very minor issues. The spam situation has gotten much better over that time, too. This topic comes up every so often on HN and I feel like the "never self-host, it's guaranteed to be a disaster, you have to use a centralised provider" crowd are just louder. Self-hosting my mail isn't something I think about much or talk about much. It's so obvious to me that it's worth doing, and it's extremely l…

> It's so obvious to me that it's worth doing, and it's extremely low effort.

DMARC, IP reputation and spams are not obvious.

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

#658

Post by Nelson69 »

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…

After 30 years, I don't think spam is going to get solved with email.

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

#659

Post by raxxorraxor »

zahllos wrote: 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…

I think we are currently in a phase because of phishing problems. Corporate filters are currently turned up to eleven, but hosting your own server is still very well possible. SPF/DKIM/DMARC helps, but isn't required. You really think the corps that do host their own servers have set that up? It is far more widely spread by enthusiasts that host their own servers.

We also should keep mail for pseudonymous and anonymous user authentication. There are a lot of threats to the free internet right now and user account consolidation is one of it. I agree that people should keep hosting themselves. Someone blocked you? Their loss, let them rant to their internal IT about it. Corporations or institutions that use Google as a provider should be seen with scepticism.

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

#660

Post by jimmydorry »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #582
jimmydorry wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First, yes. They (the small providers) have recourse, it’s just annoying. They voluntarily signed up for that annoyance because of their ideology. But much more importantly, that question is orthogonal to my argument. Using blocklists is a good way to cut down on spam, the fact that it might block some trivial percentage of people who for ideological reasons might or might not be on those lists isn’t the receivers pr…

The small providers typically don't have recourse if they approach a blocklist maintainer and ask to be taken off a list. That "trivial percentage of people" make up a substantial portion of service providers (for every Google there are many I pointed out that adopting blocklists just makes it harder to operate a mail server as a small provider, and nobody in this thread appears to disagree with that assessment. They instead seem to take issue with the tone of the message.
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