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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

#671

Post by jasode »

jimmydorry wrote: post #660
Godel_unicode wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The small providers typically don't have recourse if they approach a blocklist maintainer and ask to be taken off a list. [...] 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.

I don't think it's the tone. While the inability for senders to get off blocklists can be true, you're still not addressing why the cost to the sender to not be blocked should have higher priority than the cost to the receiver to avoid blocklists to make email admin more of a burden.

The gp you first replied to (PinguTS) is running a personal mailserver and resorted to using blocklists because reducing spam -- at the cost of some legit people not being able to send email to him -- is a tradeoff he's willing to make. You haven't convinced every user running mailservers that they should increase their spam burden because some small providers can't get off blocklists.

As another example in another communication channel... Here's a similar "blocklist" for cell phones that some users take advantage of: https://about.att.com/pages/cyberaware/ae/cp

Are "legitimate" phone numbers getting caught up in that block filter?!? Of course. But phone owners are trying to stop spam telemarketing calls. Telling them that some phone users are incorrectly on AT&T's list isn't going to convince cell users to quit using the block filter. They're willing to live with a few legit callers getting blocked.

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

#672

Post by MaKey »

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'm a happy user of mailcow:

https://mailcow.email/

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

#673

Post by 0x445442 »

IgorPartola wrote: post #442
0x445442 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gladly pay for Fastmail and I assume they’re not running a charity. Also, I think hey.com is charging $100 per year.

I am not saying there aren’t paid options. But Fastmail isn’t who we are talking about being a bad actor here and is much smaller than GMail.

You asked it there is any money to be made in email, I provided you with anecdotal evidence that there was.

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

#674

Post by hpcjoe »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #547
hpcjoe wrote: post #426

I've been debating whether to do this myself (throw in the towel on mail). I am getting tired of fighting all the assorted battles. This said, my concern is that the big players seem like they could, at a whim, drop you as a customer, with no recourse. This is what is giving me pause going to the big providers. I've been looking at mail distributions like Mail-in-a-box, and modoba as an intermediate, though none of t…

Modoboa? https://modoboa.org/en/ I was skeptical about running a mailserver but a friend set up a few mailboxes with Modoboa and so far it's going better than expected. (Mostly we just needed a mail relay.)

Yeah ... Modoboa ... my misspelling ...

I could never get it to work. Installation went great, but then I could not pull up admin panel. Not sure why.

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

#675

Post by westernpopular »

Aeolun wrote: post #396
lisper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life But that's true for any delivery endpoint in any medium, including physical mail and phone numbers. It's pretty easy to set up auto-pay for domain names so that all you really need to do is keep the billing info up to date. After that it all runs on autopilot.

Unless your registry messes up and forgets to renew your domain. It’s happened to me before (don’t use them anymore though).

name and shame? that's a pretty drastic mistake in terms of the consequences it must have had for you.

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

#676

Post by t0k0l0sh »

zimpenfish wrote: post #662
dvdkon wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? I self-host and get fewer than 10 true spam emails per year (not counting marketing newsletters).

> Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? That would be an interesting research project. The domains getting most spams on my servers are the ones that are old (20+ years) which I guess makes sense. Checking the rspamd logs for the last month gives just shy of 8500 emails with what I'd consider "definitely a spam" score. There's probably another 1000-1500 sneaking under that.

You mentioned receiving 10s of spam per day - are they being classified correctly and put in your spam folder or are you seeing them in your inboxes?

My mx hosted with hetzner also runs rspamd. Of the 32k mails received in the last month, 40% were rejected (postfix DISCARD, so the sender sees the mail as accepted but its sent to /dev/null - this only happens to mails scored very highly as spam, or sent to a spam trap address), 10% were greylisted and 1% were delivered to the spam folder.

So I'm also receiving 10s of spam per day, but they're all delivered to my spam folder with rare errors.

With the exception of an issue delivering to AT&T recently, I haven't had any outbound deliverability problems in a few years, but then again I don't send very much mail at all - perhaps I'd have more trouble if I did but most of my mail is incoming.

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

#677

Post by grepfru_it »

iggldiggl wrote: post #628
GTP wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The trade off is that even legitimate mail that you are actively expecting (like an account confirmation or password reset mail) will be delayed by however long the sending server's retry interval is. You also either need to apply the greylisting to some larger IP range (rspamd e.g. apparently uses /19 by default for IPv4) or otherwise specially handle some of the bigger mail providers, because some of them rotate th…

You just solved a random mystery I was having with mail forwarding from a single particular provider.

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

#678

Post by ldng »

Avamander wrote: post #644
ldng wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody really forces you to use HTTPS either Yet, in practice, that is exactly what both Chrome and Firefox are trying to do.

Emphasis on the "trying" here, you are not forced. It's also not just them, it's the vast majority of the internet community that agrees with that.

Still relevant, since we were discussing email, it would not need the whole "internet community" to agree, just a handful or two of provider could impose it in practice.

Standard are useless if majors providers apply a different de facto norm. That behavior has a name, it is called a cartel. And on some matters, that is punishable by law.

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

#679

Post by unilynx »

PinguTS wrote: post #631
GTP wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if anyone compared the effectiveness of postscreen vs greylisting. Can't find any

Both rely on filtering out non compliant senders, but postscreen's filtering might be less disruptive. Are there spammers out there who cannot pass a graylist but can pass postscreen ?

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

#680

Post by e12e »

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]…

Am I correct that neither of those support SIEVE filters and ManageSieve protocol?

IE something like: https://blog.tinned-software.net/setup-sieve-mail-filter-wit...

Ed: Does anyone have experience with https://modoboa.org/ ?

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