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

cfenollosa.com

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

#681

Post by WhyNotHugo »

My dad used to self-host email for his company. It worked fine for a long time -- until MS started silently discarding his emails.

A lot of his clients (very large companies) use MS for email, and his emails to them got silently discarded (not rejected as spam, not showing up in spam folder, simply discarded while responding that the email had been accepted). Notably, the invoices he was sending didn't reach the intended inbox, so he eventually had to move on to use another provider for email.

I've heard this story dozens (if not hundreds) of times over the last couple of decades. It gets worse and worse, since huge corporations only whitelist other huge corporations, and can choose to blacklist the rest. The oligopoly has won.

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

#682

Post by unilynx »

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.

> 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.

The old lists may be more plausible.

Some spammer once associated 'Robin Bennett' with my email addresses at some point 20 years ago and kept reselling it. Never used that name, didn't even know Bennett was a surname. I assume they linked me up with that name to fill up empty cells in their list and make it look more plausible.

It's a good way to filter spam. The last decade almost all spam calling me 'Bennett' is from some US political group, which mostly reminds me that it will be a long time before anything GDPR-like will pass in the US..

But almost all spam goes to that old 20 year old email address I don't use. My current email addresses are much cleaner even after 10+ year of use

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

#683

Post by Avamander »

ldng wrote: post #678
Avamander wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> just a handful or two of provider could impose it in practice.

Nah, they really couldn't. Email is simply so much bigger than only Google or Microsoft.

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

#684

Post by ayewo »

zahllos wrote: post #332
skywal_l wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in the example of the parent, he's got a domain name registered somewhere (mydomain.com) and he set, in its MX records, the gmail server. But how does gmail make the connection between that address and your gmail address then?

So normally in the cases like this, you also have to tell Google about this, and you typically do this by using one of their paid-for products like workspaces or apps for business or whatever they call it. So let's say that you decide to host skywall@skywall.example with Google. You pay them for workspaces and you likely tell them "I would like to use this domain I already have, with email". They then tell you "OK, a…

I learnt about delv for the first time reading your comment and struggled [1] to get the commands you used here to work on my Mac.

Turns out that I have to treat Apple-included binaries of OSS utilities with suspicion and instead use the version maintained by the Homebrew guys.

1: If anyone else is interested, I wrote a short article about it https://ayewo.com/how-to-get-delv-working-on-macos/

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

#685

Post by DangitBobby »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #584
DangitBobby wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racketeering is when the only solution offered to you out of a problem someone created for you is to pay the person who created the problem. In the context of email: "you have to pay us to send your email because we have created a system in which only we can send email." Seems pretty close to racketeering. Anyway, telling someone they don't understand what something means is almost never a good way to start a convers…

That’s not what racketeering is. In order to be racketeering it must be extortative, fraudulent, or otherwise illegal. Your definition would make PG&E guilty of racketeering, which they are not. Selling fire insurance is also not racketeering. When someone is using a word incorrectly making them aware of that fact is important. They’re welcome to google it.

How would selling fire insurance or an electric hookup match my definition? For fire insurance to be racketeering the ones selling the insurance have to be the ones starting the fires. For PG&E... IDK they'd have to have invented work (J/s)? From the Wikipedia:

> Originally and often still specifically, racketeering may refer to an organized criminal act in which the perpetrators offer a service that will not be put into effect, offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket.

It's unlikely (IMO) that GGP meant that they thought it would literally meet the legal definition of racketeering in a court room, more that the situation with email can be described in terms of the textbook definition.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering

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

#686

Post by mleonhard »

The suggestions are good. Do Postfix and other FOSS email servers implement them?

> - Let's keep antispam measures. ...

> - Change blacklisting protocols so they are not permanent and use an exponential cooldown penalty. ...

> - Blacklists should not include whole IP blocks. ...

> - Stop blackholing. ...

> - There should be a recourse for legitimate servers. ... doing some paperwork or paying a fee to prove I'm legit ...

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

#687

Post by sinuhe69 »

So what do the companies with Exchange and Lotus do today? Do they still host their email-servers themselves, or already gave up and moved to big-providers? I can hardly imagine companies will leave their emails on Google or Microsoft for them to scan and abuse. But I'm so many years out of corporate environment.

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

#688

Post by etherealG »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #687

So what do the companies with Exchange and Lotus do today? Do they still host their email-servers themselves, or already gave up and moved to big-providers? I can hardly imagine companies will leave their emails on Google or Microsoft for them to scan and abuse. But I'm so many years out of corporate environment.

Majority outsource to the big providers. Way better total cost of ownership, and corp accounts are safe from all the scanning bullshit because they’re paid for accounts. They’re actually the customer not the commodity like on the free versions.

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

#689

Post by massaman_yams »

berkes wrote: post #643
massaman_yams wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of legitimate mail will never see anything remotely near a 14-day block. Again, it's reserved for severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenarios; ISPs use other methods like short-term deferrals for more common/less severe problems. If you find yourself in an IP range involved in a severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenario that's affecting your delivery, then it means your provider is not mana…

The overwhelming majority of my legitimate mail has seen consistent and irrecoverable 14 day blocks for the last decade+. One on an IP that only did my email for over 6 years. Yet the oligopoly started to block blocks of IPs, including my IP, without recourse. If you say this problem doesn't exist, you are either not familiar with the problem, misunderstanding it, or simply lying. I hope it is just miscommunication.…

Exceptions to the rule do happen; I'm sorry your experience was the exception. Dealing with that kind of thing can be quite a pain if you're not experienced with it.

But again: "If you find yourself in an IP range involved in a severe, ongoing, high-volume spam scenario that's affecting your delivery, then it means your provider is not managing IP range reputation, or not doing it very well, and you should vote with your dollars and move somewhere else."

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

#690

Post by alyandon »

Nemo_bis wrote: post #561
alyandon wrote: post #170

I'd like to consider migrating from my self-hosted solution but it seems like all major email providers want $ per month per user|mailbox. Are there any providers out there that charge a reasonable fixed amount for say 50 mailboxes?

OVH MX plan? The so-called "pro" mail is just outsourced to Microsoft though. 50 mailboxes is an odd spot, too much for personal providers and too little for others.

Anything that isn't a per-mailbox model would actually work for me - I'll check out the OVH MX plan though, thanks.
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