Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cfenollosa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 744 posts

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

#721

Post by GoblinSlayer »

zimpenfish wrote: post #718
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good unless you publish your address globally?

> I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good Not quite sure I follow? Unless you mean "only allow emails to specific email addresses you've noted down", in which case, yeah, that works but also means a lot of admin when you want to use a new one (plus there's 10+ other people who use my servers for email, not just me.) > unless you publish your address globally? At least one of my email…

By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed.

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

#722

Post by stillbourne »

I've been using exchange online for my personal email. I had to do a bit of fenagling with my dns records, which is old hat at this point, to get it to work but it basically costs $4 per month per user and since I'm the only user it gives me the freedom to use my own domain name and not have to worry about selfhosting. Prior to that I was using exim as my SMTP server and dovecot as my imap/pop3. But managing it was a huge hassle. $4 a month is worth the effort of not maintaining it myself.

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

#723

Post by defaultcompany »

tiborsaas wrote: post #570
defaultcompany wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a misnomer to say you can “own” a domain name. You cannot. The better word would be “rent”. Because of that you should think about what could happen if your domain name registration lapses and someone else registers it.

I think everyone knows this who owns a domain. Probably people say this because (like I do too) they have all the control over the name. If I rent an apartment, I do have to consult the owner to make major changes.

I think people who get their email on their own domain generally consider it as their permanent home and don’t think about what will happen when the domain no longer is registered to them. Using the apartment rental analogy works up to a point. With an apartment you can get the postal service to forward your mail to a new address. With a domain name there is no way to get this to happen. Whoever holds the registration controls the MX record and can do whatever they want.

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

#724

Post by Lurkars »

kazinator wrote: post #133

> So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers. A MX records don't have to point to an IP; it can point to a host name. My MX record is a dynamic DNS host name. > Big email servers permanently blacklist whole IP blocks and delete their emails without processing or without notice. Some of those blacklists are…

I think the author didn't want to say something technical about this and just wanted to say, that with changing his MX record, that his email server has changed.

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

#725

Post by MichaelVangard »

Johnny555 wrote: post #423
MichaelVangard wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most emails are still going through servers owned by Microsoft or Google, so what does self-hosting email accomplish in reality? Some government entity likely has warrant-less access to most of your emails regardless. I like email as a way to communicate, but speaking pragmatically, it’s just not a secure means of communication in 2022.

what does self-hosting email accomplish in reality Well, for one thing it prevents Google from building a profile of my online shopping behavior based on my email receipts. Also avoids them knowing every time I go on a trip based on booking confirmation emails. Like most people, I'm not trying to hide from the government.

Using a 3rd party email host that isn't Google has the same effect with a lot less effort. I switched to FastMail for this reason, even if Google claims not to scan paid Gmail accounts for marketing purposes.

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

#726

Post by zimpenfish »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #721
zimpenfish wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good Not quite sure I follow? Unless you mean "only allow emails to specific email addresses you've noted down", in which case, yeah, that works but also means a lot of admin when you want to use a new one (plus there's 10+ other people who use my servers for email, not just me.) > unless you publish your address globally? At least one of my email…

By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed.

> By lot of admin you mean that it's not automated? That's sad indeed.

How would I automate "[someone with an account] just entered abc-xyz@domain into a web form to subscribe to something, add that to the valid alias file"?

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

#727

Post by dhosek »

bigiain wrote: post #404
aidenn0 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing dreamhost has a decent chunk of IP space...

All of which they’ve rented out to multiple spammers over the years…

That does seem to be the problem

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

#728

Post by massaman_yams »

pas wrote: post #710
massaman_yams wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "... small non-spam senders would congregate" Congratulations, you've invented the email service provider. Most small non-spam senders don't want to spend the time figuring out IP reputation, DKIM, or SPF already, so they pay someone to do it for them. What makes netblock reputation different? Reputation isn't public because then spammers game it and you get worse filtering outcomes. ISPs learned this the hard way.

sure, there is no problem with having 95+ % or more handled by professional industrial companies the problem is that they literally don't even allow others at the table, only way is to force yourself a seat by having enough traffic

Is it getting harder to self-host? Yes. Impossible? No. Most senders just find it easier to pay for it.

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

#729

Post by jjav »

whiplash451 wrote: post #607
jjav wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail)

> One spam every three days is insanely high IMO (compared to what you will get on gmail)

That's funny since on gmail I get tons more spam than on any of my self-hosted domain addresses. What's worse, I see emails in gmail misfiled as spam when they are not, which is far worse. I don't ever see that happen in my self-hosted system.

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

#730

Post by jjav »

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.

> > Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse?

> That would be an interesting research project.

Indeed. When you say get spam, do you mean pre or post-filtering?

Over the last 30 days (I don't keep them longer than that) I've received 43 spam emails which were sent to the spam folder (so I wouldn't ever see these, other than because I went and looked now for the sake of this discussion). In the same time period there was only 1 spam email which was missed by spamprobe and made it into my inbox spool.

There's a fair amount of would-be spam that gets blocked during the SMTP transaction due to things like bogus host in HELO, etc. I don't keep any stats on those, I did at one time but it was too much noise.

My email isn't secret, it should be on every spammer list I'd guess. It has been the same since the mid 90s and is all over usenet, email list archives, websites, etc and I've never made any effort to mask it.

Post reply on HN