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

Self-Host All the Things?

tedium.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 295 posts

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#161

Post by _dain_ »

dijit wrote: post #67
AviationAtom wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me crazy, but for a problem folks seem to imply has had everything, including the the kitchen sink thrown at it... why do I have yet to see a single email that has the unsubscribe button at the very top, front and center, the absolute first thing I see?

It is. It literally is. Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email. I’m sure you mean the content of the email, but we dont reach out to double opt-in users or transactional emails with an unsubscribe link, since you chose to be there. The unsubscribe link…

>Whenever gmail, thunderbird or office365 outlook notices a working unsubscribe link in a message, it puts its own unsubscribe link at the top of the message, right next to the address of the sender's email.

I've never seen such a thing. I just checked Thunderbird, on an email that has an unsubscribe link. There was no such button.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#162

Post by _dain_ »

Jedd wrote: post #140
triyambakam wrote: post #70

> which honestly kind of upset me a lot I've seen this language more and more frequently: minimized (kind of) + maximized (a lot) qualifiers. No real insight, just interesting.

In terms of annoying-once-you-notice-it idioms, should readers assume dishonesty on all other statements made by people that prefix only some small subset of their claims with 'Honestly ...' and 'To be honest ...'?

no, it's just a carelessness

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#163

Post by trimbo »

dijit wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super ea…

I also used to work on email at scale (XXX million per day), and even then I encouraged everyone to click spam[1] for any email they did not expect to receive and do not want.

My email address and phone notifications are a direct link to me and are sacred in terms of getting my attention. Yet many companies confuse getting my email address with permission to mail me anything at any frequency. They also believe that "unsubscribe" should be able to redirect me to a website with a bunch of confusing checkboxes. Neither is acceptable.

So, when I click "unsubscribe", that should immediately unsubscribe me forever with no extra efforts, but so many emailers don't do this that I just gave up and started reporting spam.

> emoji in the headline was the campaign that caused 9% of people to mark spam and 20% to unsubscribe, but it was enough to have us blackholed for 2.5 months

A guess with no info, but it sounds like a case of not removing unengaged recipients, then suddenly getting their attention with a different looking subject line or an email that came at an unexpected time.

If people receive bulk for a long time and they never engage, remove them from the list or pause sending to them to avoid this effect.

[1] - For those who don't know much about email, two things should happen when you click the spam button in Gmail and select "Unsubscribe and report spam" (it's been a while, correct me if this changed):

1) List-Unsubscribe should be triggered and this should unsub you from the list. In 2023, I personally expect this to be immediate and receive no more email but I give senders a window of a day or so.

2) The FBL should give the sender a signal that this specific campaign was considered spam.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#164

Post by SoftTalker »

dijit wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super ea…

Was your “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the message in small print or was it a large button labeled “stop emailing me” at the top?

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#165

Post by PuffinBlue »

glandium wrote: post #149
stonewall wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yes, most people will tell you not to host your own email, because its too complicated/difficult to get your mail delivered reliably. A lot of this is FUD. Yes, email is a bit more difficult to get right than say, hosting a web app behind Nginx. It's an old protocol, with many "features" bolted on years later to combat spam. I'm not sure how email is easier to "hack," unless there is a zero day in Postfix or somet…

A static, public IP address with a good reputation (ie, not on any spam blacklists) Piece of cake /s

It's not that hard to do. Harder for residential address blocks for sure. But if you do all the other things previously mentioned like SPF/DKIM etc then cleaning up an IP address isn't that hard.

The only service we've ever had issues with is Outlook as they'll ban whole block for opaque reasons and we just escalate it to the provider and they sort it. We just moved two self-hosted mail servers to new IP addresses and there were only 2 lists to clear them from, which was a fill in form style automated process to resolve.

There's always SES (or other service of choice) as a backup for sending anyway if you notice something getting blocked. It's easy to switch to that for a day or two whilst you resolve an issue - though I must admit I think we only had to do that once in the last 12 months.

Maybe I'm breaking some kind of sysadmin code here and I don't realise it's a secret that self-hosting email isn't that hard? Am I supposed to keep up the myth that it is? :-) Any greybeards here please let me know!

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#166

Post by hinkley »

stonewall wrote: post #68

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection. It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it. I use a stack of…

We need to work on a mostly turnkey solution for these things.

I still think another generation or two of raspi and friends and you can build a little cluster of them.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#167

Post by aliasxneo »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #148
stonewall wrote: post #68

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection. It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it. I use a stack of…

I had fun doing this until I had kids. I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller and all sorts of self-hosted stuff. My heart breaks slightly as I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep, I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible. There are days when the kids can't watch a pa…

You're not alone :) The only thing I have left at this point is a rather complex network, mostly because it's a pain to undo at this point. Plex went away last year and I just "license" all the kids stuff through Google play now...

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#168

Post by hinkley »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #148
stonewall wrote: post #68

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection. It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it. I use a stack of…

I had fun doing this until I had kids. I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller and all sorts of self-hosted stuff. My heart breaks slightly as I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep, I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible. There are days when the kids can't watch a pa…

For procrastination you have to set yourself up for success.

For instance, what if the alarm sent you the product page for the model of battery you need? You order them, silence the alarm, and when they show up you’re reminded you need to change them. Or if that’s a bad time, when the alarm goes off again.

I think we’ve only begun to work out how alarms are the wrong solution to the problem and what we need are prompts.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#169

Post by r1cka »

triyambakam wrote: post #74
fabianhjr wrote: post #43

Its better to design, implement, and use local-first software: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

Very cool, and interesting that Martin Kleppmann of DDIA is an author. I am glad to come across this - I was brainstorming such a manifesto, now I can use this as a resource. One local first that I recently switched to is migrating from ynab.com to my own Libre Calc spreadsheets. It took a few days to figure out all the formulas, but now I have even more control over how I track my budget.

Care to share your Libre Calc spreadsheet formulas?

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#170

Post by SoftTalker »

galdor wrote: post #9
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

You go with Mailchimp (or equivalent) for newsletters because they give you the subscription form, handle email verification, unsubscriptions, GDPR mentions everywhere, provide useful stats and notifications, segmentation and targeting… Getting email delivered is indeed really hard, especially if you send thousands of emails, but building all these other features is insanely time consuming. The cost of Mailchimp is n…

Anything I get from Mailchimp or similar services is auto-flagged as spam by rule.
Post reply on HN