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Reasons to not use your own domain for email

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Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#211

Post by phone8675309 »

l72 wrote: post #199
phone8675309 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this particular point. The US Postal Service has searched, read, and censored mail during wartime, and it's naive to assume that any provisioning of email service wouldn't have the ability embedded in it at behest of whatever legislation authorizes to the USPS to do so. Also, given the current political climate, I would be very concerned that the Comstock Laws are coming back. Can you imagine your ema…

I'm not suggesting that anybody would be required to use their government provided email for everything. I am just suggesting that it should be available to every citizen as a right, since a reliable email address is so important to every day life now. I wouldn't be sending anything through my government email that I would sent through the post mail. I would be cautious about sending anything through email, as it pro…

> I'm not sure why you feel any safer with a huge corporation that has no oversight.

A huge corporation with no oversight can, at worst, terminate my account unilaterally. Maybe they want to sue me, but that will go to a neutral arbiter (the courts).

A government run email platform can, at worst, arrest me or send a SWAT team to my house.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#213

Post by Borg3 »

camtarn wrote: post #121
Borg3 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The constant parade on HN of Google Cloud Platform paid users who got their accounts shut down for no reason and with no recourse would suggest otherwise.

Right. Because there is only google. And we should all use them. sigh

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#214

Post by tptacek »

tupolef wrote: post #155
8fingerlouie wrote: post #91

DO use a your own domain. Advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Instead of being at the mercy of whatever email provider you choose, you're free to move your domain where ever you want, without updating "a million" senders. DO NOT host your own email server though. A couple of decades ago it made perfect sense to do so, but these days it's simply not worth the trouble. Instead use Google/Outlook/Apple/Whatever t…

I've read that advice, about not hosting your own email server, every week for a few years now, but at least for anyone with a few years of self-hosting experience I would disagree. There is just a little more checkpoints than 15 years ago. Before, you needed to check your reputation on spamfilters, be careful of viruses and sending rates and dome basic DNS entries. Nowadays, check that your IPs are clean, subscribe…

Most deliverable domain names aren't DNSSEC-signed. Does anyone here have good information about the impact of signing on deliverability? It wouldn't surprise me if it was used as a signal somewhere, since DNSSEC adoption is so small and signing selects for the fussiest networks.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#216

Post by anon373839 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #207
anon373839 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? There are millions of @companyname.com and @randomschool.edu domains. They can’t all have been whitelisted. Where are you running into this issue?

It's very tld dependant. .com and .edu have been there forever, so there are no problems. But .xyz are usually spammy domains, so they are rejected by default. My personnal .email address is also often rejected because the tld is quite recent. The sites I have the most problems with are: - small shops - state own ones - public utilities Some bugs are not even pure rejection. E.G: my electricity provider, for the long…

Oh right, sorry, I hadn’t even thought about other TLDs. I wonder if the rising popularity of .io and .ai domains has shone some light on this issue? Though they are ccTLDs…

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#217

Post by Fatnino »

jkestner wrote: post #183
l72 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, for the US, the postal service should offer free email addresses to every US resident. The Postal Service is highly regulated, and you won't lose your email over a comment on Youtube.

A great idea in theory, but a large number of Americans wouldn’t trust the government with this (never mind they can do this with paper mail—this is a different scale). I don’t know why we trust corporations any more than that. Convenient UX, I guess.

So those tinfoil hat wearers can just not use the post office email. Very simple.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#219

Post by 8fingerlouie »

tupolef wrote: post #194
8fingerlouie wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's hard if you know what you're doing, but "correctly use IPv6, DNSSec, Rspamd, Dkim, Dmarc, Spf, autoconfig/autodiscover" is a lot of technology for simply sending and receiving email. Considering that emails are insecure by design, and any email will have at least 2 participants, and you have no control over where the remote participant sends/receives emails, self hosting for privacy concerns is al…

You're right about the difficulty and the privacy, but I hope that people will still host their own little part of internet. The fundamental parts that you can host universally today are still a website and a mail server. Everyhing else like fileservers, webapps, federated services, streaming, vpns, game servers... have multiple implementations and evolve rapidly every year. If people no longer host the most fundamen…

>If people no longer host the most fundamental services, it's leaving the play field to the industry.

While i tend to agree, i also fear that this exact phrase is what is keeping email in the dark.

Email in it's current form is old, very old, and everything "modern" about is DKIM, SPF, etc, has been added in the form of X- headers, but besides that, nothing much has changed, and because it needs to be compatible with potentially decades old software, nothing much will change.

At the same time, email has been crucial to business/industry needs, and while alternatives exist, they kinda feel like the "instant messenger" days of the early 2000s, where there were a dozen or more different instant messaging networks, and you needed an account everywhere to be able to talk to people.

Just look back at 2020 and COVID. How many different "Collaboration" platforms did you sign up for just to be able to work ? Teams ? Zoom ? Slack ? Discord ? How many of them are open standards ?

How many different mail providers did you sign up with ? (making spam catching accounts for collaboration platforms doesn't count).

Email is in dire need of a complete rework, but with so many different implementations of both servers and clients, that is not likely to happen fast. By "reducing" the number of participants, it allows changes to the standard to be more radical, and allows for faster propagation of those changes.

As it is now, those changes can only be small, and must be iteratively rolled out. Many of the proposed addons like DKIM has almost a decade behind it (if not more), and it is still not mandatory. Email needs an "email 2.0" which breaks compatibility with older versions.

Is this not an issue for the web then ? Well, despite having a relatively small amount of browser implementations, as well as a relatively small amount of web server implementations, at least compared to email, if you look at HTTP 2.0, that also took a long time to roll out, but i assume because HTTP has had a couple of decades less than email, the problem is not as widespread yet.

Re: Reasons to not use your own domain for email

#220

Post by 8fingerlouie »

sebazzz wrote: post #204
8fingerlouie wrote: post #91

DO use a your own domain. Advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Instead of being at the mercy of whatever email provider you choose, you're free to move your domain where ever you want, without updating "a million" senders. DO NOT host your own email server though. A couple of decades ago it made perfect sense to do so, but these days it's simply not worth the trouble. Instead use Google/Outlook/Apple/Whatever t…

> use /Outlook/ to host your custom domain and use their offerings with your custom domain Well, unless you’re willing to pay for a business Office 365 license, it won’t happen on Outlook anymore. Outlook only supported Godaddy, of all registrars, anyway, but now next in November they will remove custom domain support altogether. I’ve now migrated to iCloud, which supports any registrar (certainly not what I expected…

How is iCloud working out for you ?

I've been thinking about moving our mails there. Not because i'm unhappy with mxroute, but because it's "one more service", and everybody in the household already uses iCloud.

I'm not too worried about "vendor lock-in" as i have the "exit strategy" already in the form of backups and custom mail domain, so it simply comes down to ease of use.

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