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Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

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Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#41

Post by mike_hearn »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #34
chrissnell wrote: post #23

Be aware: Rackspace (and surely many other cloud server providers) intentionally submit their IP blocks to DNS blacklists to dissuade spammers from using their hosts to send/relay mail. I'm not sure if the other big players do this but it wouldn't surprise me. Same goes for most consumer-class cable modem ISPs.

Do you have any evidence for this? It seems unlikely to me...

He's talking about something called the PBL (policy blocklist). The idea is it contains IP ranges that aren't "supposed" to send mail, like consumer ADSL ranges. People who want to send mail from home directly are supposed to do so via their ISPs SMTP servers, which may be configured to relay but only from IPs the ISP controls.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#42

Post by mike_hearn »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #35

This is cool, but it doesn't actually help you with mass surveillance unless the other side of your conversation is doing that too. What point running your own email server if your friend is on hotmail? Also, even if you both run your own MTAs STARTTLS does not help much except to reduce the scope of the passive-only surveillance dragnet, because the configuration does not require signed certificates. Finally, if bot…

At least in theory this shields who you're talking to, somewhat. But I think a radical rethink like Pond is perhaps a better way forward:

https://pond.imperialviolet.org/

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#43

Post by josho »

Even better is to host your personal email on a server at your home. SMTP will retry sending mail if your server goes down for a period, so uptime isn't critical.

I've been doing this for several months with no issues, and it's pleasant getting out of google's targeted profiles.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#44

Post by robomartin »

smacktoward wrote: post #36
robomartin wrote: post #31

This is neat. I've been running my own email forever and appreciate the difficulty involved. I do have a question: Does hosting your own email truly isolate you from government surveillance? If a million people use this to host their own email on AWS, what's to keep the NSA from ordering Amazon to tap into your data? You almost have to host it on your own hardware in the garage in order to add a significant layer of…

> Does hosting your own email truly isolate you from government surveillance? Not by itself, no; the government can still get to you by getting access to the machine you host it on, or the switch the mail flows through on its way in and out from the outside world. Hosting your own just reduces the number of third parties the government can try to shake down to get access to your data.

I guess my point is that unless you have the machine in your home nothing really changes: They shake down the hosting provider and they are in.

In other words, what's the difference between buying email service from GoDaddy and renting a VPS from them to host it yourself?

Not being critical at all, just trying to understand if there's something fundamentally different about Mail in a Box that makes it more government-secure than other approaches. The description seems to list privacy from government snooping as the primary motivator. Is it truly effective at that? If so, why and how?

As I understand things the very idea of being secure from snooping is an illusion so long as your email is on a machine that you don't physically control in your home or office. And, even then, the best you can do is encrypt all traffic to make it more difficult --not impossible-- to capture your data.

Am I wrong?

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#45

Post by josho »

chacham15 wrote: post #26
morsch wrote: post #9

Very nice. Comes with Roundcube so you've got a webmail client available. - DKIM signing on outgoing messages (opendkim). - The machine acts as its own DNS server and is automatically configured for SPF and DKIM (nsd). I remember many people running their own SMTP server used to have massive issues with their outgoing mail being silently or non-silently ignored or sent to the spam folder. Does this take care of this?…

Jeff Atwood talks about this: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email... . . And its unlikely that the code takes care of all these things. For example, how are you going to configure the reverse ptr in code?

With dkim/SPF the lack of a reverse ptr is less important. I've had one email bounce as a result, even then the bounce included instructions to resolve the issue with their server.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#46

Post by mhurron »

mike_hearn wrote: post #41
mike-cardwell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence for this? It seems unlikely to me...

He's talking about something called the PBL (policy blocklist). The idea is it contains IP ranges that aren't "supposed" to send mail, like consumer ADSL ranges. People who want to send mail from home directly are supposed to do so via their ISPs SMTP servers, which may be configured to relay but only from IPs the ISP controls.

There is no reason you can't set up your SMTP server to use your ISP, or other SMTP service like gmail, as a smart relay.

Personally I have a VPS that I relay mail through.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#47

Post by robomartin »

thisishugo wrote: post #16

It remains a constant frustration to me that Postfix, Exim, Cyrus, Dovecot and the like still feel as if they belong very much in the "here be dragons" territories of the Unix world. Configuring these systems is an exercise in constant frustration and bafflement. They're such a pain to use that since becoming the sysadmin in charge of our work email servers, I gave up running personal ones as well and just pay FastMa…

At some level I've always viewed this as an example of how FOSS can fail to deliver good products at times. It should be embarrassing to the FOSS community that something as fundamental as email services requires super human effort to setup, administer and maintain. I don't know how it is we got here. It's a real head shaker.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#48

Post by mike-cardwell »

chacham15 wrote: post #26
morsch wrote: post #9

Very nice. Comes with Roundcube so you've got a webmail client available. - DKIM signing on outgoing messages (opendkim). - The machine acts as its own DNS server and is automatically configured for SPF and DKIM (nsd). I remember many people running their own SMTP server used to have massive issues with their outgoing mail being silently or non-silently ignored or sent to the spam folder. Does this take care of this?…

Jeff Atwood talks about this: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email... . . And its unlikely that the code takes care of all these things. For example, how are you going to configure the reverse ptr in code?

Even if it can't set the PTR it's self, it could at least detect if your PTR is missing or wrong, and display that information to you with some advice on how to resolve it and how important it is.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#49

Post by mhurron »

peterwaller wrote: post #32

It does greylisting by default. Greylisting is awesome at cutting down spam, but we recently noticed that it was preventing a major mail provider from getting through, among others, because it seems that this major provider doesn't use the same IP twice (at least sometimes). If ignoring email coming from a major provider isn't an option (it isn't.), then what are your options?

You can whitelist from GMail while still greylisting from everyone else. Simply query DNS for their SPF records and use that for the whitelist, Google is good about keeping that up to date.

GMail sends from a farm, it's random where the exit ends up being.

I only have that problem from GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo don't seem to have this problem.

Re: Mail-in-a-box: easy to set up modern SMTP/SMTPS server stack

#50

Post by privong »

smacktoward wrote: post #36
robomartin wrote: post #31

This is neat. I've been running my own email forever and appreciate the difficulty involved. I do have a question: Does hosting your own email truly isolate you from government surveillance? If a million people use this to host their own email on AWS, what's to keep the NSA from ordering Amazon to tap into your data? You almost have to host it on your own hardware in the garage in order to add a significant layer of…

> Does hosting your own email truly isolate you from government surveillance? Not by itself, no; the government can still get to you by getting access to the machine you host it on, or the switch the mail flows through on its way in and out from the outside world. Hosting your own just reduces the number of third parties the government can try to shake down to get access to your data.

It also means that (assuming one has some understanding of computer security) you stand a chance (albeit small) of potentially catching them in the act of getting access to your data (for some types of surveillance).
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