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

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 150 posts

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

#51

Post by mike-cardwell »

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.

I am familiar with the SpamHaus PBL. It was my understanding that anyone could easily remove their own IP address from the list if required? Presumably that is what happens when Rackspace customers want to send legitimate mail. So why would it cause any problems for spammers?

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

#52

Post by Niten »

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?…

> 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? "Mostly" really isn't good enough.

Frankly I've had mixed results over several years of hosting my own personal email server, even with a valid PTR, SPF, and DKIM. Most SMB and personal email systems I interact with are fine, as aside from Bayesian filtering those tend to rely heavily on blacklists which I am responsible enough to keep myself off of—easy given that I'm the server's only user. And I've never had an issue sending to Gmail users.

Microsoft is the real f-up in this regard, originally with Hotmail and now with the updated Outlook.com. Even though I'm on no blacklists and pass both their SPF and DKIM checks:

    Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; spf=pass (sender IP is XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX) smtp.mailfrom=redacted@example.com; dkim=pass header.d=example.com; x-hmca=pass header.id=redacted@example.com
    X-SID-PRA: redacted@example.com
    X-AUTH-Result: PASS
    X-SID-Result: PASS
my messages still end up in the Junk folder.

If you visit their support page you're recommended to join their partner Return Path's Sender Score Certified Email program to stop junk filtering of your legitimate messages. That's great, if you're a medium-sized organization that doesn't mind paying their certification fee; but Return Path won't even allow an individual to register (I've tried). I'm familiar with Hanlon's razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", but this at least feels like a racket.

Unfortunately I don't know what else to do, other than continue to advise everyone I know not to use Outlook.com and friends.

And to finally answer your question, if this VM runs its own DNS then it probably takes care of SPF and DKIM adequately, but you'll likely have to contact your hosting provider for the PTR record, which is at least as important. But even following those best practices you can still have delivery issues such as I have described above, leading to the unfortunate reality that if you really need a message to be delivered you're probably better off sending it through Gmail.

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

#53

Post by xyzzy123 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #42
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/

I think we're talking about different orders of magnitude of weirdo here :)

At this point the only people I know who could or would use Pond are people who can compose crypto primitives on their own anyway.

Also if we are going to go all Pond and do messaging from the ground up, we need to acknowledge that the global passive adversary is real.

EDIT: after replying to rickisen below, I'm starting to see your point. Maybe we need Pond or bitmessage or a resurrected mixmaster if real people think TLS solves traffic analysis.

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

#54

Post by mobiplayer »

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.

I setup one a couple days ago on a Rackspace cloud server and anything I've sent from there reaches my Gmail inbox.

By the way, I've used Postfix and it took me like 10 minutes to get it running. I wouldn't call it user friendly, but far from being complex.

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

#55

Post by rickisen »

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…

metadata

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

#56

Post by clarry »

josho wrote: post #43

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.

I wish more protocols were built with such robustness and decenteralization in mind. If you try to host a web site at home and it gains some attention among netizens, you might have a bad day. Not because your connection is dog slow, but because all those people will complain about the way you host.

The internet is too darn centeralized, people can't just put services out there.

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

#57

Post by xyzzy123 »

rickisen wrote: post #55
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…

metadata

Let's think about this more closely.

Where are you hosting your email. Are you keeping it on say an AWS instance? OK flag that, all the plaintext would be there, and also, duh, it's still obvious that it's your communication because you're connecting to it, and maybe even paying for it.

OK, you host it at home on your DSL line? OK, so plaintext is harder, but oh wait. Yeah, your IP.

TOR hidden service or something? Good luck getting SMTP to work over tor.

So tell me again how TLS is going to help with metadata.

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

#59

Post by rickisen »

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…

There is a difference between goverment surveilance and mass survielance.

In order to escape mass surveilance this is most likely enough. As all you have to do is to be different.

If you think you are actually "target" by a goverment youv'e got bigger problems. And you should probably stay away from email alltogether.

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

#60

Post by nfoz »

coherentpony wrote: post #33

Why has nobody just made a Docker image that anyone can download and use for free? Or even just a Dockerfile. That way it's a text file and people can contribute and improve the setup. Just my two cents. Edit: Looks like my idea is far from original https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7634677 >

> Why has nobody just made a Docker image that anyone can download and use for free?

Because you haven't done it yet. :)

Post reply on HN