Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
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Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#2Could've said this in 2007.
The wild west days of email, with bang paths and "store and pray" delivery systems, those were fun. By the time `sendmail.cf` hacking was no longer a necessary skill, email had become industrialized. Today, why would you even want to try routing internet email through an RBBS net to WWIV net to some hackers custom Amiga board?
SMTP was the Ford Model T of electronic messaging. It slaughtered the previous visions of what the field needed to be. We can look back fondly at the older ideas and even re-implement their insights now, but the lessons of the market are written in big bold letters now.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#3I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days.
I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to those people to stop them and to get them to reach their targets, but in the last 24 months, a lady from Michigan is repeatedly giving out my email address for everything (I've got covid appts, doctor appts, movie tickets, responses to home buying inquires...). I have no idea how to stop this: this would've never happened with any provider that's not owning like 60% of the market.
I am constantly annoyed and I've considered both stopping mail forwarding from this account to mine (but then I might miss that YT premium notification) and I've tried reaching out to many humans on the other side. But I've so far resisted the urge to cancel those movie tickets or vaccination appts, but things just keep coming in.
I can't imagine how are people not overwhelmed by wrongly targetted email: there's more of it than spam I get on my personal server, so spam filtering would definitely not move me towards gmail. And actual spam also gets through on gmail!
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#4Wait, is email spam still a thing? I only get a few spam a day and Spamassassin easily identifies them.
I had assumed that the spammers had moved off to other mediums. Either that or they are specifically targeting big servers like Gmail and are leaving the smaller servers, with their varied (artisanal) anti-spam approaches alone.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#5I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days. I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to tho…
I don’t think you can stop it. I have to imagine that this woman doesn’t have an email address and just gives out what she thought was a fake one, since so many things require it. Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#6Someone should try "artisanal email server" using cloudron or yunohost !
the bigger problem is that "authoritative" email monopolies such as Gmail, 365 and the other big ones arbitrarily define and impose what is a legit email server or not and even with better score than gmail an "artisanal" email server can suffer from being classified into spam by the big tech players just because they can and will do anything to maintain their monopoly.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#7Wait, is email spam still a thing? I only get a few spam a day and Spamassassin easily identifies them. I had assumed that the spammers had moved off to other mediums. Either that or they are specifically targeting big servers like Gmail and are leaving the smaller servers, with their varied (artisanal) anti-spam approaches alone.
It never stopped. What is however more annoying are all the "marketing messages" from all the companies you ever bought a single thing from in your life. It's incredible how often some companies spam you with this (often more than once a day). Really not sure what they are trying to achieve, but for me it's the resolution never to buy anything from them again as I filter their whole domain permanently.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#8I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days. I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to tho…
I don’t think you can stop it. I have to imagine that this woman doesn’t have an email address and just gives out what she thought was a fake one, since so many things require it. Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?
> Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?
She may be getting it at f.lastname@gmail.com.
I signed up for Gmail the first or second day it came out with first.last@gmail.com, but hardly ever log(ged) in over the years. A little while ago I did go into it and noticed getting a bunch of message to firstlast@gmail.com.
Now Gmail allows for 'customized' addresses in that you can drop a period anywhere and it will still go to your address. But this raised the risk of one person signing up with first.last and another person signing up with firstlast. Supposedly this is prevented, but I think that they did not catch this situation in the early days of the service, and so a bunch of OG accounts have cross-contamination.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#9I run my own email server and it's not so bad. gmail is obviously the most troublesome "peer" - if it wasn't for the fact I need to communicate with some gmail users regularly then I'd just cut gmail off. You have to set some headers and DNS stuff, having a static IP helps, and obviously not allowing that IP to send spam too. Largely it works fine.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#10I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days. I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to tho…
I don’t think you can stop it. I have to imagine that this woman doesn’t have an email address and just gives out what she thought was a fake one, since so many things require it. Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?
Someone signed up for an Amex card using my wife's gmail address. This was years ago, and she still gets the Amex emails regularly (like, between daily and weekly). It's incredible both that the Amex customer doesn't notice, and also that Amex has absolutely no method whatsoever for a non-customer to contact them and fix the problem.