Pffff people said this 15 years ago.
Hotmail is an occasional pain for the self-adminstered email server, everyone else works fine IME.
Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
121–130 of 519 posts
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#122I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently:
- Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fastmail or proton is a first step that gives you lots of security fom arbitrary. Because you own the doorstep, you can change provider without having to inform all your contacts of the move. You're also more secure from unilateral moves from your provider.
-Hosting your own mail server means that you are responsible for the persistence of your mail. It's a nice artisanal thing to do, and you may be satisfied to know that no one is reading your mail.
-Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part, because you need a stable IP that is accepted as a legitimate mail sender. Moreover, you need to monitor this property in the long term. Every mail server has their own way to choose who is a legitimate mail sender, and it's an ongoing pain to check that.
You're not forced to go all the way, you can simply pick a domain to secure the frontdoor, or you can host your mail server without sending mail by yourself, etc. You can also self-host, and change your mind later without much impact.
I personally would incite everyone to do at least #1 for safety reasons, #2 if you want to fiddle with the system to know how it works, and to avoid #3.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#123qmail since 2003. No intention of changing, well, maybe to postfix.
There's several advantages for me, I can easily backup Maildir with find -mtime +90, tar and purge.
Using mutt to read my own mail makes filtering off spam very easy.
Maybe gmail has some advantages, somehow the domain looks more "professional" than hotmail or outlook addresses do. Can't explain that though.
If you run your own mail, you have a domain, so running your own web site comes naturally too.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#124> Your IMAP access might be as good as theirs, but things like your webmail, your spam filtering, and almost certainly your general security will not be as good as they have.[...]
> Especially, open source can't compete on features like webmail and performance in things like spam filtering.
If anything roundcube is a better webmail client than many of the mail-provider ones. And that's ignoring all the ads and tracking that these come embedded with, even if you pay for them.
I haven't used gmail-for-organizations but if it's anything like the normal gmail interface then ... I guess some power users will prefer it? But in my experience many people prefer roundcube, because it's simple and usable. Not that it's perfect or better in all the ways, it's just from my experience and the users I talk to, it is just as good and fills a need that gmail doesn't.
Same goes for spam-filtering. It's not that spamassassin/amavisd/rspamd/postscreen/RBLs/whatever is 100% perfect, it just get's you pretty far, and from my experience also gmail, as the main contender, has varying success on how close they achieve 100%.
And even security is not magic. A large mail provider doesn't have access to magically different security tooling than everyone else. They have a threat model that is slightly different and their scale allows them to do some things that not everyone can. But wrt to one's userbase it's perfectly possible to be "just as secure".
Running your own org-mailinfrastructure is certainly not "artisanal" - for some reason this comes off slighly dismissive in the article - it's just that, as anything, it's work that you have to want to invest in. A trade-off where it often does make sense to outsource. But then email is not so different from any other service you want to provide.
... but then I see that the article seems to partially be writing off of the experience of using the U of Toronto mail system, which seems to be using squirrelmail and procmail. I didn't even know squirrelmail was still developed - this impression kind supported by there being no news between 2013 and October 21, 2021 on the frontpage https://squirrelmail.org/ while procmail is unsupported since approximately forever (it feels like pre-9/11 but I am not sure).
If you compare that experience with outlook.com - then I can certainly see why one could come to the conclusion in this article.
EDIT: Heh: my guess of procmail being pre-9/11. Wikipedia says: "Final release 3.22 / September 10, 2001"
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business use of email tends to look a lot like spam and people mark it as such. An appointment reminder or notification that something just shipped is generally fine. Send out mass notification of your holiday sales and that’s going into someone’s spam folder.
> generally fine So you're saying that anything can get you blacklisted if you're unlucky enough? I think that's the point of the people you're arguing with. At this point we just need to figure exactly how unlucky.
Not so much a question of luck, sending out sipping notifications that for example include advertising is risky. Sending a high volume of appointment reminders for the same appointment is similarly problematic.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#126Someone 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…
I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case. If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works. In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No,…
I think the "decent effort" part is the key thing. We had to change our mail routing temporarily earlier in the year (after having sent via Office 365 for multiple years) and keeping on top of emails that were being blocked was a non-trivial amount of effort (and stress) for a period of time.
Unlike the person to you're replying to we had no issues with Google or Microsoft (once we did the requisite things) - it was Yahoo (and the people they provide email for) and then multiple mid-size organisations who used IP based block lists. At one point our mails were being rejected by our local NHS trust, the London Fire Brigade and a mental health agency we make referrals to. None of this was complicated to resolve but it was energy that could have been better used elsewhere.
I'm not usually part of the "let's go cloud without doing any cost-benefit analysis" movement but with email delivery I was happy when we could go back to routing via Office365 again. If a recipient decides to ban Microsoft's IPs that's usually going to be a bigger problem for them than me.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case. If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works. In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No,…
> If you put some decent effort [...] it works Well, I put in more than some decent effort, and I didn't get it "to work". I detailed my efforts here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-email-from-your-own-ser... Please stop spreading falsehoods. If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.
> If you were able to somehow get your own email server to deliver email to Gmail and Outlook, great, good for you - but stop pretending that anybody can do it.
Yes, that's probably true. I've been running my own server for 20 years now, and I guess that in itself helps with getting my mail delivered (apart from t-online, but who cares about them). At some time I also hosted some mailing lists, but I quickly abandoned that because that's a surefire way to get your IP blacklisted sooner or later. If you set up a completely new mail server, there probably is a lot of luck involved, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, at least not for your critical business mails. I pretty much keep doing it only out of nostalgia, it doesn't really make any sense otherwise.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> generally fine So you're saying that anything can get you blacklisted if you're unlucky enough? I think that's the point of the people you're arguing with. At this point we just need to figure exactly how unlucky.
Not so much a question of luck, sending out sipping notifications that for example include advertising is risky. Sending a high volume of appointment reminders for the same appointment is similarly problematic.
I've never done any of that.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#129The article makes a string of assertions without evidence. For example, that an “artisinal” email server will not “measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers.”
One reason that I continue to run my own email server after more than a decade of trouble-free operation (thanks Postfix and Dovecot) is that it performs better than my Gmail account, which I maintain as a 3rd-level backup and for some email lists. Delivery and receipt from my personal email is so fast that I can use it for real-time conversations with anyone else on a good-performing server, almost like chatting on WhatApp. This doesn’t work with Gmail, because it takes so long for a message to leave their servers. Plus on my own system I don’t get the spam false positives that plague Gmail.
Those are only two ways that a personal server outperforms Gmail. I can do plenty of other things with it, because I control it, that are impossible with Gmail.
Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one
#130I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently: - Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fastmail or proton is a first step that gives you lots of security fom arbitrary. Because you own the doorstep, you can change provider without having to inform all your contacts of the move. You're also more secure from unilateral moves from your provider. -Hostin…
There’s a midpoint at #1.5 where you control the domain and rely on an external host, but also have a continuous archive of your historical mails on your own server. Otherwise with a standard IMAP setup, if your provider locks you out, you’re limited to only the most recent N messages on connected devices.