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Self-Host All the Things?

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Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#121

Post by chillfox »

dijit wrote: post #15
Nextgrid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super ea…

I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam.

When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in some huge html template and the amount needs to be converted.

When I buy something in a physical store they have the decency to ask if I want a receipt. I don't understand why that's such a hard concept for online stores/services to get, ask me if I want a receipt, don't just stick it in my inbox because you have my email address.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#122

Post by nl »

chillfox wrote: post #121
dijit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super ea…

I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam. When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in s…

For accounting purposes the bank receipt will rarely have the details needed for tax (eg in Australia that don't include the ABN).

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#123

Post by jd3 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

> Email newsletter tools: Old or new, your pick Am I wrong to think that most businesses/people pay for Mailchimp because getting your e-mail actually delivered into the inboxes of your target audience/customers is non-trivial? aka, you're going to end up in "spam" otherwise? I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I woul…

> I find it hard to believe that you can "free-ly" send e-mail to, say, 100,000 e-mails and actually have it get delivered at a high rate? I would love to learn if I'm wrong though.

The company I work for has an outbox feature which supports this and it was a non-trivial problem to solve. We ended up using sparkpost with a bunch of modifications to isolate potentially bad actors (i.e., clients who pay for our software but send what is basically spam) to an individual sending pool. We also have CSMs that handle this and help to coach clients to not send spam.

https://support.sparkpost.com/docs/deliverability

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#124

Post by chillfox »

linsomniac wrote: post #40

Self-hosting is a big operations problem, with few tools to automate it. Long ago, I had an associate tell me that he was having some success with setting up Wordpress sites for local political organizations. I said to him: "Oh, that's really neat! What are you doing to ensure that the sites stay up to date with security patches?" His response was completely unrelated to my question, which I figured was my answer and…

I have run a lot of WordPress sites, it's easy for a skilled admin to run it securely for a long time with barely any effort and unfortunately it's also easy for a user to make it insecure.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#125

Post by stonewall »

ryjo wrote: post #120
stonewall wrote: post #68

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection. It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it. I use a stack of…

Incredible. The usual response to "should I host my own email" is "don't do it; you'll get hacked." Three questions: 1. Have you heard of this complaint? 2. Do you use a home ISP connection, or a commercial ISP connection? A "home ISP connection" here usually comes with a dynamic IP address; you can't get your hands on a static address without paying a very large amount monthly or getting a commercial connection. 3.…

1. Yes, most people will tell you not to host your own email, because its too complicated/difficult to get your mail delivered reliably.

A lot of this is FUD. Yes, email is a bit more difficult to get right than say, hosting a web app behind Nginx. It's an old protocol, with many "features" bolted on years later to combat spam.

I'm not sure how email is easier to "hack," unless there is a zero day in Postfix or something. Back in the day, lots of script kiddies would find poorly configured mail servers that were happy to act as an open relay...maybe the stigma persists?

To deliver mail reliably, you need 4 things (in my experience):

- A static, public IP address with a good reputation (ie, not on any spam blacklists)

- A reverse DNS record that resolves back to your mail server's IP

- A domain SPF record that says that your mail server is allowed to deliver mail

- DKIM records and proper signing of outgoing messages (DMARC records help too)

2. I have a residential cable internet connection, but pay extra for static IPs. You can probably get by with a dynamic IP and some kind of dynamic DNS service, as long as you don't want to send email. You could still receive email locally if your MX recorded pointed to some kind of dynamic DNS record.

Note that some ISPs explicitly block outbound traffic on port 25 due to spammers. You might need to check with yours.

3. The only things I expose to the internet are Postfix (to send/receive emails), XMPP (to chat with others), and my web server. Everything else (calendar/contacts, IMAP, Syncthing, etc) stays behind my firewall, accessible only to internal hosts. I use wireguard on my Android phone to access these services seamlessly when I leave the house.

I've never bothered to conceal my IP address. For awhile, I experimented with using Mullvad VPN for all my egress traffic. Unfortunately I spent all day solving CAPTCHAs...wasn't worth it (for me, anyway).

EDIT: I should add, that I also have a "normie" email address at one of the usual providers that I use for really important things like bank accounts / utility providers. If I get hit by a bus, I don't want my (very nontechnical) wife to deal with sysadminning on top of my early death.

For all our personal communications though, we use my selfhosted email domain.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#126

Post by pmarreck »

stonewall wrote: post #85
novok wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much power does it take? I've realized with some services it's cheaper to use it than the electricity and hardware cost.

I almost certainly don't save any money considering electricity cost. I have a dell r630 for compute and an r730xd that I use as a NAS. Then I have one switch for the rack and a POE switch for the house. Probably 3-5amps total? If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient gear. That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much. I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my roof.

do you backup offsite? if not, in the event of a fire, your data will live under your "poof!"

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#127

Post by chillfox »

nl wrote: post #122
chillfox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mark receipts as spam, but I do delete them without opening them and I really can't blame the people who mark them as spam. When I buy something, I get a notification from my bank, instantly, that's basically the receipt in a standardized compact form (2 lines of text) with the amount in my local currency. This is much more useful than the receipts online stores send where the relevant details are buried in s…

For accounting purposes the bank receipt will rarely have the details needed for tax (eg in Australia that don't include the ABN).

The vast majority of the things I buy don't need receipts to be kept and reported for tax. It's personal stuff like a streaming subscription, a book or a game.

And the times I have tried to claim expenses as work related (in Australia) that I bought online I have run into the problem that the receipt provided by the company is ambiguous (not sufficient by itself) because amounts were just specified with a $ symbol instead of USD/AUD.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#128

Post by stonewall »

pmarreck wrote: post #126
stonewall wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost certainly don't save any money considering electricity cost. I have a dell r630 for compute and an r730xd that I use as a NAS. Then I have one switch for the rack and a POE switch for the house. Probably 3-5amps total? If I started over, I would probably choose more efficient gear. That said, I don't mind paying for the electricity too much. I enjoy the warm fuzzies of knowing my data lives under my roof.

do you backup offsite? if not, in the event of a fire, your data will live under your "poof!"

I have some automation that does a weekly archive of everything important to a ZFS-based NAS. Home directories are also stored there over NFS, with hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots.

Once a month or so, I plug in two separate 5TB external HDDs and run a backup script that rsync's everything to each one (2 is 1 and 1 is none). These are stored outside my home.

I should probably get some kind of cloud-based / encrypted backup thing going as well. I don't claim that my current backup system is very good.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#129

Post by zwilliamson »

I love self hosting. Here’s my home setup.

Hardware (you don’t need much!)

Mini atx tower, 8TB usable storage, Debian, AMD processor, 8GB memory

Pfsense Firewall (Tailscale exit node)

Plume Wi-Fi (would like to replace, owned by comcast now)

Solution stack:

Portainer + Docker Compose to manage everything

Nextcloud

Photo Prism

Tailscale (remote WireGuard based access from all my devices. Integrates well with Pfsense)

Home Assistant (amazing platform for home automation and more). I love the new voice control features and mission!

Used to self host Email with Helm hardware company (not k8s Helm) but they went out of business. Self hosting email is annoying thanks to the big email providers and their control over the spam filtering world.

Matrix chat server bridging all the chat interfaces I use. This is managed by an awesome open source Ansible playbook https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Pihole

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#130

Post by zwilliamson »

triyambakam wrote: post #73
stonewall wrote: post #68

I self-host literally everything (email, calendar/contacts, VOIP, XMPP, you name it) from by basement with used 1U servers from eBay and a cable internet connection. It was probably more hassle than most people would want to bother with to get it set up. But, with everything up and running, there's very little maintenance. I probably spend a few hours a month tinkering still, just because I enjoy it. I use a stack of…

Very inspiring and thank you for sharing. I run GrapheneOS too but I haven't set anything up like a Wireguard VPN. What is the rough idea of how that works?

Checkout Tailscale for an easy to rollout WireGuard based solution that has a fair free tier
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