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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

#131

Post by EvanAnderson »

southerntofu wrote: post #78
bijant wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory it would be simple to provide a "cloudworkers cooperative" kind of service that just bundles the outbound mail so that traffic is sufficiently large to be whitelisted by the big providers. The two biggest problems are A. Scaling up sufficiently without attracting Spammers. Because even a single Spammer can ruin your reputation forever. So ideally you'd have a tight knit group of friends or similar. Even the…

Yeah SMTP relaying is quite common. The problem is due to email architecture, to my knowledge, that same relay is going to be able to read your incoming emails because remote servers will block emails from user@endserver.org sent from relay.net unless endserver.org has MX entries pointing to relay.net.

That is less the case today. Back before SPF, absolutely. Today, with properly configured SPF records, not so much.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#132

Post by yc-kraln »

I am very happy with my artisanal choice. I have been doing so for several decades, now. Usually only trouble when I have to move to a new IP range (changing colo provider), as it means re-establishing reputation and so forth.

Not a huge issue, and worth it for me.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#133

Post by sam_lowry_ »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #92
hannob wrote: post #70

Earlier 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.

I did run my own email server for 20+ years. As you may imagine, I had to learn a thing or two about DMARC, DKIM and SPF, but spread over the years it is not a big investment to make.

Most of the time, delivery problems were of my own creation. Like running out of disk space or accidentally disabling TLS.

Once in a while, Microsoft would start swallowing emails or Google would push everyone to use DMARC.

But overall, the experience has been very pleasant. I host my mails, I own my data. I am not shy of using Google, but my work is not defined by their whims. When Google tells me I ran out of space in my account I just delete stuff because I have copies of everything outside of Google infrastructure.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#135

Post by Icathian »

pyrale wrote: post #122

I 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…

I've done #1, it didn't occur to me that you could split up #2 and #3. That sounds like a really interesting project. Thanks for the idea!

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#136

Post by FpUser »

matt123456789 wrote: post #68
FpUser wrote: post #41

I do away with the middle ground. I rent email services from businesses that specialize in email hosting and I own domain name. No way I will have my email serviced by Google / MS / Apple and the likes.

Who do you use? After seeing all the horror stories posted on HN, I have been worried about getting banned from $MegaCorp randomly and would like to minimize the blast radius if that were to happen.

Just do a google search. There are plenty and I do not want to recommend anything particular

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#137

Post by rob_c »

Frankly no. Both Google and Microsoft office have taken a massive step back by implementing "smart" functionality into their mail search which makes accessing critical information (and therefore my job) impossible... I'll be self hosting until these companies return basic working functionality

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#138

Post by grishka »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #116
tdrdt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server." I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on…

Even if your ip address/domain is not in the blacklist right now, it only takes a few people marking your correspondence as spam for it to be blacklisted. Since everyone is on these big free providers, nobody will ever see a single email from you any more. With less centrally controlled email, that would not be possible. I think that is the problem everyone is talking about.

People generally know to check their spam folder if they're waiting for an email but it doesn't arrive.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#139

Post by Retric »

jacquesm wrote: post #128
Retric wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t mean that’s the only way to trip up, there are a lot of unspoken self hosing email rules. Don’t use public data centers, don’t send news letters etc.

Re: Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

#140

Post by andix »

It’s not so bad to run your own email server. Im doing it, because email is very sensitive data, and I don’t want to share it with Google or Microsoft or any other cloud provider.

The worst part is, that you can’t use any fancy email clients, because they all use proprietary protocols and once again cloud services. But imap and activesync works well enough too.

The most important thing is, to get a clean IP address. Don’t ever try to host your Mailserver on digital ocean for example, their IPs have such a bad reputation that some providers even block them on network level. Their whole subnets can’t connect to them, no possibility to get unblocked at all.

Once you found a legitimate hoster, check that your IP is not bkacklisted at any major provider. If it is, try to get other IPs, until you get a clean one. Don’t try to go through unblock-processes, that often won’t work.

And then you need to set up your server well. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, …

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