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After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

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Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#141

Post by tsukikage »

gingerlime wrote: post #135
tsukikage wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running a private mailserver for myself and a couple of friends since 2002. I hit a similar issue with Microsoft last year. I route outgoing mail to hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com and msn.com domains via email-smtp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com. I started doing this when I noticed a large portion of e-commerce email I was receiving originated from amazon vms and they clearly had no deliverability issues. The…

office 365 hosts a bunch of domains though. My bounce was to a .berlin domain hosted there. Yes, I could route all smtp via a ESP and pay for it, but that’s centralization.

Interesting - whatever permaban it is that my IP block got didn't affect office 365 hosted services (verified with several different domains at the time) - just literally the domains I mention. Guess I've lucked out so far.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#142

Post by Snild »

mmsnberbar66 wrote: post #138
lisper wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want You can even have a hybrid solution where incoming mail goes directly to your self-hosted server and (some) outgoing mail is relayed through a third party.

What would be the advantage?

Benefiting from the large provider's reputation in regards to spam blocklists etc.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#143

Post by z3t4 »

sgt wrote: post #42

Very interesting, I've self hosted my e-mail since 1999, which incidentally is 23 years ago. My current server is at Hetzner in Germany.

do you have your own asn? The entire Hetzner network has been banned by Microsoft, so you can't send to Hotmail addresses

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#144

Post by [deleted] »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #117
jasode wrote: post #21

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or C…

"The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name" You would think. The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life(at least). Otherwise, as soon as you lose your domain you lose ownership of your email. Any one that has control of the domain has control of you…

[deleted]

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#145

Post by WretchedEarl »

jasode wrote: post #21

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or C…

> simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want

That's not necessarily a sure cure, depending on the hosting provider. RoadRunner (Spectrum / Charter) in the US and Shaw in Canada won't deliver emails from my domain hosted at Runbox.com (or sent directly from the runbox.com domain.) Spectrum's bounce message references an error code that translates to "Spectrum limits the number of concurrent connections from a sender, as well as the total number of connections allowed. Limits vary based on the reputation of the IP address. Reduce your number of connections and try again later."

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#146

Post by kevincox »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #88

It was a huge mistake for email receivers to take on the cost of filtering spam. Of course given the evolution of the internet and email it is easy to see how that mistake happened. Nobody had a crystal ball. But the only solution here is to raise the cost of sending email to the point where spam is no longer profitable. It seems like one solution is to bcrypt hash (or some similarly expensive algorithm) the email an…

The problem to adding a cost to email is that it affects everyone. The amount of CPU power you need to waste to make most spam not viable is so much that it isn't worth it.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#147

Post by teddyh »

E-mail is complicated, sure. But I’ve had it up to here with people who give up running their own server and then go on to vastly exaggerate how infeasible it is, in order to placate their own conscience. It’s not that they’ve gotten tired of doing it, oh no; (they say,) it’s entirely the fault of Google, Microsoft, etc. who’ve made it literally impossible to run your own e-mail server. Except it’s not impossible – lots of us do it, still. And now there’s one fewer of us, so the rest of us have to work that much harder when the next monopolizing standard comes along (BIMI, anyone?). Sure, you don’t owe us anything, but thanks for nothing when making these public rants; you are scaring away people who might still be inclined to help!

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#148

Post by zahllos »

yomkippur wrote: post #101
zahllos wrote: post #71

I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…

was just gonna ask how you would handle DKIM and SPF stuff. Hetzner? Digitalocean?

I use a small datacentre in my country, actually not far from where I live. DKIM/SPF are independent of the provider. The easiest way to understand is to consider how receiving works. If I'm getting an email from hnemail.example, the first thing I do is consider the IP address. Oh, 257.257.257.1? Ok. So I then ask DNS "what is the SPF record for hnemail.example?" and it returns

    v=spf1 mx -all
This tells me only to accept emails from 'MX' entries for that domain. So I query 'MX' against the DNS server and I get a list of A records, which I can get IPs from. If the IP is in the list, spf passes. Otherwise it fails, mark as spam.

For DKIM, when the email was sent it was signed with a key by the sending server. It is identified by a UUID in the incoming email. So the receiving server again queries DNS for TXT ._domainkey.hnemail.example and receives the public key as a response. Signature verification passes? Accept email. It fails? Mark as spam.

This doesn't have a lot to do with IP reputation. This is different. If you are a very large email provider, you might develop custom spam filters. IPs are allocated to 'autonomous systems' i.e. who actually uses them and hands them out to users, and depending on the business you might make some decisions about reputation. For example, if the IP address is part of a consumer ISP block that is handed out to users of broadband, chances are high that if they're sending email, it is probably a Windows PC compromised by malware.

Similarly, you might decide some ASNs are better than others. Some hosters are more liberal in what they will accept, such as VPN endpoints, tor nodes and such and as a consequence of this more spam comes from these ranges.

Rightly or wrongly, larger email providers try to add these extra filters to the process to protect their users from spam. This obviously sucks if you are genuinely trying to run an email server on your symmetric home fibre connection with a dedicated IP, but that's the world we live in.

I can't make any general statement on which providers might be best, and some people will have no issue whereas others will find themselves unable to send anything. I don't work for Outlook/Microsoft or Google and never have, so I don't know exactly what rules they use, and in all likeliness they shift constantly depending on spammer patterns. I can only say I've found running from a small DC to work pretty well.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#149

Post by flyinghamster »

zahllos wrote: post #71

I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…

I've also been self-hosting email for years, and the only deliverability problem I've ever had has been with AT&T. If I try to send something to an AT&T customer, I get an automated "your message has been eaten" notice, and following its directions accomplishes precisely nothing. At this point, I can only guess they're hellbanning the IP block in which my VPS resides, because it does not show up on any public DNSBLs.

Google? No problem. Comcast? No problem. Charter? No problem. AT&T? Problem.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#150

Post by [deleted] »

johnklos wrote: post #99
noncoml wrote: post #39

Forget about self hosting. Even a custom domain is a pain sometimes. According to a lot of web apps, my email is not valid and can’t use it. Also I have been told by a customer support person that my email is not right as it has to end with gmail.com

The fact that it's too hard for you doesn't mean it's too hard for everyone else.

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