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

utcc.utoronto.ca

161–170 of 519 posts

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

#161
I advise everyone to take a look at the EU Digital Markets Act. This may be a unique opportunity to force large corporations into behaving nicely with others on the interoperability front and kill off their malicious monopolies at the root.

https://interoperability.news/2021/12/eu-parliament-upgrades...

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

#163
post #28

Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either. Literally every…

I'm sorry this happened to you, but it's a shame. You end up giving money to your perpetrators and leaving the rest of us in the same situation you were in previously. Maybe a hosting coop could be an option? Large enough for reputation but ethical enough to still federate with smaller hosts?

Agreed. But I did learn a lot from it. I needed that because in our large organisation at work the admin rights are highly compartmentalized. And this way I was able to understand what other admins were and weren't able to do.

You can actually get a free test tenant from MS for 3 months but setting up a real production environment is much better than doing some tests.

But yeah I feel lousy about it.

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

#164
post #58
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you host it on vultr? Just $2.50/mo for half a gig of RAM instance.

I don't think you get a static IPv4 address with that instance.

Not anymore. The one with IPV4 is $3.50/mo now.

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

#165
post #6

Someone 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 hear this all the time, but I question how true it is. I've been running my own mail servers for decades, and I've never had any problems with sending or receiving mail. I suspect anyone who properly configures their server will be fine.

The problem is delivery problems are almost undetectable.

If I send an email to a corporation’s customer support, or to a distant relation, or to an open source mailing list, and I don’t get a reply, it could be a delivery problem - or it could just be that they didn’t decide to reply.

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

#166
post #28

Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either. Literally every…

I tried office 365 for email this year but couldn’t get the marketing emails from Microsoft under control. No matter how much time I spent trawling through the settings menus. Almost every email I got was about some security update or promotion from some ms product I did not use and had no intention of using. And I was paying for O365 too!

It is possible. I managed to stop them in the end. One of the many admin sites if I recall correctly (seriously, they have an office admin portal, exchange online admin, Azure Ad portal and everything is spread out across those)

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

#167
post #70
post #6

Someone 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,…

[deleted]

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

#168
post #162

The fate of the Web will follow. For example, Chrome & Firefox together will remove FTP protocol support because "stats suggests very few % people use it"

FTP/SFTP are still very much in use today. Removing support from the browser actually makes sense to me as the majority of browser users are not using it for FTP. There are a myriad of FTP/SFTP clients that are vastly more powerful and have more security options than any browser implementation of the FTP client ever had.

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

#169
post #6

Someone 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…

Every time my artisanal mails went to spam it was an overzealous corporate spam filter (mostly for mails with attachments). Never from one of the big hosts.

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

#170
post #79
post #28

Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either. Literally every…

You may just have been unlucky with your IP block having spammers. How were you hosting it - own ISP or another provider? I have not had deliverability issues for years with my Kimsufi (OVH France) server. While I am confident my server is well configured using best practices, I suspect some of it is also just luck not to be in the same IP block as a spammer.

I was using a colocation hoster in Belgium. They actually moved me to another netblock to test (they were a really nice small company). But the same happened.

I heard Kimsufi is indeed pretty bad as it's so cheap people tend to use it for 'throwaway' purposes. It's basically the white label budget brand of OVH :)

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