If Hillary can do it, so can you.
How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
171–180 of 339 posts
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Redundancy requirement was one of the reasons I started building WildDuck mail server. It can be set up with no-spof components, everything can be replicated. https://github.com/nodemailer/wildduck#no-spof-architecture
Whoa! That's very interesting, thanks a lot! Haven't seen this project before - and I've tried to search for mail servers using document-oriented DBs, although not sure if I've searched specifically for MongoDB. Will definitely take a look.
I guess the project is too new and it is hard to stand out amongst other players that have been around for 20 years by now. Even though not having been around so long has advantages as well, for example it allows skipping non-needed features and adding new stuff like full unicode support – I host андрис@уайлддак.орг on my WildDuck test instance (even though I can only communicate with Gmail using this address, other servers either refuse my messages or do not send to such address).
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#173Isn't it possible to make all these changes in a server and make it available as a docker container or VM (with minimal customization required for end users?)
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fastmail is great until their support hands your account over to some random person that just happened to ask.
https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html They have a very strong privacy policy, they’re not just going to hand your email over to a “random” person.
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Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#175Yeesh, there's so much involved. I've been running my own mail server with https://mailinabox.email for ~2 years and can heartily recommend it. Still, even with that there are gotchas if you want to be able to send messages from your server to Google et al, eg. reverse-DNS-records, DKIM, SPF. Not for the pressed-for-time.
I've been using mail-in-a-box too for about a year now. I'm pretty happy about not being tied into a 3rd party anymore.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#176I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…
"And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time." ... " ... writing a MTA with the goal of minimizing configuration and being secure and resistant to attacks by default. " As a 20+ year UNIX sysadmin and fellow owner of my own email infrastructure for 18 of those, I am surprised to read this and am not even sure what you are talking about. Can you explain what you me…
I'm equally surprised. I've run my own mailserver for over 20 years. Postfix works.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
"And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time." ... " ... writing a MTA with the goal of minimizing configuration and being secure and resistant to attacks by default. " As a 20+ year UNIX sysadmin and fellow owner of my own email infrastructure for 18 of those, I am surprised to read this and am not even sure what you are talking about. Can you explain what you me…
In the age of password leaks it is really common that email accounts are easy targets and get hijacked – most users are probably still using the same password for their email as they used for LinkedIn in 2012. So it might happen from time to time that an otherwise normal account suddenly sends 20 000 emails to hotmail.com unless you have somehow predicted that and configured the mail server to not allow it.
>most users are probably still using the same password for their email as they used for LinkedIn in 2012
This is absolutely not true.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#178Icing on the cake: Sprinkle a little Let's Encrypt in there to cover SSL. It doesn't take much to have a cron make a new cert and restart dovecot and postfix. My setup is similar, but it uses MySQL instead of LDAP. I love being able to make aliases and even better - deleting them when I'm done with them.
> Sprinkle a little Let's Encrypt in there to cover SSL.
Unfortunately most MTAs aren't configured to check the certificate chain, so they'll happily take any SSL cert they're handed and start chatting. MITM or downgrading is trivial.
There is an IETF draft ( MTA-STS ) from 2017 that should address this.
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been running my own mail servers since the mid-90s, and always only a single server. SMTP keeps retrying, so you can be offline. The transport layer was designed to deliver mail to servers even if those servers only dialled in to one of the "internets" once per day, so it's fine to have some downtime. It's totally up to you how you prioritise getting a server back up again, and frankly if the message can't handl…
> frankly if the message can't handle at least a few hours delay then email probably isn't the right medium for it. This may have been the case in the mid-90s, but it is certainly not the case today. I frequently receive emails that require immediate attention, whether from my employer, my bank, or any number of other notifications. Normal email users expect emails to be delivered in seconds, not hours.
Then normal users need to adjust their expectations. Email has never been assumed to be immediate.
Iirc, its even in the spec
Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html They have a very strong privacy policy, they’re not just going to hand your email over to a “random” person.
They already have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15855081