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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

#21

Post by jasode »

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 Cloudflare, Hezner etc, host your html or mp4 files.

I quit self-hosting email at home over 15 years ago. It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on. As long as I control the MX record on my own domain, that's really all that's necessary.

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

#22

Post by jrm4 »

This isn't actually that hard to fix, it's just that for whatever reason, we seem to frequently have this blindspot that we don't seem to have in other industries.

Namely that "do it yourself at home" and "massive oligopolist" aren't the only two options. It's like saying "You can only have hamburgers two ways, cook them yourself or McDonalds."

I do the third and it's been great. I let my paid webhost handle it. (hostdime if you're interested, but I'm sure others do it well also)

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

#25

Post by jokethrowaway »

Sending emails with dkim + sfp and I never had big problems with reachability and a postfix server on Digital Ocean.

I haven't done it since last year though. Has something gone terribly wrong?

I remember debugging issues with email sent via aws ses to Hotmail addresses at $dailyJob but I can't think of a single Microsoft product that works well (windows, teams, azure, now even GitHub is starting to work every other day) so it doesn't surprise me.

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

#26

Post by andruby »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #15
okasaki wrote: post #2

All that "security" just to fight spam. IIRC it was estimated that globally spammers make $300M per year from their spam. It doesn't seem like much. Somebody joked that it would be better if we just paid them that much to do nothing.

I wonder what the underlying problem is. Gabe Newell once said that "Piracy is not a pricing issue. It's a service issue". I believe this has been proven by netflix/spotify as well. Is spam just a symptom of a much deeper problem? If so what is it? Or is it naive to think of spam this way?

I think it is different. With Piracy people want something (product/service/media). The quote from Gabe is about the fact that they are willing to pay for it, if it is convenient and affordable.

Nobody wants spam or the things promoted in the spam. The companies want attention from the users. I think the better version is targeted ads on Facebook, etc. Maybe that’s the closest analogy to Gabe’s quote.

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

#27

Post by bob1029 »

Proper, artisanal self-hosting of email can still be viable depending on your expectations and tolerance levels for random issues.

These days, I operate with the medium-temperature bowl of porridge: AWS WorkMail with custom domains & users. My use case is basically "Replace gmail for personal email". I don't have a lot of patience for running an actual email server, so this is about as custom as I can get.

Running a custom email domain can have other practical implications, such as having to carefully re-iterate spelling when mentioning your email address over the phone to a customer support agent. With a gmail or hotmail account, virtually everyone can type that hostname in without thinking about it. This concern is moderated by being able to select a username with fewer than 5 characters, rather than your full legal name appended with your date of birth.

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

#28

Post by lxchase »

Reminds me of this fun story:

A person at a company mistakenly created an email list segment (or lack thereof) resulting in an email to the entire email list of hundred of thousands of emails. This combined with inexistent (we were a naive startup without an email specialist role) list hygiene practices meant we were blacklisted by Gmail after some time.

Took a year to get a hold of someone on Gmail's spam team. We found out were on 4+ Gmail blocklists, some of which were ML-based. We couldn't do anything to remove ourselves after we fixed the issues. A $1-2 million revenue channel dried up because we couldn't get out of the Gmail blackhole (short of rebranding completely, rewriting content, and using a different ESP). Fun times.

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

#30

Post by yonixw »

> ... [They use] spam as a scapegoat to nerf deliverability and stifle competition.

Disagree. It was a way too open protocol to begin with. From a time of innocence best suited for places with inherit trust like inside a business. And it's not just spam. Phishing is also a huge issue.

As much as I want to sympathise, Email for the big WWW is unsalvageable IMO. Too many bad actors are out there.

> [Solution:...] * There should be a recourse for legitimate servers

This is the same Big tech story. They want to cut cost, you want a human touch. You can see similar stories here in HN every week. Which is why I think it will never happen.

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