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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

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Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#301

Post by CodeWriter23 »

sedachv wrote: post #287
CodeWriter23 wrote: post #169

Running your own personal, non-commercial server may be just fine. But if you’re business is pumping out volumes of email, no amount of DMARC, DKIM, SPF, CFL participation and fighting to stay off IP blacklists will prevent you from eventually succumbing to the user that clicks the Junk button to delete their emails. This will tank your domain’s reputation and get your emails routed to Junk (or silently discarded) fo…

What is CFL participation?

Customer Feedback Loop. When Junkie taps the Junk button you get notified by the ESP to delete them any mailing lists and never email that address again. They typically track this as a metric against your domain. And some ESPs, like Comcast won’t even sign you up to participate unless you’re big.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#302

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

Spivak wrote: post #203
sigstoat wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normal email users expect emails to be delivered in seconds, not hours. their expectations are unreasonable. gmail, etc don't even manage that much of the time, let alone guarantee it.

Sure, everything is best-effort on the web but <10s delivery is pretty much the norm now.

Except email has nothing to do with the web?

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#303

Post by Shoothe »

brongondwana wrote: post #300
Shoothe wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia DKIM was conceived in 2004 and SPF was standardized in 2005 (although designs date a few years before that). I wouldn't call them particularly new (it's almost 14 years now). Even DMARC was here in 2010, that's 8 years. One recent thing is MTA STS but the progress is slow on this front (from my POV).

Yeah, it's still underway at the IETF. Last session we came close to finialising most of the documents in the UTA working group, which includes MTA STS. Meanwhile, there's ARC which is still in early stages of deployment, and hopes to fix the indirect mailflow problems of DKIM. (and of course there's JMAP on the client side, which is super exciting for those of us working on it)

I've seen some providers like Gmail already using MTA STS records and subdomains, but they don't read the records of my domains yet. Still it's an interesting solution.

I'm disappointed in the mailing lists software and configuration "in the wild". Refusing to just change From address and put the original From into Reply To and breaking DMARC (that I've seen some operators just claim "is badly designed") is a very sad state of the world.

I've read JMAP spec but was not pleased with the RPC style design. I've seen "why isn't it REST" and the FAQ says REST is not mobile friendly. Still, reading all these Foo/get methods looks bad to my eyes (sorry, personal preference) an I don't see how it could improve caching (as the FAQ claims). I like the idea of replacing IMAP with something modern though.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#304

Post by clan »

cpncrunch wrote: post #293
megous wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook.com/Microsoft blacklists entire subnets because there are spammers in the same IP range. It's ridiculously lazy practice. They should just block IP addresses that are actually sending SPAM. It's not like that's a problem technically. You can fit all IPv4 addresses into a 512MB database. I'm thinking of solving it by blacklisting outlook.com domain, so that senders at least know that I can't respond to them. I…

With gmail you can at least request that they unblock you, and they will do that. With live.com and icloud.com you have to spend inordinate amounts of time bouncing between useless support people before you get anywhere. gmail in general seems to have the best spam filter (lowest false positives and negatives).

In my experience live.com was an easy fix.

But gmail was not. Even as a business user with support.

Gmail rejects me as an ugly spammer at the gate when using IPv6 but not when using IPv4.

My IP addresses are not listed in any public blacklists.

And the Borg hivemind is not able to tell me why. Gmail support is friendly but have no knowledge of their filter nor an escalation path.

The amusing part is they reject me as a bulk sender. But when I register into their bulk mailer program my volume is too low.

This is with strict SPF, DKIM, DMARC and registered with dnswl.org.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#306

Post by clan »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #231
techsupporter wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sucks ass when your mail does not get through as GMail/Hotmail rejects a connection from the IP address your cloud company allocated for you, in spite of DKIM etc. God, yes. Gmail, in particular, really enjoyed just dropping connections from my IPv6 addresses every few months. Sometimes it would return an error, something obtuse and wrong like maybe, "your forward and reverse DNS records do not match" even thoug…

> "your domain reputation is coming back as too new." Did you follow up on that crap and asked what the fuck could possibly be going on with this nonsense? (More politely than I just did of course.)

I have had the same problems with IPv6 and Gmail. As I also admin G.Suite I have access to their paid support.

I did your exact follow up - politely and persistent!!

It was a dead-end. They had no idea - and worse - no escalation path to the SMTP team.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#307

Post by jarvuschris »

agentultra wrote: post #41

I 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!…

There's no reason it _has_ to be like this. I feel like it became common wisdom that you just shouldn't run a mail server too early and the cool kids all gave up working on mail servers. The author is right though about how terrifying it is that we've ceded running email to an advertising company

All the things that make running your own server hard are software problems, the protocol itself lends itself very well to running your own. We just need someone to build the [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/) of mail servers. You have the right idea with your Haskell server, though I think in this day a Go project might be more successful.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#308

Post by ilammy »

smolsky wrote: post #200
agentultra wrote: post #41

I 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!…

I ran my own mail server (a few VMs in the cloud) for about five years. It's fun as you have control over accounts, aliases, forwarding, sieve tricks as well as backups. It's good to know that your broker and doctor's mail is delivered directly to your server and not Google. It sucks ass when your mail does not get through as GMail/Hotmail rejects a connection from the IP address your cloud company allocated for you,…

> It's good to know that your broker and doctor's mail is delivered directly to your server and not Google.

That's only if your broker and doctor are not using Gmail or G Suite, otherwise your email (with them) is likely to be read by Alphabet regardless of your server setup.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#309

Post by foxhop »

I run my own outbound mail server for my infra. I couldn't justify paying a 3rd party just to make my mail more deliverable. I understand the cat/mouse game of spam but that should not prevent the rest of the world from running thier own email services.

I also accept inbound mx for some of my personal domains, but I don't currently manage my own mailboxes, the mail gets aliased to my Gmail account.

If at some point I get fed up with this arrangement I can transparently change where the email ends up.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#310

Post by dade_ »

ef4 wrote: post #285

> Getting off GMail is one of the best ways to take back your data in the face of dragnet surveillance. This just isn't true. You can host your own mail server and GMail will probably still end up hosting a large fraction of the email you read and write, because the people you correspond with are still using GMail. (In the same vein, you can refuse to have a Facebook account but Facebook probably has a dossier on you…

That is a very defeatist position.
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