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The “mail is hard” myth

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Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#301

Post by hakfoo »

jcranmer wrote: post #169
brianpgordon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. Each email is only worth so much to a spammer. They can't lose money on every email and make up for it with volume.

The value to spammers isn't in email delivered, it's the actual user engagement at the end of the process. A million messages delivered to the inbox is worth far more than a billion messages delivered to the spam folder.

A million messages delivered to the right inboxes are valuable.

The quantity-above-quality model in the spam industry probably lead to low-quality or vague list criteria. Broad demographic groups and domains. A lot of third party data of questionable legitimacy. If you've been running the list a long time, some "email address foo@bar.com clicked on campaigns A and B" data. You might be able to say on a large scale "List A is likely to convert better than B", but it still comes down to spray-and-pray at the individual address level.

If you went to a spammer with a few "sucker lists" of 100k emails each, and told him "you can only send 1k per day", will he have the data to triage his list to get a decent return on it anymore?

This would also snowball over time. Without being able to do high-volume campaigns initially, they'd have a harder time building up the knowledge they can use to manage their lists, and the quality would decline over time.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#302

Post by newscracker »

darekkay wrote: post #170
newscracker wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use... non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.

> and provide more, like Posteo Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".

Depends on your definition of “more” and also who you are as a user.

Just for arguments’ sake, I could argue that Fastmail’s privacy stance and policy don’t matter much compared to Posteo because of what’s written on their websites as well as which jurisdictions these are located in, and hence Posteo is better for privacy. I could also argue that for non-technical people, having a custom domain and managing it is a pain, compared to just choosing some domain from a list of predefined domains in a drop down and not having to worry about domain renewals, MX records, etc.

I’m not saying that custom domains are bad (they do allow you to switch to another provider easily), but there are trade offs to consider in both cases, and hence what may be “more” for one may be “less” for another.

Also consider the price difference when multiple mailboxes are required. Fastmail becomes quite expensive very soon compared to the others.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#303

Post by roel_v »

pdonis wrote: post #299
roel_v wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Can't tell if you're serious or not - but if you are, just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that. I mean I used it for many years but I'm a nerd weirdo.

> just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that You don't have to force an average user to hand edit Sieve files. You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file that current mail providers put on top of whatever hand-built custom non-standard filtering rules system they currently have. To the end user it would look the same…

" You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file"

From a quick google, there does seem to be a Roundcube plugin for managing Sieve filters, but man yet another dependency (or two, as it seems you need a separate daemon as well) in an already brittle (by the time you get to this point) stack...

Look, I understand where you're coming from, and I used Sieve for many years, but it's 2019 - something is not an 'Internet standard format' when the number of users actually using it can be expressed with 4 or 5 digits at best... This horse is not just dead, we're snorting its ground up bones by now. Nobody caters to power users any more. Back when power users made up a sizeable portion of the internet population, yes, but not in 2019...

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#304

Post by emailgreps »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #223
dwd wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also recommend setting up a dmarc record so you can monitor your deliverability. Spam however is still a hassle and you're never going to match Gmail or Outlook when you're small. Say it takes a few hundred identical spammy emails to trigger a filter. For Gmail it means the chance of receiving that spam is less than 1 in a million. If you're small and managing say a 1000 users - a large percentage will end up…

You can't actually measure deliverability with dmarc reports. They will only tell you the portion of emails that are bounced, but they don't differentiate between email in inbox and email in spam folder.

SPF and DKIM are best practices to get delivered to the inbox and DMARC reports are the richest source of aggregate email authentication performance results.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#305

Post by emailgreps »

emailgreps wrote: post #304
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't actually measure deliverability with dmarc reports. They will only tell you the portion of emails that are bounced, but they don't differentiate between email in inbox and email in spam folder.

SPF and DKIM are best practices to get delivered to the inbox and DMARC reports are the richest source of aggregate email authentication performance results.

However, you are correct, DMARC reports will not provide the disposition of an email getting delivered to the inbox or spam folder. The report is generated based upon the transaction at the MTA level before the message is handed off for delivery.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#306

Post by pdonis »

roel_v wrote: post #303
pdonis wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that You don't have to force an average user to hand edit Sieve files. You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file that current mail providers put on top of whatever hand-built custom non-standard filtering rules system they currently have. To the end user it would look the same…

" You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file" From a quick google, there does seem to be a Roundcube plugin for managing Sieve filters, but man yet another dependency (or two, as it seems you need a separate daemon as well) in an already brittle (by the time you get to this point) stack... Look, I understand where you're coming from, and I used Sieve for many years, but it's 2019 - somet…

> something is not an 'Internet standard format' when the number of users actually using it can be expressed with 4 or 5 digits at best

Well, there is no other standard format at all, so basically you're saying we might as well just give up trying to have an internet standard for email filtering. That doesn't seem like a good outcome to me.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#307

Post by pcamen »

In the late 90's I worked for an email server software company. Since then, almost 20 years now, I've been running my own mail server. I wouldn't say it is hard so much as a PITA and very time consuming. I spend quite a bit of time reviewing logs making sure that my server has not gotten hacked or compromised in some new way.

Over the years, a new exploit type comes along, like backscatter, that I then have to figure out how to secure my server against. And I'm also very proactive at reviewing logs and banning IP's against the constant barrage of probing. I must spend a few hours a week dealing with the mail server.

And then there are periodic "someone isn't getting my mail" problems that I have to track down, where Yahoo or pacbell.net or some other large mail system decides that my server is insecure for some reason, despite not being on any DNS RBLs (which are also sometimes a problem for no good reason).

If it weren't for the fact that I have so much more flexibility and ease-of-use on my own mail server for setting up many domains and multiple email addresses, I would move everything to a provider and not manage it myself.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#308

Post by ekianjo »

scarface74 wrote: post #113
ekianjo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else? The same can be said "why should I grow my own veggies when I can buy them from the supermarket?" - The point is always, always, about Freedom.

When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is. If you were running your own restaurant and your home grown vegetables caused a worse customer experience would you do it? Running your own mail server which causes more of your mail to go to spam is worse than using a commercial provider.

You noticed my point was not about any being better than the other. Growing veggies is a lot more work than buying them too. Again, Freedom.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#309

Post by ekianjo »

paulie_a wrote: post #135
ekianjo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a great analogy. Why do more work when you can get the same result with less effort? If you wake up one day and the only email you can use is the one you can get from a major provider, you have just become a consumer.

Honestly what's wrong with that?

It all depends on what you value and how independent and self reliant you would like to be.

Re: The “mail is hard” myth

#310

Post by gingerlime »

muppetman wrote: post #231
gingerlime wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you try to host it on Digital Ocean, they actually block port 25 out, so you're out of luck... And you have to manage diskspace, backups, firewall/fail2ban, OS updates etc etc etc I'm in the same boat as you. Managed to grind my teeth and pull through something like this for my own use and family, but it was painful.

I run my primary mailserver on DigitalOcean. It seems to work fine. I think you have to have either your account, or the Droplet, active for 30+ days before they'll let you have port 25 open.

Last time I asked they categorically said they won’t open port 25.

I think really old droplets might have had them open though. I guess they grandfathered these in

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