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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)

#311

Post by _xnmw »

twothamendment wrote: post #21
Torgo wrote: post #7

I started running my own email server around 2014. I am using every mitigation I can find, but I still get an unending torrent of spam that slips through. If tweaking spam filters and deleting spam is your idea of fun, then run your own email server.

I've been running since 2001. There were some rough years in there with spam and big providers rejecting for no good reason. Now it has been years since I've had any delivery issues. As for spam, I get 2-3 a week that make it through, but I don't make any effort to tweak it. Thanks for bringing up the painful memories of adding new filters each night. So glad those days are over for me.

Big providers probably rejected you in the early days because you were an unknown sender back then.

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

#312

Post by collinmanderson »

dasil003 wrote: post #220
_jal wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat - been running my own mail since the 90s. I could understand complaints about lots of weird hoops to jump through to get mail from your server accepted elsewhere - that has become harder over time[1] - but there's a very short list of things that need to be done to avoid being hijacked. Mail server setup for the uninitiated does look a little daunting, especially if you're more accustomed to "all…

On the plus side, do you really want to communicate with anyone who uses a SBCGlobal email address?

That’s kind of harsh. I know a lot of people with sbcglobal addresses, and yes I want to communicate with them.

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

#313

Post by scottmsul »

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 wonder if cryptocurrencies could be used as an anti-spam prevention measure. In order to send you an email, maybe I have to send you 2 cents worth of cryptocurrency.

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

#314

Post by grib »

scottmsul wrote: post #313
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 wonder if cryptocurrencies could be used as an anti-spam prevention measure. In order to send you an email, maybe I have to send you 2 cents worth of cryptocurrency.

Everything old is new again, the bitcoin proof of work mining began life as a way to require people sending email to burn a second or two of cpu time see: http://www.hashcash.org/

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

#315

Post by floatboth »

techsupporter wrote: post #217
smolsky wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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…

> no data was ever reported because "your mail volume is too low."

That is fucking shameful indeed. Domains with tiny volume need postmaster tools the most…

But it seems like having a little conversation from your domain with a gmail address helps. Just send a mail to your google account, click not spam, reply, do a couple more back and forth replies.

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

#316

Post by cpncrunch »

megous wrote: post #295
cpncrunch wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Hmm, but where do you ask for that?

I think this is the link:

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/msgdelivery?vid=0-35...

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

#317

Post by cpncrunch »

clan wrote: post #304
cpncrunch wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Did you fill in the delivery problem form?

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/msgdelivery?vid=0-35...

I had a problem with ipv6 myself with gmail, but the problem was that I just didn't have ipv6 fully set up on my server, so either SPF or reverse DNS wasn't working or something like that. I think I just configured sendmail to only use ipv4 and that solved the gmail issue.

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

#318

Post by mholt »

jarvuschris wrote: post #307
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…

The "Caddy of mail servers" should be a plugin to Caddy, since server types are pluggable. Caddy's HTTP, DNS, and TCP+UDP servers are all just plugins.

I typically don't recommend someone running their own mail server, but if they do, I wish there'd be a good one they can use, and that one would definitely be a Caddy plugin.

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

#319

Post by erikb »

SwellJoe wrote: post #133

I'm surprised by how many people think mail is an impossibly hard problem. There some things about mail that are stupid; the core protocols are old and it shows. But, once things are working, you can leave it alone for years (aside from regular software updates) without trouble. I have. I've never not run my own mail servers (and often for several other people/companies/projects, as well) in the past 20 years. I used…

I seriously always failed getting over that first hurdle every time I tried. I didn't try this one yet, but most guides deviate from whatever my setup will be by a little, and that then increases to a lot of investigation work with pretty unclear config values and not a lot of debugging tools.

Have I invested enough energy? Apparently not. But I'm over the weekend-sized amount by a multipler bigger than three.

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

#320

Post by Pistos2 »

notinventedhear wrote: post #16

Yeesh, 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.

> Please note that the goal of this project is to provide a simple, turn-key solution. There are basically no configuration options and you can’t tweak the machine’s configuration files after installation.

Can't configure post-install? At all? This seems like it would be a showstopper for some.

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