Where is UUCP? Why are addresses not bang paths? Where is sendmail.cf?
Ditto. I was sorely disappointed to click through "1984" to find a subheading on "setting up postfix".
Self-hosting email like it's 1984
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#42Say I want to test the waters for selfhosting email, and I already have my how domains setup with SaaS like Google workspace and equivalent. Is there a way to setup mx records so that both google and my own server gets email for a while? This would be useful to test the waters over a few months before fully migrating
Not really, SMTP relays will only send messages once, to one server.
But it’s not receiving that is the problem, that is generally fine, if ports are open at ISP / network level. It is the sending that is often tricky. Sending email on the other hand can be done from multiple servers (if SPF correctly configured) And nothing prevents you from sending email directly from your own relay. You could try that, and reception would not be affected.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#43[flagged]
I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email. Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted. I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my e…
The Canadian government too. They let Microsoft do it. A company headquartered in a country threatening to annex Canada, and known to collaborate with their spy agencies.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's addressed in the article: > The elephant in the room is real-world deliverability. With self-hosting you risk not receiving mail or someone missing your mail. I accept this for my personal projects, but you may not. Keep this in mind.
Not self-hosting if you actually need email does not address the elephant that self-hosting email doesn't actually do email. I say this as someone who self-hosted for several years but had to give up because important emails were discarded. Until the deliverability issue is actually addressed, self-hosting is not viable for email.
I’ve been self hosting my email for thirty years. I don’t have any more deliverability issues than I do at work using a major provider. It is entirely viable.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#45[flagged]
One problem in this are bad actors. German Telecom for example (t-online.de) only accepts mails from servers it whitelists. To get whitelisted you have to apply with them and your domain HAS to have a website with an Impressum, your clear legal name AND an email that is NOT your domain for emergency contact. It is insane. If every provider would act like that, email would die in a month.
Ironic that a big telecom does not believe in decentralized protocols. Oh wait….
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#46Modern email providers, especially ones offered by ISPs often have the same problems that people criticize self-hosted providers for. Even Google has problems. For example, I regularly order via companies that use Shopify. Now, all of the shopify emails are going straight to spam in Gmail, despite constantly marking them as not spam. (These even pass dmarc/spf/dkim etc, so who knows what's going on here.) Email deliv…
I have self hosted my email for about twenty years; fr about ten or fifteen I just forwarded everything to Gmail but had to revert to local ( started with local mail in emacs, but switched to imapd to solve the airplane ticket in the airport issue) because so much important stuff was marked as spam. Like in the middle of a conversation between me and on other person their reply to my email (which I always bcc:ed ack to myself) would disappear. Self hosted is much better. It took few iteration to get spf etc working.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#47[flagged]
One problem in this are bad actors. German Telecom for example (t-online.de) only accepts mails from servers it whitelists. To get whitelisted you have to apply with them and your domain HAS to have a website with an Impressum, your clear legal name AND an email that is NOT your domain for emergency contact. It is insane. If every provider would act like that, email would die in a month.
[dead]
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#48Actually, full strength virtual (multi-domain) email hosting is also quite doable.
This is a great guide that's been used and updated for many years:
https://www.purplehat.org/?page_id=1450
Once hosting email for yourself, you may want to add new project-specific domains, or host email for friends and family. The database user accounts actually make it easier to add and remove users after the system is up and running.
This Purplehat guide provides a step by step procedure that's allowed many people and orgs to bring self-hosted email online...
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#49Say I want to test the waters for selfhosting email, and I already have my how domains setup with SaaS like Google workspace and equivalent. Is there a way to setup mx records so that both google and my own server gets email for a while? This would be useful to test the waters over a few months before fully migrating
Configure google to forward mails to your self hosted server.
When replying reply from your self hosted server.
That way you can gradually shift over.
I had been self hosting like this for years.
Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spoiler alert, it’s Postfix. So not really 1984 software. But then again, neither is Linux…
Almost everything described in the article didn't exist in 1984. Postfix, OpenDKIM, TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Only very basic SMTP and DNS, but even MX records didn't exist.
OpenDKIM seems dead: