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Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

coinerella.com

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Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#41

Post by cassepipe »

bgro wrote: post #20
elric wrote: post #10

This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future. Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.

Yes, the world will be a better place with a real email alternative. The current system does not work. I should be able to refuse emails and not get spammed with life ending phishing and malicious links around every corner. Email providers shouldn’t be able to whoopsie and delete emails on my behalf, or gatekeep information that’s needed in court. Self hosting doesn’t fix the core problems with email even if you don’…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810747 was a proposed solution but it didn't catch on

Basically you had to play a (very small) amount to charity to cold-email someone (and with an escape hatch if you state you know the person)

That system would basically gate all spam without changing much

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#42

Post by willy__ »

tptacek wrote: post #31
elric wrote: post #10

This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future. Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.

That depends on what your goal is. If it's to change the world, it's self-defeating. If it's to build a product, it's common sense.

You hit the nail on the head.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#44

Post by willy__ »

nyeah wrote: post #17

Some people say "this is obviously wrong" and other people say "this is too obviously correct to be worth mentioning." That combination can sometimes indicate an interesting point.

That's why I ended up writing the article. I had some comments under my last post in the "worlds collide" category that I personally could not fathom.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#46

Post by comrade1234 »

I've been hosting my own email server since 1999. It started in San Francisco, moved to a colo in socal for awhile and is currently in my cellar here in Zurich on a fixed residential ip.

Thinks have definitely gotten stricter over the years, with things like dkim and a few other acronyms I can't remember. But if you follow the rules and keep your server secure I've never had a problem sending to Google, Microsoft, etc.

I'd rather not host my own mail but I like having it close by where if someone wants to subpoena me they factually have to go through me. Also I have so much historical email (27 years) it is GBs and so costly.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#47

Post by throwmeaway820 »

This article was clearly written by an LLM.

The author has two other submissions, one of which is entitled "Programmatic SEO: Generating 100k+ Pages That Rank".

I'm at the point now where I find it incredibly rude when someone expects me to read LLM output without clearly identifying it as such.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#49

Post by xantronix »

Sure, it's a pain in the ass, but why should we scare people away who WANT to self-host?

Pro tip for people with low mail volume or those who can spare a few packets on extra DNS traffic: Validating that a host has a non-provider PTR record which has corresponding A/AAAA/CNAME records resolving back to that same IP address, is enough to filter out a large bulk of spam.

Re: Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026

#50

Post by lanstin »

elric wrote: post #10

This attitude is so self-defeating. If no one hosts their own email anymore, no one will be able to host their own email anymore in the future. Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.

Email itself cannot be regarded as a reliable delivery method. That said, I host my own email service, have for decades, and often have problems sending to people. I am not running a product on it, and so my recipients usually will check in spam since they want my email. My family knows to txt if there is an email I need to read (that isn’t a mail hosting problem but I don’t really read email consistently). I also have a small web site where I can put family recipes and my resume and the odd file that is too large for email. And a mastodon instance, sync thing, dns, and an old fingerd I wrote in Lisp in 2008 when I was done being a stay at home dad and needed an industry job.

It is a great hobby, and a good way to keep aware of current trends in internet infrastructure. And, like riding a bicycle to commute, maximally free of red tape or external regulation.

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