Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

cfenollosa.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 744 posts

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#491

Post by tsaixingwei »

I tried to operate my own email server as well on a VPS, and I have been thinking that the way to solve these problems is to solve the problem of spam itself. Detecting spam puts the costs on the email providers... when the costs should be born by spammers.

Perhaps some sort of digital stamp (digital signatures similar to stamps on physical envelopes) for each email sent paid for with micropayments in a cryptocurrency like nano (note: I don't own any crypto). Small cost per email like 0.01 cents that is trivial for legitimate senders but not for bulk-sending spammers. SMTP servers should put all incoming unsigned emails into spam folders. This will disincentivize spamming (probably not eliminate it) enough that self-hosting emails might be possible again without having to swim against the tide.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#492

Post by RockingGoodNite »

jms703 wrote: post #74

Email is broken. Fix that first so that hosting it isn’t such a terrible chore.

This was the first thing in Google so caveat emptor: https://www.templafy.com/blog/how-many-emails-are-sent-every....

Now for the quote:

"Globally, as of 2019, a staggering 293. 6 billion emails were sent each day and there are currently now over 4 billion email users worldwide."

If we suppose that 95% of that traffic is SPAM, 14,650,000,000 or 14 Billion legitimate emails are sent around the world every day on a planet with 8 billion people and not sure how many of those are connected to email.

Even at 14 billion, email is staggeringly successful, this is why FAANG wants us small time operators who do this as a hobby, for free for ourselves and family ... out of their pool.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#493

Post by thayne »

How I wish spam was handled:

1. Any email that isn't signed with DKIM is blocked (having a signature specific to the source email address would be better, but that is probably too much to ask for)

2. If the sender isn't in your contact list, block it, or at least mark it as spam.

3. Have an easy way to add new entries to you contact list, maybe a new url scheme similar to mailto:? So that it reduces the friction of say getting a confirmation email when signing up for something, or making sure you get emails from a new acquaintance. It would probably be good to have a way to add a full domain to the allowlist as well.

But that would make selling/sharing email addresses a lot less valuable, so there might be some resistance to that from marketing and adtech.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#494

Post by RockingGoodNite »

What do I do? I got rid of Spamassassin after being challenged by someone on HN or Reddit, can't recall which. Spamassassin is pretty effective but was consuming too much of my time.

So I stopped. I analyzed mail for a few weeks to look for patterns in the wild with my server. I came to the conclusion to block all but the top level TLD's. That decision yielded very positive results.

I then wrote a simple SPAM blocking server to allow me to block habitual or suspicious TLD SPAM sending domains, as well as a few custom checks for common sense things.

As a result of those two decisions, I am now at or better at blocking SPAM than I was with Spamassassin and 2 other related tools I just remembered I also stopped using, spamass-milter and postgrey.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#495

Post by RockingGoodNite »

jhugo wrote: post #458
neop1x wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also been self-hosting email for 15 years and only had couple of problems at the beginning, mainly until my IP got enough reputation. I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though. It has reverse-DNS, SPF, DKIM, TLS, MTA-STS and even DANE with DNSSEC (on a self-hosted BIND but that's another story). It is implemented using Exim, Dovecot, SpamAssasin, DNSBL and Roundcub…

> I have been hosting it on a bare metal Supermicro server in a proper datacenter, though. This is a key difference. Many people who have a bad time self-hosting mail set up with a minimum-effort major provider like Hetzner or DO — you're guaranteed to have spammers as neighbours some of the time, and other networks will behave accordingly when deciding whether to accept your mail. A real server in a proper datacentr…

I've run my email server in VM's at a variety of ISP's like GoDaddy, Linode and AWS Lightsail and never had an issue, well once when Microsoft banned a group of IP's in a drag net. I filed a request with them and they fixed it in a week or so.

Real hardware servers are not required to host email.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#496

Post by stjohnswarts »

LinuxBender wrote: post #118
eikenberry wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a happy medium. Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. You have complete control over the incoming mail but dodge the filters by using the established business for sending mail.

Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy. [1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thund…

Not a single member of my friends or family is going to use GPG encryption, not even my mother who loves me dearly. I had a computer geek "penpal" for a while and we did monthly emails to each once a month to catch up via gpg, and even that died off lol

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#497

Post by stjohnswarts »

NavinF wrote: post #406
deltree7 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, this is the text book definition of "out of touch"

Yep. On any other site I’d assume that comment was satire. Nothing’s changed in the last decade: https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...

even zimmeman says it's too complicated for the unwashed masses and was meant for the techy crowd of the time he came up with it.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#498

Post by RockingGoodNite »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #460

For those who might choose to run their own email these days, you don't have to postfix + dovecot: https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy https://blitiri.com.ar/p/chasquid/ These options are much easier to set up, will do things like generate DKIM for you, etc. I talk about this a lot[0]. There are positively awesome tools for email out there. [EDIT] - Since I'm repeating myself I've collected all the options into a post[1]…

I recommend people do it themselves or not at all, these are my tools: postfix/dovecot/mysql/opendkim/opendmarc.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#499

Post by RockingGoodNite »

tsaixingwei wrote: post #491

I tried to operate my own email server as well on a VPS, and I have been thinking that the way to solve these problems is to solve the problem of spam itself. Detecting spam puts the costs on the email providers... when the costs should be born by spammers. Perhaps some sort of digital stamp (digital signatures similar to stamps on physical envelopes) for each email sent paid for with micropayments in a cryptocurrenc…

Cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme and even if it weren't, the technology crushes itself under its own weight.

Re: After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel

#500

Post by stjohnswarts »

sneak wrote: post #182
LinuxBender wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy. [1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thund…

Most of my friends and family don’t own computers, only phones and sometimes tablets.

there is definitely software to help with pgp on ANY tablet, phone, or PC your friends and family have access to. The universal problem is no one cares to encrypt except a few computer nerds, spooks, and journalists.
Post reply on HN