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

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

#501

Post by stjohnswarts »

marvel_boy wrote: post #195
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…

Apple supports encryption on Mail: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mail/mlhlp1180/mac

protonmail also has nice tools for it if you use them. I suspect tutanota probably does as well.

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

#502

Post by radford-neal »

gingerlime wrote: post #69

Sending email out is a royal pain. Trying to deal with a Microsoft ban on my IP even though it’s sparkling clean for several years. DKIM, DMARC, SPF etc all ser up, reverse dns, you name it. Looks like Linode is being blocked as a whole pretty much? Hate the level of centralization, particularly since there’s still a shit ton of spam still around. Sorry for the rant. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions…

I vaguely recall seeing in Linode docs that Linode itself blocks outgoing mail, unless you contact them to arrange for them not to.

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

#503

Post by hardwaresofton »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #498
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.

I agree with you, but I think that stack you're using is actively harmful to newcomers at this point.

Something like Maddy is much easier to set up, comes with workable SMTP + IMAP, saves to object storage.

If you pair maddy with Thunderbird/Outlook/Mail/whatever else, I think we can actually get new people self-hosting without getting discouraged.

[EDIT] I misunderstood the earlier comment as a recommendation -- it's just a statement of fact.

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

#504

Post by laundermaf »

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…

> Small cost per email like 0.01 cents that is trivial for legitimate senders but not for bulk-sending spammers

Given how much is spent on ads, I’d say that an email is still worth more than that. So, what you get is spammers paying minuscole amount of money to skip the spam filter and killing the idea at the root.

Or they can simply steal these credentials from one of the millions of hacked sites and cause additional trouble to them.

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

#505

Post by RockingGoodNite »

sbuk wrote: post #260
Fuzzeh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPF and DKIM no longer have any real value. Just look at SA and the values it assigns by default to mail with those headers. Couple that will the fact that spam now has valid SPF and DKIM - just makes them pointless.

DKIM and SPF, along with DMARC are more about authentication - they let you know that the message has come from where it says it does. This makes spoofing harder, not necessarily spam. Greylisting deals with most of the "spray and prey" spammers, though it does have it's own issues.

Agreed.

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

#506

Post by RockingGoodNite »

intelVISA wrote: post #248
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.

Yep SMTP relay is the only sane choice nowadays sadly. Sending your own mail is a losing battle against the email blacklist cartel.

No...it isn't the only sane choice. If it works for you, great. Forunately for Internet freedom, there many of us small timers left who have no issues hosting our own email.

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

#507

Post by neilk »

fortran77 wrote: post #155
neilk wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

e-postage, knows-SMTP-4, knows-SMTP-5 -> https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html We have cryptographic identity in SMTP already. In fact, almost all our protocols and formats for signing and identity were first adapted from email standards. This has already failed. "You might be an anti-spam kook" does need to be updated to also include cryptocurrency solutions. You're neglecting the transaction costs as…

> "You might be an anti-spam kook" does need to be updated to also include cryptocurrency solutions I was scanning this thread to see if someone would post that old copypasta email solution checklist form again. Here's one version: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

I can’t believe it, there is already a checkbox for “weird new form of money”.

I feel a little bit bad for dismissing the solution… but not very bad.

If low-cost microtransactions were viable, we could do many interesting things. For some reason cryptocurrency is often conflated with microtransactions. Yeah yeah Lightning Network blah blah, but I haven’t heard of anything that could scale to 300 billion emails per day.

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

#508

Post by RockingGoodNite »

dhosek wrote: post #235
mordae wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

Indeed. I host my domains with dreamhost and it turns out that outgoing mail from their servers will get marked as spam by Google. The exact same mail sent through a gmail address (whether under gmail.com or a custom domain) will be delivered no problem (although after the sudden closing of legacy free email, I found that emails that I had been sending via gmail with my own domain that had been getting blocked by spa…

I can pick any ISP today, including Dreamhost, and have clean email reputation and sending ability with FAANG and Microsoft in less than 30 days.

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

#509

Post by RockingGoodNite »

srkaplan wrote: post #370
mordae wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

I just randomly looked at 8 different emails in my inbox. All of them were from different email providers (except google which was there twice). There's hundreds or thousands of email providers you can chose from. iphmx 1 google 2 kornet 1 linkedin 1 secureserver 1 amazonses 1 self hosted university email 1

Agreed.

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

#510

Post by RockingGoodNite »

api wrote: post #259
mordae wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

It’s just because of spam. All open systems that do not impose a cost to participate are destroyed by spam.

Incorrect.
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