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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

#521

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

Giving large providers a taste of their own medicine might be interesting, let gmail spend 24 hours on a black hole list, make sure the removal forms have a captcha so they can’t be filled out by automation, when people complain on social media then let people know what it’s about. Social media really gets Google’s attention, it draws them out from behind their algorithms and silence when nothing else will.

Utilizing IPv6 more might help also since at some point it becomes absurd to have quintillions of addresses blocked for all eternity.

There are monopoly and racketeering angles also, since Google and Outlook are suppressing independent mailers in favor of their own paid products. Nobody will make any money except the lawyers but that’s ok as long as the situation improves.

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

#522

Post by RockingGoodNite »

massaman_yams wrote: post #397

I am not a Google employee, but I do work with email anti-spam at scale. There's a lot to critique here but it boils down to three points: 1. Spam filter behavior has changed because spam has increased in volume and sophistication, not because ISPs want to save money, or to eliminate competition. Some techniques that worked well 5 years ago aren't as effective anymore. One of the consequences of this has been a reduc…

Agreed, well written counterpoints.

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

#523

Post by Joel_Mckay »

The cloud services providers have some of the worst IP blocks for spam. Cheap hosting blocks are a distant second place.

Google for example, doesn't even hide the fact you have to request whitelisting using their online business services portal. They don't give a toss what kind of sender authentication/signing hoops you have jumped through already, and user letters may still end up in the spam bin.

Many users have indeed migrated to the web platforms, and don't care about people data-mining their business communications. The real issue is so have many spammers/scams, a side-effect keeping their trade on life support by removing technological administrative barriers for the desperate... and you can't block Google/Outlook/Redmond.

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

#524

Post by Godel_unicode »

jhugo wrote: post #455
yomkippur wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

was just gonna ask how you would handle DKIM and SPF stuff. Hetzner? Digitalocean?

Find a clueful small provider, local to you if possible. On huge providers like Hetzner and DO, you are guaranteed to have spammers as neighbours some of the time, even if the provider rapidly shuts them down. On the other hand, a good-quality small provider may rarely if ever host spammers.

Counterpoint, our mail admins spend a lot of time trying to convince small-scale providers to shutdown the spam email coming from them. Lots of people who host at small scale providers don’t care about patches, so they send tons of spam.

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

#525

Post by Godel_unicode »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #521

Giving large providers a taste of their own medicine might be interesting, let gmail spend 24 hours on a black hole list, make sure the removal forms have a captcha so they can’t be filled out by automation, when people complain on social media then let people know what it’s about. Social media really gets Google’s attention, it draws them out from behind their algorithms and silence when nothing else will. Utilizing…

Gmail wouldn’t care at all, they know the pressure would go the other way. Racketeering doesn’t mean what you think it means.

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

#526

Post by RockingGoodNite »

jrm4 wrote: post #306
colinsane wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like saying "You can only have hamburgers two ways, cook them yourself or McDonalds." and your comment seems to be saying it’s OK if we lose the ability to cook hamburgers at home, because there are other (more ethical) restaurants that aren’t McDonalds. am i misunderstanding?

No. To beat up the metaphor, I'm saying if we support the restaurants that aren't McDonalds and that are more "mom and pop" (and get others on board) then we can beat McDonalds or at least live in harmony with them.

To colinsane's point, I don't want to be a restaurant, I want to cook my burger at home. A lot of us do. You're OK with the Hostdime restaurant. I'm OK cooking my own burger. A lot of us are and we don't want to lose that right.

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

#527

Post by RockingGoodNite »

Avamander wrote: post #275
colinsane wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like saying "You can only have hamburgers two ways, cook them yourself or McDonalds." and your comment seems to be saying it’s OK if we lose the ability to cook hamburgers at home, because there are other (more ethical) restaurants that aren’t McDonalds. am i misunderstanding?

The metaphor is kinda good. It's okay for people to refuse your home-cooked burgers because they don't trust them to be safe. There are actual small food vendors that comply with sanitation rules and you can have them provide catering services, professionally. And that is okay.

Public health is not at stake. I want to cook my own damn email burger thank you.

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

#528

Post by dsr_ »

Aeolun wrote: post #400
PinguTS wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completly agree with you. While Hetzner is my actual neighbor as their headquarters is right in the neighboring town, I still use a server at very small scale provider. I have no problem with my email server. I receive some spam here and there, mostly from Russia. But I immediatly block the according IP addresses for some time. For years I avoided to use any external service to decide whether its Spam or not. But a…

> Even as I don't use DKIM or DMARC. I wouldn’t expect sending email to be the problem. But I’d be surprised if it’s delivered.

One of SPF or DKIM is pretty much mandatory, and SPF is far easy to maintain.

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

#529

Post by RockingGoodNite »

tsukikage wrote: post #123
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've been running a private mailserver for myself and a couple of friends since 2002. I hit a similar issue with Microsoft last year. I route outgoing mail to hotmail.com, live.com, outlook.com and msn.com domains via email-smtp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com. I started doing this when I noticed a large portion of e-commerce email I was receiving originated from amazon vms and they clearly had no deliverability issues. The…

File a complaint request, they will fix it, they did for me.

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

#530

Post by LMYahooTFY »

zahllos wrote: post #71

I'm on 12 years of self hosting email and counting. Once every so often, I do end up being blocked, usually by Outlook and once by Yahoo. I'm in their 'sender program' and they still don't actually bother to contact postmaster@, but a few emails is usually enough to unblock the block within 24h. Agree with a sibling comment that many major providers fail to operate the SPF/DKIM/DMARC tools they insist you do. Each to…

Would using a VPS with a static IP not work?

Also does it help to use Google/Azure to host with regard to IP reputation with Gmail or Outlook?

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