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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

#661

Post by raxxorraxor »

DanAtC wrote: post #210
flyinghamster wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been self-hosting email for years, and the only deliverability problem I've ever had has been with AT&T. If I try to send something to an AT&T customer, I get an automated "your message has been eaten" notice, and following its directions accomplishes precisely nothing. At this point, I can only guess they're hellbanning the IP block in which my VPS resides, because it does not show up on any public DNSBLs.…

At least you get notified. Microsoft/Outlook on the other hand silently drops emails leaving you and the recipient in the dark.

The correct response would be to set them on the blacklist for a time. People would complain and they would quickly change their behavior. Microsoft currently really wants everyone to have a Microsoft account.

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

#662

Post by zimpenfish »

dvdkon wrote: post #645
zimpenfish wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use block lists, fail2ban, gray listing, most of rspamd's widgets, and Bayesian filtering. Still getting 10s of spams a day just to my accounts.

Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse? I self-host and get fewer than 10 true spam emails per year (not counting marketing newsletters).

> Any guess on why people's experiences with spam are so diverse?

That would be an interesting research project. The domains getting most spams on my servers are the ones that are old (20+ years) which I guess makes sense.

Checking the rspamd logs for the last month gives just shy of 8500 emails with what I'd consider "definitely a spam" score. There's probably another 1000-1500 sneaking under that.

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

#663

Post by [deleted] »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #582
jimmydorry wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. I am pointing out that using the same kinds of lists that the big providers use will result in smaller providers being arbitrarily blocked with little recourse. Do you disagree with that assessment?

First, yes. They (the small providers) have recourse, it’s just annoying. They voluntarily signed up for that annoyance because of their ideology. But much more importantly, that question is orthogonal to my argument. Using blocklists is a good way to cut down on spam, the fact that it might block some trivial percentage of people who for ideological reasons might or might not be on those lists isn’t the receivers pr…

[deleted]

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

#664

Post by nickersonm »

hkt wrote: post #612
hardwaresofton wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Is Maddy's IMAP+object storage setup mature now? Last time I tried it I was testing against minio and trying to get my 25gb inbox synced over. The transfer was in b/s, would've taken forever. I love the project but haven't checked in on it for over a year now.

I use maddy + dovecot. maddy's IMAP implementation is good for small stuff (and trivial to set up!), but still performs very slow for few-GB inboxes or larger.

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

#665

Post by jrm4 »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #527
Avamander wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely!

Another way to look at it: In what world are you more likely to be able to cook your own burger: One where it's literally just McDonalds who can now control how people talk about burgers, or one where there's also other restaurants as well.

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

#666

Post by oskarc »

OP mentioned on Twitter that he chose iCloud Mail as the provider. How do You handle issues with losing incoming mails? Apple very often rejects mails from financial companies or ones that contain particular words and they won't report that to You. That's the only issue that keeps me from moving from own server.

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

#667

Post by account42 »

megous wrote: post #337
theturtletalks wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make sure your emails don't end up in spam?

That's a recipient's problem.

That's my current approach with Outlook's IP block blacklists.

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

#668

Post by jrm4 »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #526
jrm4 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Said it above; but I 100% agree with you. My point has "second-order" effects.

I'm not necessarily saying your email has to go away and you HAVE to use hostdime. I'm saying the goal of McDonalds is to dominate and obsucre everything and anything that cuts into that is useful, especially third-parties like Hostdime. For someone like me that finds it too hard, but also finds gmail unacceptable this is a good (and should be obvious) solution.

How I explain this in real life:

"You'd be stupid to run a business off of gmail. When your phone or internet or electricity goes down, you can call a human and yell at them because you pay them. What happens for google? This is why I pay someone."

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

#669

Post by jwr »

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 don't think it matters which provider you choose. Big corps ban entire IP blocks, and you will get spammers as neighbors both at a low-cost provider and at a "proper datacenter".

FWIW, I've been using Hetzner for the last 10 years or so (but bare metal server, not a VPS) and haven't had issues.

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

#670

Post by wholyshit »

Do not throw your towel.

I also manage since over 20 years my own mail server. Had a few problem but less than expected.

I love the flexibility and low costs besides the time which is needed to understand what is going. But this was a good invest if I look back.

Keep your mailservers running

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