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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

#701

Post by jhugo »

jwr wrote: post #669
jhugo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It absolutely matters which provider you choose, assuming the provider is big enough to have their own address allocations (which is not that big, really — plenty of relatively small hosting providers all over the world have their own ASN and address allocations).

My recommendation is to use a provider that doesn't host spammers. Hetzner is not great at that in my experience, but sounds like they've been fine for you. Smaller providers who know their customers and are able to pay attention to how their network is being used are generally quite good at making things difficult enough for spammers that they go elsewhere.

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

#702

Post by jhugo »

reidrac wrote: post #603
jhugo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 agree, but it is true that some aggressive DNS RBL may include Digital Ocean, for example, just because [1]. The point is not that much that there are such blocking lists, the point is why admins use them. Surely that's blocking a good chunk of spam, but also legit sites. 1: "As you should know now: It is not you, it is your complete provider which got [redacted] listed."

DO regularly shows up on RBLs, even "less aggressive" ones, because it's regularly a source of spam. Same with Hetzner.

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

#703

Post by jhugo »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #495
jhugo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Real hardware servers are not required to host email.

I agree, and said that in my parent comment.

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

#704

Post by jhugo »

HenriTEL wrote: post #657
jhugo wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also 20+ years, only very minor issues. The spam situation has gotten much better over that time, too. This topic comes up every so often on HN and I feel like the "never self-host, it's guaranteed to be a disaster, you have to use a centralised provider" crowd are just louder. Self-hosting my mail isn't something I think about much or talk about much. It's so obvious to me that it's worth doing, and it's extremely l…

> It's so obvious to me that it's worth doing, and it's extremely low effort. DMARC, IP reputation and spams are not obvious.

Amazing — even though you quoted me, you still managed to reply to something I didn't say!

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

#705

Post by jhugo »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #524
jhugo wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't seem like a counterpoint to me. The provider you're describing isn't clueful. A clueful provider pays attention to what's happening on their network and knows how to make themselves an unattractive host for spammers.

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

#706

Post by jhugo »

neop1x wrote: post #598
jhugo wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 had tried it on a very inexpensive VPS before having my own physical server. The IP was blocked almost everywhere. Even though I filled out a lot of forms in Outlook, Yahoo, etc, it appeared that those major email providers had blacklisted the entire subnet of the VPS provider, and IP reputation seemed to have made little difference. Choosing the right provider is crucial! A new VPS provider may work well and make…

Selecting the right host is very important. They should be unattractive as a host for spammers. Get this part right and you don't have to worry that tomorrow your neighbour is a spammer. The virtual/dedicated thing is not as important — many providers comingle virtual and dedicated servers in the same address space anyway.

One example of a good signal: if you cannot sign up online, but must make personal contact with the provider (via email or other means) to set up a server. It's a minor inconvenience for you — you're only going to do it once — but spammers expect to have to do it many times and won't bother.

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

#707

Post by jgsaau »

koheripbal wrote: post #471
jimmydorry wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are using external blocklists, you are perpetuating the problem here. Small mail operators end up on blocklists through no fault of their own, and it sounds like your server would reject them just like the big servers do.

Not using block lists will inundate mail servers with spam. It's a necessary evil.

What we found 20+ years ago when we started to provide a very poor service to attempted spam delivery was that the spammers realised our servers were very 'slow' and stopped the attempts. We used to get 1000s of new IPV4 tuples / day, now we get < 10. If you put the inbound SMTP sessions to sleep this is wrecking the spammers bus. model, they need to deliver 1,000,000,000+ / day. Don't u fell sorry 4 them. The only time we don't tuck them in 4 a snooze is if they are in a 3rd party BL !!!

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

#708

Post by hardwaresofton »

fire wrote: post #699
hardwaresofton wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey apologies, I just enabled EthicalAds this week, I'll look into this and add something... I'll also forward your concern to them.

Thank you very much!

just for visibility -- it should be fixed, added a media query just now.

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

#709

Post by emiliosic »

Couple of suggestions: Oracle's OCI has a free offering. One could use that as a mail relay. Also SpamHero has been a pleasure to work with with very reasonable pricing to filter most of the junk that comes in, re-delivery service and outbound relay

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

#710

Post by pas »

massaman_yams wrote: post #431
pas wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if netblock reputation were known small non-spam senders would congregate, this would help weed out the spammers. but google et al. don't provide any feedback. nor any way to build reputation for your IP. (where are all the staking blockfoo chainbar solutions? or at least let people pay a one time fee for some exception) anyway, since we already have certificate transparency, we could have a similar one to look up MT…

> "... small non-spam senders would congregate" Congratulations, you've invented the email service provider. Most small non-spam senders don't want to spend the time figuring out IP reputation, DKIM, or SPF already, so they pay someone to do it for them. What makes netblock reputation different? Reputation isn't public because then spammers game it and you get worse filtering outcomes. ISPs learned this the hard way.

sure, there is no problem with having 95+ % or more handled by professional industrial companies

the problem is that they literally don't even allow others at the table, only way is to force yourself a seat by having enough traffic

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