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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

#711

Post by bullen »

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…

Everyone that can should host their own HTTP/1.1, DNS and SMTP at home on a battery backed Raspberry 1, 2 or Zero if they have an external IP.

To host anything beyond those protocols and/or on more powerful hardware is often counter productive.

The problem is getting the ports opened, you need to fight for that right even if it makes spam worse in the short term.

Fight for external IP, ports and static IP in that order.

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

#712

Post by bullen »

Everyone that can should host their own HTTP/1.1, DNS and SMTP at home on a battery backed Raspberry 1, 2 or Zero if they have an external IP.

Preferably with their own implementations, I have implemented all 3.

To host anything beyond those protocols and/or on more powerful hardware is often counter productive.

The problem is getting the ports opened, you need to fight for that right even if it makes spam worse in the short term.

Fight for external IP, ports and static IP in that order.

Edit: Reposting as separate comment because very important!

Edit2: How I wish downvoting required an argument. 500 karma is too low a barrier.

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

#713

Post by [deleted] »

zimpenfish wrote: post #618
jjav wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use any kind of block list on my mail server, as I find the concept to be fundamentally flawed. I accept all incoming email as long as basic sanity on the connection is met and then apply bayesian filtering after the email has been accepted. I get just about no spam at all (<10 per month, maybe).

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.

[deleted]

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

#714

Post by HenriTEL »

jhugo wrote: post #704
HenriTEL wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

You say that self-hosting a mail server is obvious and extremely low effort, which simply is not true. But ok, let's say that you happen to have a clean IP and no spam or dmarc issues. You still had to choose what to deploy, which is not obvious and actually setup/maintain your server which is not extremely low effort.

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

#715

Post by Avamander »

pas wrote: post #698
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.

we mandate public health measures because it's kind of easy to check for "safe to eat" quality. also arguably it's too ineffective considering how hard it is to open a restaurant. (because instead of harassing random taco trucks we should focus on other preventative measures, better visibility of food safety, better reporting and tracking) sure maybe it's time for a "Let's Email" (after letsencrypt) service that hand…

> sure maybe it's time for a "Let's Email" (after letsencrypt) service that handles reputation for email senders. > what's needed is something similar.

There are more than a few out there. No offense but if you would have had dealt with spam, you would have known that already.

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

#716

Post by zimpenfish »

t0k0l0sh wrote: post #676
zimpenfish wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You mentioned receiving 10s of spam per day - are they being classified correctly and put in your spam folder or are you seeing them in your inboxes? My mx hosted with hetzner also runs rspamd. Of the 32k mails received in the last month, 40% were rejected (postfix DISCARD, so the sender sees the mail as accepted but its sent to /dev/null - this only happens to mails scored very highly as spam, or sent to a spam trap…

> are they being classified correctly and put in your spam folder

Mostly. There's probably 3-5 spams a day which get into my inbox; also 10-15 a day that wrongly end up in the "maybespam" folder (generally bulk that I'm not worried about seeing 100%.)

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

#717

Post by GoblinSlayer »

zimpenfish wrote: post #618
jjav wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use any kind of block list on my mail server, as I find the concept to be fundamentally flawed. I accept all incoming email as long as basic sanity on the connection is met and then apply bayesian filtering after the email has been accepted. I get just about no spam at all (<10 per month, maybe).

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.

I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good unless you publish your address globally?

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

#718

Post by zimpenfish »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #717
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.

I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good unless you publish your address globally?

> I thought self hosting is for aliases? Shouldn't those fix spam for good

Not quite sure I follow? Unless you mean "only allow emails to specific email addresses you've noted down", in which case, yeah, that works but also means a lot of admin when you want to use a new one (plus there's 10+ other people who use my servers for email, not just me.)

> unless you publish your address globally?

At least one of my email addresses has been published globally since ~1995. Others since ~2000.

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

#719

Post by janandonly »

It's strange that in his list of possible solutions to keep e-mail spam free, there is zero mentioning of hashcash [1].

No, that is not a shitty crypto coin. It's just a computational proof that your computer spend some seconds on hashing, which is fine if you send 1-to-1 emails like real people do, but not if you are a spammer who bought a file with 6 million leaked e-mail addresses.

See Back's 2002 paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".[2]

  [1] https://wikiless.org/wiki/Hashcash

  [2] http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf

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

#720

Post by pas »

Avamander wrote: post #715
pas wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we mandate public health measures because it's kind of easy to check for "safe to eat" quality. also arguably it's too ineffective considering how hard it is to open a restaurant. (because instead of harassing random taco trucks we should focus on other preventative measures, better visibility of food safety, better reporting and tracking) sure maybe it's time for a "Let's Email" (after letsencrypt) service that hand…

> sure maybe it's time for a "Let's Email" (after letsencrypt) service that handles reputation for email senders. > what's needed is something similar. There are more than a few out there. No offense but if you would have had dealt with spam, you would have known that already.

I know, and they are quite useless since the big mailbox hosts don't interact with them.

the wonder of letsencrypt is that it does have the backing of Google et al.

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