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Self-hosting email like it's 1984

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Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#91

Post by dijit »

stebalien wrote: post #59

I used to do this. What finally killed it wasn't reputation, it was the fact that I needed 100% uptime or risk losing messages, getting my address blacklisted, etc. Email is supposed to be resilient to down time (retries, trying each MX record, etc.) but I found that large mail providers tend to just bounce and walk away. Worse, GitHub (back in 2016 and 2018) would mark a recipient as "unavailable" after a single bou…

I have a feature (called greylisting) whereby my server intentionally rejects the first mail it receives from a domain.

I have never had anyone claim that their mail has not been delivered to me, and I get a lot of mail.

Retry is built in to the spec, and if you’re really worried you can put a second “receive” SMTP server on the internet with a lower priority, and have it backhaul with LMTP.

———

Email was designed in a time where hosts were not perpetually connected to each other.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#92

Post by stavros »

watermelon0 wrote: post #29
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #7

Here is my advice to anyone wanting to test out self-hosting email. Start by using your self-hosted email to sign-up for accounts. You don't have to use the email address for your personal correspondence Use Mail-in-a-box to get started [1]. You can literally set it up in a couple of hours by following the instructions and everything should just work. After a few years, you can think about switching your personal cor…

I can recommend Stalwart [1] which is a complete mail service contained in a single binary, that doesn't really have any external dependencies, and is really easy to install and update. I've looked (and tried) a few other projects in the past, but Stalwart was the easiest to setup, and I haven't had any issues with it so far. [1] https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

I'm not looking to self-host my email, but this looks fantastic. It's making me reconsider the decision, hm. Thank you for this.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#93

Post by toast0 »

Krei-se wrote: post #76
toast0 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Q: If your server(s) is/are offline for a few hours, why would you "lose messages"? They said... >> Email is supposed to be resilient to down time (retries, trying each MX record, etc.) but I found that large mail providers tend to just bounce and walk away. I take that to mean that if your server isn't availble to receive the mail at the time it is first offered, it won't be retried later. That wasn't the case (fo…

It's not reasonable. Mail not deliverable is not the same as house burned down, recipient moved unknown or sth, it simply means the letter was not received. Who and why messed up is unknown, thus NO mail server will mark you down after a single attempt. Host your own!!

Reasonable and plausible are different things. I wouldn't be surprised if some outgoing servers just never get around to sending retries.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#94

Post by jeduardo »

drnick1 wrote: post #81

I think the following is a better guide for someone looking for a complete setup that includes an IMAP server and that can be used with regular email clients like Thunderbird: https://workaround.org/ispmail-bookworm/ I set up my own server more or less following the above guide, but eschewed the database in favor of plain text files. I wanted to keep things simple since I am the only user, but the above guide should…

I also use this guide, but I switched it to PostgreSQL instead. The recent upgrade to Trixie brought a new Dovecot with breaking changes to its configuration. That was a bit of a pain to resolve, but everything is working fine now.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#96

Post by talkingtab »

I personally believe it is worth exploring the idea of a different email realm for communities. The concept is pretty simple. Don't accept email from gmail, microsoft, hotmail or any other non-community member. Community members don't spam, don't send email in bulk and have reputation.

It is funded by pay-per-transgression. If you are a community member and someone receives unwanted email your reputation suffers. If you are gmail, et al you have to pay for each email sent & received.

Someone once wrote (let me know if you know the source) that users are not the customer, because they don't pay. It is advertisers who are the real email customers. This has resulted in a business model where users are prey animals. This is upside down and probably cannot be fixed without a hard fork.

I don't mean this is a good idea, or implementation. But I think it is a good direction.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#97

Post by 1oooqooq »

hmng wrote: post #75
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #57

(had to dug my comment from under a flagged parent) I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email. Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted. I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one w…

My first email usage was at University, pre-WWW. After that I briefly used some ISP email service, but that was on a time of very limited storage and POP only accounts, so I started hosting my own email even before having an always-on internet connection, using a relay and dynamic DNS to receive email when online. Now a days, I use a small VPS to route and receive email, but final destination and storage is on my hom…

outlook.com keeps sending me dmarc reports with failed dkim... while every single other provider gives pass to all domains. at this point I don't even care anymore.

why Microsoft is so crappy?

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#98

Post by Krei-se »

jasode wrote: post #83
Krei-se wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fearmongering. My mails always got resent after some hours or a day. It's absolutely NOT possible to tell if the problem is on your side, senders side or somewhere in between why a mail is not delivered once and no standard server config would simply toss it. Host your own mail. I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Don't be distracted by the "complexity" - if you config r…

>I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Your anecdote of success doesn't matter to the others that correctly configured DKIM/SPF and still don't get their emails delivered to Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/etc. E.g. : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 One of the reasons for hard-to-diagnose sending failures is that Gmail/Outlook have "extra invisible rules" that override correct D…

No, that's because your relay overwrites part of the header which makes dkim strict break. Change to relaxed or don't modify the header on your relay.

Outlook business will accept your mail, Outlook private may filter, but the rates fluctuate so heavy i suspect its rules based on user behaiviour/interests. I dono, cant have both spamfree inbox and 0 false positives.

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jasode wrote: post #83
Krei-se wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fearmongering. My mails always got resent after some hours or a day. It's absolutely NOT possible to tell if the problem is on your side, senders side or somewhere in between why a mail is not delivered once and no standard server config would simply toss it. Host your own mail. I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Don't be distracted by the "complexity" - if you config r…

>I get 99% deliverability with 0 repuation since i do dkim and spf correct. Your anecdote of success doesn't matter to the others that correctly configured DKIM/SPF and still don't get their emails delivered to Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/etc. E.g. : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437 One of the reasons for hard-to-diagnose sending failures is that Gmail/Outlook have "extra invisible rules" that override correct D…

[deleted]

Re: Self-hosting email like it's 1984

#100

Post by Gigachad »

mey wrote: post #82
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #57

(had to dug my comment from under a flagged parent) I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email. Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted. I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one w…

> treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it. This is why I have stepped away from a lot of my self hosting. I have turned my attention/time elsewhere. Apparently though the time/money balance is shifting a bit again, so it may be worth it to go back. My biggest hesitance to self hosting email specifically is dealing with spam. What does that look like these days and do you have any pointers to share?

I’m not sure that there is any pre made product for this, but I’ve been playing around with LLMs to identify spam, or just generally sorting emails for you. And even the self hosted models seem to be pretty good at classifying emails even without external information like spam blacklists or IP reputation.
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