Subj : Re: Community
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : DustCouncil
Date : Thu Oct 06 2022 17:27:19

 pF>  bo> https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-th
 pF>  bo> -years-
 pF>  bo> i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

 pF> If that's the article I think it is, there's a lot of truth in it. I ran
 pF> my  own mail server for about 5 years back in the 2000s, and it was
 pF> manageable.  Trying to send mail from an ISP's IP block or a VPS
 pF> nowadays is a pain, and  getting your IPs off of blacklists is extremely
 pF> difficult.

Somewhere - it might have been reddit - people were tearing into this guy for being technically incompetent, because, well, that is how certain kinds of technical people are.

What should be accounted for is the *sheer joylessness* of hosting a server of any sort, if you have anything like a limited number of hours in the day *and* you don't particularly get a charge out of running one.  

I like running web servers, but I know a lot of people don't.  I expect there are people who like running e-mail servers. I sure don't.  There's no hobbyist pleasure in that for me, personally.

When I ran my own - it was Postfix - they kept releasing updates which broke my configuration files, which are byzantine and annoying to fix. And then there's the spam issue.

E-mail, to me, is mundane.  If I could do my own mail service with minimal hassle, I'd do it.  But it wasn't minimal hassle. And the benefits of doing it myself were minimal anyway.

I think the guy who wrote that article had his limits, too.  It's not that it can't be done, it's that there are a limited number of hours in the day and is doing that a good use of your time?  Maybe, if you're into it.  How many people are into it?

What I have found works for me is to own my own domains, and get professional mail hosts to just provide service for them (this is borderline trivial - they want you to put a bunch of DNS records in proving you own the domain, then they take care of the rest).  

If I become unhappy with a service or they turn out to be evil or something, I can just move the address to a competitor, taking the domain with me and preserving the accounts.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (21:1/227)

.