[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why can't I host my own email?
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Ask HN: Why can't I host my own email?
I can host my own Mastodon server, or all kinds of other novelty /
fun things which don't seem easily decentralized. Email feels like
one of the most decentralized internet concepts, and ironically
it's seemingly the one thing I _can 't_ self-host unless, from what
I've heard, I enjoy being permanently marked as spam / blacklisted.
What's going on? How do we fix this?
Author : warent
Score : 256 points
Date : 2022-04-27 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
| gvb wrote:
| You _can_ set up your own email server. There isn 't anything to
| "fix" (unless you can "fix" all the spammers) but does require
| setting up SPF in your DNS and it helps to support DKIM/DMARC.
| Also, your internet provider / VPN host likely blocks port 25; if
| that is the case, you need to use a "smart host" email relay
| service.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=self+ho...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=self+hosted+email+server
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=dkim+dmarc+spf
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yes, SMTP is amazing. It's a decentralized, fault tolerant
| messaging protocol. Civ2 used to have multiplayer over SMTP.
| blenderdt wrote:
| I host my own email and never get marked as spam.
|
| One fantastic tool is: https://www.mail-tester.com/
|
| And another is Gmail. When you send an email to Gmail you can see
| some spam info in the headers which you can use to fix problems.
|
| I just hope I never get blacklisted. Sometimes you can fix this
| by sending the blacklist a message but this is not always
| possible.
| excitom wrote:
| I hosted my own email server from 1995 to 2010 (Solaris on a Sun
| IPC, sendmail and IMAP compiled from source). What finally drove
| me to move my domain to gmail was the spam.
| pwg wrote:
| You certainly /can/ self host. I've been self hosting my own
| email since circa 1999 on my home internet link. I've been
| through four different ISP's in the ensuing 22 years, but email
| still flows.
|
| What often happens is that virtual hosting firms (Linode, Digital
| Ocean, etc.) are often used by spammer's for their hosting too,
| and so if you try to host by renting a "cloud vm" or "cloud
| server" and are unlucky to have an IP address a spammer
| previously poisoned, or just happen to be in the same netblock as
| a prior spammer, you find your new IP often 'blocked' from the
| big services, for no good reason than you happen to be from a
| "bad neighborhood". And this is usually the genesis for all the
| scary stories about "can't self host".
|
| But reality is, you can self host, but you do have to set things
| up with all the modern requirements (SPIF, DKIM, etc.) as well.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| You can host your own email. I do.
|
| What you can't do easily is talk to other large public email
| servers. Which I don't.
|
| My home email server receives email I send to it, but won't
| forward email to other domains. This is very useful - basically
| anything on the iPhone is shareable via email, so now I can
| capture a copy of things outside of the phone easily and
| privately from anywhere without having to go through an untrusted
| third party such as Google.
|
| In addition to having SMTP setup, I have IMAP setup, so I can
| retrieve email from my phone or other email client that various
| other self-hosted services on my local network generate, or my
| desktop PC running Thunderbird.
|
| I do have to monitor logs as I get regular password-guessing
| attempts on the services. I have a script that checks for
| repeated failed logins or other bad behaviors and adds malicious
| IPs to a blocklist ipset.
|
| It would be interesting to federate with others and participate
| in a private SMTP network. I'm sure these already exist.
| walrus01 wrote:
| no matter how impeccable your rdns, spf, dkim and dmarc
| configuration is, even if you're an absolute _master_ of
| configuring postfix and opendkim, etc, your outbound smtp
| deliverability success rate is going to be very much dependent on
| the reputation of your IP space.
|
| the best possible IP space will be somewhere that the entire /24
| and parent /22 or larger block does not belong to anybody else's
| low cost VPS, VM, dedicated server or shared hosting. Which is
| hard to find these days unless you personally know somebody at a
| mid sized regional ISP that can sell you a custom package of
| colocation and some small sized piece of public IP space (like a
| /28 or /29 for your server) in known clean IP ranges.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| You _can_ do it, but spam filters are so extreme that you may
| find your mail goes undelivered or auto-filtered into spam.
|
| Small _hosting companies_ struggle with email deliverability, so
| you have to ask yourself if it 's something you want to deal
| with. Sometimes if you end up on a blocklist there's no easy way
| to get off of it, and you may find yourself unable to get an
| email into someone's inbox until you have the time to redo a lot
| of work (moving to different servers, IPs, etc).
|
| From my perspective, you're better off using your time to do
| literally anything else unless email is something you want a very
| deep understanding of.
| skyde wrote:
| if i'm not mistaken this happen because e-mail server don't have
| an identity.
|
| it's too easy for scammer to create a domain name.
|
| or is it only because smtp doesn't have any kind of
| authentication and rely only on IP adress?
| shmoe wrote:
| out of the box this is the case, but improvements like
| DKIM/DMARC/SPF etc have allowed for a bit more authentication
| Arch-TK wrote:
| You can host your own email. I do it. I don't really have many
| problems. Every now and again someone's misconfigured mail server
| decides that my email is spam but really this doesn't matter to
| me so much. At least the major email providers that everyone else
| seems to use happily accept my emails.
| senko wrote:
| You can. I did that for decades until I got tired of maintaining
| that server.
|
| Use a reputable VPS provider (one that's not likely to tolerate
| their customers being spammers), once you get the server check
| the IP against various blacklists (get a new server / IP if that
| happens). Make sure you set up your SSL certs and DKIM, SPF and
| DMARC properly.
|
| Across the years, I had _very_ few instances where my outgoing
| mail ended up in someone 's spam box.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| A simple way to get most of the benefits of self-hosted email
| (run from your own domain, keep full control of your data, manage
| mailboxes yourself, etc.) without the problem of being marked as
| spam is to use a service like Amazon SES as an SMTP relay.
| rsync wrote:
| There's a lot to say here from both sides - people running their
| own mail infrastructure (like I have for almost 25 years) and big
| mail providers dealing with brutal, unrelenting spam.
|
| But there is one piece of this that's ridiculous, broken and
| almost cruel: silently dropping messages marked as "spam" with no
| notification given back to the sender.
|
| Why does this practice exist ? Who believes that this is decent
| or acceptable behavior ?
|
| If gmail doesn't want my inbound message - for any reason - that
| is just fine.
|
| If they drop it on the floor without telling me that is _totally
| shitty_.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Mailservers drop mail on the floor because they are doing spam-
| filtering AFTER accepting mail for final delivery. Once it's
| been accepted for final delivery, it can no longer be rejected.
|
| The delivery server doesn't generate the bounce message you
| were expecting; that's generated by your own mailserver, on
| seeing a REJECT status code from the delivery server.
|
| Mailservers do spam-filtering after accepting for final
| delivery because spam filtering can be processor-intensive.
| Sometimes it's farmed-out to an appliance or whatever. To have
| the SMTP process suspended while Spamassassin goes through it's
| contortions multiplies the consumption of server resources on
| the SMTP server.
|
| The delivery server CAN'T (and shouldn't) send you the desired
| bounce message, because it doesn't really know who you are. It
| can't rely on the From: address, because you could be sending
| on behalf of someone else.
|
| In my view (and the view of the RFCs), if a server says "200 OK
| Accepted for final delivery", then it MUST deliver the message.
|
| There's an awful lot of the kind of server-side spam-filtering
| that does actually involve delivering: the kind that filters
| mail into the recipient's spam folder. That mail hasn't been
| dropped on the floor. It's been delivered, just not to the
| inbox.
| rsync wrote:
| You've described how _my mailserver_ should work.
|
| I'm willing to stipulate that this is correct and would, in
| my case, be a difficult problem to solve.
|
| But nobody is losing job offers or missing kids' schedules or
| breaking their summer plans because of _my mailserver_.
|
| I am talking about gmail. I am talking about MS (whatever it
| is). I am talking about yahoo.com.
|
| Their spam heuristics are, in many cases, laughably bad -
| they are demonstrably, clearly broken. If I email my wife
| twice daily for 15 years and then one of my _responses to her
| emails_ gets put in the gmail spam folder ... what words to
| even use for that ?
|
| They need to fix this. I don't care how sticky of a problem
| it is.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > they are demonstrably, clearly broken
|
| Well, gmail, MS and Yahoo have their own ideas about what
| "broken" means. Google in particular forces changes to
| standards by simply implementing them in their own
| services. Those changes _never_ make it easier for small-
| fry postmasters; so I conclude that Google would like all
| small-fry mailservers to disappear.
|
| Discrimation through spam-filtering isn't unthinkable, and
| it would be hard to prove (especially if they claimed there
| was "AI" involved in the filters). Google used to have
| really good spam filtering; I can only suppose that the
| reason it's got worse is that they want it worse.
| elric wrote:
| $employer uses MS for email hosting. MS recently started
| dumping every single email from every single Apache mailing
| list in the spam folder. These are mailing lists to which
| I've been subscribed for a decade, to which I regularly
| send emails, and which probably have thousands of
| subscribers. There is no option for me to whitelist the
| mailing list, only individual senders, of which there are
| hundreds.
|
| Everything about megacorp spam filtering is broken.
| eminence32 wrote:
| I run my own mail personal mail server, and do my own spam
| filtering. Things that are likely spam get delivered into a
| spam folder for the occasional review, but things that are
| extremely likely get rejected entirely (with a "spam rejected"
| message).
|
| I guess my feeling is: if I want to quarantine suspected spam
| without telling the sender, that's my prerogative -- why does
| the sender get any say in this?
| rstupek wrote:
| I don't think he's saying you can't quarantine spam if you
| choose. What his complaint is, I send you an email, your mail
| server says it accepted it, the email is then just discarded
| entirely (not put in a spam folder).
| Someone wrote:
| I would think returned spam would have to be checked for being
| spam by servers receiving the returned messages.
|
| If they don't do that and decide whether checking is needed
| based on presence of some mail headers, or using heuristics on
| the subject line, spammers will start faking returned messages.
|
| I think that makes it expensive to return spam.
| https://99firms.com/blog/spam-statistics/ says about half of
| all e-mail is spam, so returning that would increase e-mail
| traffic and spam checking by 50%.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| A bounce message can be very small, specifying only three
| fields: To, From, Date to identify the rejected message.
| Compared to this spam messages would be much bigger,
| consisting of html, css, javascript, pdf attachmens, zipped
| executables etc. The message could be sent to a fixed
| address, like abuse@same.server; how to check messages on
| that address is a different story as it's not user messages,
| but technical messages.
| bityard wrote:
| > If they drop it on the floor without telling me that is
| totally shitty.
|
| No, it's the ONLY reasonable thing to do when something like
| 98% of all SMTP traffic on the Internet is spam.
|
| If mail administrators bounce back an explanation for every
| "bad" message:
|
| 1) Their outbound mail volume would go through the roof.
|
| 2) The host sending all the bounces would look like a spammer
| to _other_ automated spam-classification systems.
|
| 3) In the unlikely event that a spammer actually reads
| bounches, they could use the feedback to tweak their systems to
| avoid the spam filters.
| teddyh wrote:
| What a recieving mail server _should_ do is reply immediately
| after the DATA command with " _That mail is spam and I refuse
| to acknowledge recieving it_ ". This would be fair, as the
| sender would know that the mail was not passed on. What it
| should _not_ do is to simply say " _Yep, I got this mail now,
| I'm good!_ " and then _later_ , _silently_ look at the
| contents of the mail and decide that it's spam and delete it.
| m4lvin wrote:
| There are sane email providers who do exactly this, for
| example Posteo -- see question "Is there a spam folder"
| here: https://posteo.de/en
| jjav wrote:
| > If mail administrators bounce back an explanation for every
| "bad" message:
|
| Nobody is talking (I don't thing anyone is) about sending
| back a bounce message, that would indeed make no sense.
|
| A responsible email server should:
|
| 1) Reject the email during the SMTP conversation if it's
| going to do that. Then the sender knows it didn't go through
| because it got the error code. There's nothing to bounce
| back.
|
| 2) If it accepts the mail during SMTP conversation, then
| _always deliver_ to the recipient.
|
| 2a) Some disagree, but I think it's totally fine to deliver
| it to the recipients spam folder if post-processing
| determines it might be spam. That's not wonderful, but it
| still got delivered and the recipient can go find it in the
| spam folder. Most people are used to looking there regularly
| anyway since many of the larger providers (coughgooglecough)
| have such terrible false positive rates. The important thing
| is to never lose email.
|
| What's never ok is to accept the email during SMTP and then
| silently file it in /dev/null.
| yobbo wrote:
| I guess the volume of spam-reject messages would dwarf
| legitimate mail.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Responding gives the sender the ability to better explore the
| detection rule space and find a way to get through.
|
| Exactly what a legitimate sender wants and what a provider
| would not want to give an adversary. Now the adversary has to
| also incur a cost to determine successful deliver vs
| open/engagement rates make it just that much harder.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| In case of gmail you can have an account there and see what
| goes through.
| lbriner wrote:
| I think it's a false economy. At best it is security by
| obscurity.
|
| Google tell you why things are spam and often they even
| return quite detailed error emails when they don't accept
| stuff it doesn't benefit an attacker that much. Any decent
| attacker already knows that they should sign stuff and make
| identifiers align and can do so trivially easily.
|
| People like Yahoo are the opposite and are completely opaque
| as if they are doing anything that clever. All they can
| realistically do is check originating IPs, message content,
| alignment etc. just like everyone else.
|
| Since I can still a lot of very decent SPAM in my inbox,
| their lack of transparency clearly doesn't work so they might
| as well help legitimate senders to deliver stuff properly.
| rsync wrote:
| "Google tell you why things are spam and often they even
| return quite detailed error emails when they don't accept
| stuff ..."
|
| Where are you seeing these details ? I have never seen any
| bounce messages from messages I send into @gmail.com that
| end up in a spam folder ...
| jhugo wrote:
| I've been self-hosting email for about 20 years, from a dedicated
| server in Europe. The server hardware has been replaced a couple
| of times but kept its IP.
|
| If you set everything up right, and choose the host for your mail
| server carefully, and never change IP, after a fairly short time
| you won't have much problem with being marked as spam. No more so
| than with any other email host.
|
| As is so often the case, the people that say you should never do
| it probably have little relevant experience, they are just
| repeating something they heard.
| pera wrote:
| It also depends on the reputation of your neighbours / AS...
| try to setup an e-mail server with a cheap VPS in
| DigitalOcean|OVH|Hetzner and even if you kept using the same IP
| address for 10 years I don't think you will be able to relay to
| gmail
| cpach wrote:
| I have a friend who is self-hosting on Linode. All mails from
| her reach my inbox (Gmail).
| flo123456 wrote:
| I've been doing exactly that for roughly 10 years and never
| had a problem with Gmail. You just have to set everything up
| to latest best practices (DKIM etc.). I've even changed IP
| addresses a couple of times.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I run two different private email servers, both set up
| pretty much identically with all the modern "best
| practices" as you say. One of them is on an address that
| has been stable for the past 10 years, and on a quality ISP
| that actually cares about reputation, and mail delivery is
| mostly not a problem. The other one is on a cheapo ISP, and
| mail delivery is so poor due to neighboring IP addresses
| causing me to get block that I gave up and resorted to
| using a free SendGrid account to relay my outgoing mail
| through.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I self-host for 20+ years, the last 12 years on Hetzner.
| Did some transactional mailings as well professionally. Not
| spam, but forum notifications, mailing lists.
|
| 2007..2014 were probably the worst. Gmail was chainging
| often, Microsoft was blocking everyone.
|
| I think self-hosting is easier now than 10 years ago.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I self-host on Linode, and they occasionally fall into
| UCEPROTECT level 3 (the ISP-wide blocklist), likely due
| to a spammer trying to set up business as a Linode
| client. You can't really do much about ISP-wide
| blocklists, and honestly mail servers should not
| aggressively reject E-mail simply because some other
| rando at the ISP sends spam. I've always had success
| working with the aggressive mail server admin to get
| unblocked. Often it's just an E-mail to provider-
| abuse@provider.com
| bsder wrote:
| > honestly mail servers should not aggressively reject
| E-mail simply because some other rando at the ISP sends
| spam
|
| This is because the business department will try to force
| admins to ignore requests to remove spammers as the
| spammers generally pay decent money.
|
| By blocking _everyone_ , it forces the ISP to get off
| their ass and kill the spammer irrespective of how much
| they are willing to pay.
| pera wrote:
| Which provider do you use? (by the way, I didn't mean that
| every cheap provider will have issues, prgmr/Tornado for
| instance works great for me)
| nemothekid wrote:
| You started self hosting before Gmail was a thing. It's
| completely likely that Google has had you whitelisted since the
| inception of gmail when they were far more open. The "reputable
| IP" is the hardest part of delivering mail reliably; and your
| post says the equivalent of "just have your dad gift you a
| reputable IP from the 90s"
| jhugo wrote:
| I'd be very surprised if I was on some kind of static
| whitelist from the early days of Gmail. Such a list, if it
| exists, would likely be reserved for much higher-volume
| sending IPs.
|
| I've helped others set up self hosting much more recently,
| and haven't had any reputation problems beyond the early
| period where the IP has no history. (It is important to find
| an IP that doesn't have recent bad reputation, but that is
| fairly easy to do. Unless your host is in the business of
| hosting spammers most IPs will be clean.)
|
| The reality is honestly just that self-hosting mail is not as
| hard as all the people who don't do it say it is.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Google would ignore your data because you are too small?
|
| Your ip and those of others who have sent mail to gmail
| have been recorded.
|
| Your reputation score is high.
|
| Try a new ip and see how hard it is.
| jhugo wrote:
| It's not exactly _hard_ on a new IP, as long as the IP is
| clean (which is reasonably simple to ensure, as long as
| your host isn't in the business of hosting spammers). You
| just have no reputation to start with, so you can't
| expect perfect deliverability from day one. But after
| some time (and we're talking weeks-to-months, not years),
| you'll be fine.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Sure if you want a lot of them to go through but not
| necessarily all. If someone marks your email as spam you
| may have to start all over again. If you want to send
| more than a few emails per day you have to warm the ip by
| sending specific volumes over time. It's doable, easier
| with a service to help you.
| _moof wrote:
| I've also been hosting since before Gmail was a thing but
| have since set up new servers with new domains in
| disreputable subnets, and I haven't had any deliverability
| issues. If you configure things right (SPF, DKIM) you won't
| have problems.
|
| This idea that self-hosted email is impossible is wildly
| overblown.
| Noughmad wrote:
| > As is so often the case, the people that say you should never
| do it probably have little relevant experience, they are just
| repeating something they heard.
|
| More likely, they're saying that 99% of people don't know how
| to self-host, and for 99% of the rest it's not worth the
| trouble. Also, if you have to ask, then you shouldn't self-host
| it.
| tinsmith wrote:
| "If you have to ask, you shouldn't be doing it," said the
| tired old King of Gatekeeping.
|
| For a second, I thought I was on Stackoverflow. If you aren't
| starting by asking questions about the possibilities or
| limitations of a system you're about to work in, then you
| aren't starting properly.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| That adage exists because those who really want to do it
| won't be asking to be spoonfed and will instead start doing
| the research themselves.
| eddieroger wrote:
| For perspective, some may perceive doing research as
| being spoon-fed. Sometimes, you don't know where to start
| and need a hand. At one point, I didn't know how to turn
| on a computer, and now I'm a software engineer.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| The area of 'i barely know how to keep a server running'
| is a problem for everyone else on the internet as your
| mail server starts relaying a deluge spam and phishing
| emails
| tinsmith wrote:
| I get why it exists, but we also have to be honest with
| ourselves and admit that there is a massive problem in
| communicating without assumption of prior
| knowledge/experience. The tech world is particularly
| guilty of this, with veterans having forgotten that there
| was a time when they didn't know what they know, and
| lacking any patience to adequately help those seeking
| understanding. To add to the issue, the Internet proper
| is so noisy with partial or broken information that the
| task of finding the correct information is far more
| daunting than it was 20 years ago when I started
| learning.
|
| We need to give newcomers a break and answer their
| questions _well,_ and discuss to promote understanding,
| instead of swatting at them with our canes. The only way
| knowledge passes to the next generation of thinkers and
| tinkers is if we fuel that curiousity.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Running an email server, that is secure, is not easy. In
| the mean time, before you're qualified and know what
| you're doing, your mail server is a danger to others.
| From being an open relay through just plain unpatched
| security vulnerabilities. It's not the consequences for
| you, it's the consequences your fuckups have for everyone
| else.
|
| There's plenty of other tech they can screw with.
| jjav wrote:
| > More likely, they're saying that 99% of people don't know
| how to self-host, and for 99% of the rest it's not worth the
| trouble.
|
| Certainly way more than 99% of the general population
| wouldn't know how to self host, but within a techie
| population like HN, easily ~50% can be capable of doing it if
| they wanted to. Whether it's worth the effort is a personal
| decision, but there's a lot of value in owning your own email
| so I recommend it to anyone who's curious about it and
| willing to do it.
|
| > Also, if you have to ask, then you shouldn't self-host it.
|
| We should be encouraging curiousity (a HN value) not stomping
| on it.
|
| If anyone asks, I say go for it. Worst case you'll learn new
| things, best case now you own your email.
| sosborn wrote:
| I would amend this to say, "If you have to ask, then you
| shouldn't self-host it for anything mission critical."
|
| Otherwise, how would anyone learn anything?
| kijin wrote:
| People who have been hosting their own email for decades like
| GP probably built up a solid reputation for their domain and
| IP before spam filtering became such a kafkaesque business
| and IPv4 blocks became so fragmented.
|
| If you start self-hosting now, you should be prepared to lose
| quite a few emails randomly for the first X months while
| everyone else tries to figure out whether you're legit or
| not. Though I would encourage anyone who can to try to self-
| host at least some part of their email infrastructure, even
| if just for the learning experience, I would also recommend
| that they avoid using self-hosted email for anything
| business-critical until they're sure they've got the hang of
| it.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > you should be prepared to lose quite a few emails
| randomly for the first X months while everyone else tries
| to figure out whether you're legit or not
|
| And then prepared to lose quite a few emails consistently
| for the next 10 years when some decide you're not legit.
|
| Source: I self-host.
| tragictrash wrote:
| Don't forget about attacks. If you lose control of that
| domain you are pwnd.
| jhugo wrote:
| I'll definitely take that (which is largely under my
| control) over e.g. Google deciding that I've done
| something wrong one day and cutting off my email.
| tragictrash wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment, but It's not under your
| control. It's under the registrar's control. I'd argue
| registrars are way more prone to social engineering
| attacks than google is. I also don't use Google as my
| email provider though.
| jhugo wrote:
| The choice of registrar is under my control, though.
|
| Also, little-known fact: if you register a UK company
| (probably more practical if you already have one, but the
| effort is not actually that big), you can register .uk
| domains directly with Nominet, the UK registry, by
| setting yourself up as a self-managed registrar. It
| doesn't cost anything (beyond the cost of the domain
| name) and is very easy. I'd love to know if there are any
| other registries that allow something similar.
| tragictrash wrote:
| I'm in the USA and would totally bite the bullet and do
| something like that, if possible
| kuschku wrote:
| Tip: Start with a solid SPF, DKIM, DMARC policy and
| register for microsoft, yahoo, etc.'s admin tools and add
| your domain to google's webmaster and postmaster tools.
| (Yes, even if Google postmaster won't show you anything
| yet)
|
| Use mail-tester.com or similar tools to ensure everything
| is configured correctly.
|
| And then just start sending. As long as your volume grows
| slowly over the first few months, you'll get basically no
| rejects.
| kijin wrote:
| Yep, it takes patience and lots of trial and error to
| build and maintain a reliable email server, unlike an
| HTTP server or Minecraft server which you can fire up
| with a script any time you want. Probably explains why so
| few people do it successfully.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| What is the yahoo version of SNDS (the microsoft thing)
| called?
| bityard wrote:
| I know about the Google postmaster tools but I'm coming
| up blank finding anything about Microsoft and Yahoo. Do
| you (or anyone else) have links to these?
| kuschku wrote:
| Yahoo has merged theirs with AOL (kinda) and currently
| they only seem to offer
| https://senders.yahooinc.com/contact/#complaint-feedback-
| loo...
| teddyh wrote:
| Microsoft: https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.c
| om/snds/index....
| porbelm wrote:
| I agree, I've been hosting my own email for a few years now,
| using Mailcow on a Linode. With SPF and DKIM properly set up,
| mail is /usually/ accepted by the receiving end.
|
| The only nag is that Microsoft is EXTREMELY strict for their
| hosted email. It's the only provider that consistently denies
| recieving mail from my server when the IP range it's on becomes
| greylisted in UCE-PROTECT -- which happens every so often...
|
| Easily solved with getting the MX and backup MX IP's
| whitelisted there, but I haven't bothered cashing out for that
| yet...
| jhugo wrote:
| > when the IP range it's on becomes greylisted in UCE-PROTECT
| -- which happens every so often
|
| This is a common complaint with Linode specifically, but
| probably fairly common with low-cost virtual server providers
| in general. It's worth looking into the history of your IP
| before you start using it to host mail, and if it's feasible,
| shelling out for a dedicated server (ideally from a provider
| that doesn't also offer virtual servers, or has enough
| network separation between them) makes it much less likely
| that your neighbour is a spammer. Mine's never been on UCE-
| PROTECT.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It's wild that something as pedestrian as hosting your own
| email comes with a pile of caveats comparable to those attached
| to browsing I2P or using cryptocurrency to buy stuff.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > It's wild that something as pedestrian as hosting your own
| email comes with a pile of caveats
|
| No, it's not "wild".
|
| Its just that we're in 2022, not 1997.
|
| Long gone are the days of "fire up Sendmail and you're good
| to go".
|
| To those thinking of self-hosting, I would say they should
| start by understanding modern anti-spam.
|
| Understanding modern anti-spam will not only help them with
| their inbound email, but will also help them understand how
| to ensure deliverability of their outbound email too.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| May be you've been grandfathered into a white list when things
| weren't so sophistcated 20 years ago?
|
| Have you tried setting up a brand new email server with a fresh
| IP from say, Digital Ocean or AWS?
| andrewaylett wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat, but have a slightly different
| conclusion: if you started 20 years ago, you'll have a much
| easier time _today_ than if you started six months ago.
|
| I think it's also fair to say that personal mail for a small
| domain is _much_ easier than even a small amount of
| transactional email and don 't even try sending newsletters
| beyond your friend group.
|
| I have run mail off three different IPs over the ~20 years I've
| been hosting, switching IP address didn't affect me all that
| much.
|
| Another thing to note is that receiving mail is really easy.
| Sending it is hard, filtering out the spam (and only the spam)
| from your inbound email is harder.
| jjav wrote:
| Yes, receiving is very easy. Just doing that has a lot of
| value because now can't be arbitrarily cut off from your
| internet identity by gmail/et.al. for no reason.
|
| So a easy way to get started is to receive everything
| directly and use a commercial (often with low-volume free
| tier service) relay for outbound until you get comfortable
| enough to remove the training wheels. (Or never remove them,
| that's a legit choice as well.)
|
| > filtering out the spam (and only the spam) from your
| inbound email is harder.
|
| I don't find that at all. Filtering spam is the easiest part.
| All I do is if SPF doesn't match, goes to spam folder. Beyond
| that, apply a bayesian filter.
|
| I get no false positives and the spam that gets through to my
| inbox can be counted on one hand per quarter. Basically none.
|
| That's yet another benefit of self hosting, since my bayesian
| filter is trained on my personal email specifically, it tends
| to become very good. Unlike generic gmail filters for
| example, where there'll always be some mail that ends up in
| spam no matter how many hundreds of times you mark it not-
| spam.
| jhugo wrote:
| Spam has become much easier to avoid on inbound mail at some
| point. I turned off all Bayesian/heuristic based spam
| filtering around 2015 and now just check SPF and DKIM, and
| have a fake first MX record. No "Junk" folder, everything
| that passes the checks goes to the inbox. I get maybe one
| spam mail every week or so, which I just delete.
| born2discover wrote:
| Could you please elaborate on the "..., and have a fake
| first MX record" ?
| acatton wrote:
| Not GP, but I think what they meant is having a MX record
| with a higher priority pointing to an unroutable IP
| blackhole IN A 240.0.0.1 @ MX 10
| blackhole.example.com @ MX 20 mail.example.com
| jhugo wrote:
| Yup, exactly, for the reasons described in the sibling
| comment to yours.
|
| Doing it this way doesn't even delay mail much most of
| the time; many legitimate MTAs connect immediately to the
| priority-20 MX after failing to connect to the
| priority-10 one.
| pferde wrote:
| Legitimate SMTP servers will try your domain's MX records
| one by one, in order of priority, until they reach one
| that accepts the message. Spammers' scripts usually don't
| bother, they just try the first one and move on to the
| next address on their list.
|
| Of course, this is not 100% reliable, as it's not too
| difficult for spammers to adapt and improve their
| scripts. Of course, vast majority of spammers are either
| not sophisticated enough, or do not care enough to do so,
| so if you don't mind your incoming mail to be slightly
| delayed, it's kind of a low-hanging fruit, as it cuts off
| a huge amount of low-effort spammers.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| Use aliases?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > If you set everything up right, and choose the host for your
| mail server carefully, and never change IP, after a fairly
| short time you won't have much problem with being marked as
| spam. No more so than with any other email host.
|
| This is untrue. If you are the only person using your email
| server, your volume will be so low that the big providers
| (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) won't track your reputation. So,
| ironically, being a low-volume sender means your email will be
| constantly classified as spam.
|
| I speak from experience: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/dont-send-
| email-from-your-own-ser...
| jjav wrote:
| > being a low-volume sender means your email will be
| constantly classified as spam
|
| "will" is a strong word. I've read that very low volume
| sending server can sometimes have issues, but never
| experienced it. My outgoing volume is about as low as it gets
| since it's just me and some family that don't use it much,
| but don't experience any problems.
| jhugo wrote:
| "This is untrue" and yet I and others in this thread have
| been doing this for a long time without encountering the
| issue that you so confidently claim exists.
|
| My email server is used by two people. Reputation is tracked
| by all the big providers, as evidenced by a) my email not
| being classified as spam, and b) them showing reputation of
| my domains in their various reputation dashboards.
|
| "Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those
| that are doing it."
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| Not an expert on this, but maybe this is because you have
| been hosting your server for 20 years? Maybe newer servers
| have a higher threshold to cross? Seems a logical
| hypothesis to me, which would mean you're both right.
| dugite-code wrote:
| I selfhosted my email server on the same IP address for
| 10 years and never got my reputation tracked. I remember
| once reading that they needed something in the range of a
| few thousand emails going to their servers. I swear it
| used to be listed on the google dashboard but like
| everything else email related they hide this information
| to "protect from spammers". Sounds like an excuse for
| anti-compeditive behaviour to me
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > "This is untrue" and yet I and others in this thread have
| been doing this for a long time without encountering the
| issue that you so confidently claim exists.
|
| When you make a claim that supposedly applies to all
| people, a single counterpoint is sufficient to disprove the
| claim. It's as if you had said "all rabbits are black",
| then I showed you a white rabbit to counter that not all
| rabbits are black, and you come back with "look, I have a
| black rabbit here". How does that make sense to you?
|
| > them showing reputation of my domains in their various
| reputation dashboards.
|
| I never got access to their dashboards because my email
| volume was so low. If you somehow did, good for you.
|
| > "Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt
| those that are doing it."
|
| I'm not "interrupting you from doing it". I'm interrupting
| you from giving bad advice to OTHER people.
| jhugo wrote:
| > When you make a claim that supposedly applies to all
| people, a single counterpoint is sufficient to disprove
| the claim. It's as if you had said "all rabbits are
| black", then I showed you a white rabbit to counter that
| not all rabbits are black, and you come back with "look,
| I have a black rabbit here". How does that make sense to
| you?
|
| Well said!
|
| Your claim is "it is not possible to self-host your own
| mail on a low-volume server and not get consistently
| marked as spam by GMail / other large operators". The
| existence of a single person successfully doing exactly
| that (and there are numerous such people in this very
| thread) is sufficient to disprove your claim.
| e12e wrote:
| > Your claim is "it is not possible to self-host your own
| mail on a low-volume server and not get consistently
| marked as spam by GMail / other large operators". The
| existence of a single person successfully doing exactly
| that (and there are numerous such people in this very
| thread) is sufficient to disprove your claim.
|
| Perhaps that was _their_ claim - but I 've generally read
| advice as: "There's no predictable way to guarantee that
| any given person can today take over hosting their own
| mail with predictable and good delivery to Gmail and
| o365."
|
| So just that a, b and c have, so far, good delivery from
| their setup is not a guarantee that person x can just
| "set things up correctly" and somewhat straightforwardly
| get good delivery.
|
| Last I did it, I had to go via undocumented api/pages for
| both o365 and Gmail in order to improve delivery - and
| mail that gmail/o365 smtp servers swore they accepted
| without problems - still sometimes ended up as spam, or
| simply vanished after delivery.
|
| This was all individual low-volume. Never found any
| reason for it.
|
| That said, I'll probably go back to hosting my own mail,
| and just live with certain parties being bad net
| citizens, eating the occasional mail without error or
| bounce. It's not like I really expect them to do better.
| Although especially in the case of Gmail, it's a little
| like Disney eating up public domain stories and spitting
| out copyrighted and trademarked content. Google did a lot
| to force people away from proper quoting (by hiding the
| fact of how Gmail quoted things in the "friendly" ui) and
| they pretty much killed Google groups - after
| marginalizing alternatives. But those ships have sailed.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| You're correct, I shot myself in the foot there. But can
| we agree that some people manage to successfully run
| their own email servers and some people don't?
| jhugo wrote:
| Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't recommend it casually to
| everyone, but if someone says "hey, I want to learn to
| host my own mail, but everyone tells me I shouldn't", I'm
| totally going to recommend they do it. If they have the
| desire to learn, it's likely (not certain! but likely)
| that they'll succeed.
|
| I do think that most of the effort/risk is at the
| beginning. Making sure you're on a reputable provider,
| checking the history of your IP, setting your mail server
| & the security features up correctly, monitoring
| deliverability etc.
|
| After everything is working well, if you got that part
| right, the ongoing effort should basically just be
| keeping software up-to-date. You could always get unlucky
| and e.g. someone starts sending spam on a nearby IP and
| you have to waste some time dealing with that, but
| hopefully if you picked your provider well that won't
| happen. It's yet to happen to me, but my provider only
| offers dedicated servers, which are probably not so
| popular with spammers.
| redox99 wrote:
| > If you set everything up right,
|
| You don't even need to set everything right. Up until very
| recently (months), I was sending emails from a few of my
| servers, and I had NOTHING set right. As in, I was sending from
| IP addresses that were never mentioned on my DNS, no PTR no SPF
| no DKIM no nothing. Just good old "here's an email from this
| address, trust me I actually own that address and it's legit".
|
| And it worked just fine.
|
| Surely just a reputation thing, as I had been doing this for
| over a decade, and all emails were very important (password
| recovery, order details, etc), no newsletter or anything.
|
| I recently replaced all that with zoho because I wanted
| something a bit more secure and didn't want to configure it
| myself.
| _moof wrote:
| Yup, came here to say pretty much that. I've been self-hosting
| email for decades, first from a box on my home network (back
| when that was possible) and later from a VPS. It's not nearly
| as hard as folks make it out to be.
|
| At the very least, getting your server marked as
| spam/blacklisted is not inevitable. Just make sure you aren't
| an open relay and that you've got properly configured SPF and
| DKIM records in your DNS. Once that's set up you can pretty
| much forget about it. I haven't had to touch any of my configs
| in years.
|
| Initial setup takes maybe a day or two if you know your way
| around Linux or one of the BSDs.
| Biganon wrote:
| Self hosting my emails, grade of 100/100 on mail-tester, I'm on
| none of the dozens of blacklists I've queried... and Microsoft
| marks every single one of my emails as spam.
|
| Just because you're lucky doesn't mean other people are
| "unexperienced". I don't know what experience has to do with it
| tbh. Maybe if you have experience working for Microsoft and you
| can contact the right people there...
| snitch182 wrote:
| I have been self hosting my private domains for a couple of
| years now and spam is not a problem with rspamd and it needs
| very little resources. Some large hosts just outright blocked
| me but i always get it unblocked with some assistance of my
| hoster. So, yes it is fine. I even set up webmail with
| rainloop. Better than anything once you got it set up right.
| notacoward wrote:
| > probably have little relevant experience
|
| Or maybe they have 10x the experience you do, but it was
| different experience for reasons beyond their control. Don't
| over-generalize from a sample of one. That's hubris.
| rolph wrote:
| this looks like prime territory for another federal oversight.
|
| essentialy email has been taken over by the minority for
| financial benefit, and creates a noncompetetive situation.
|
| it has been obvious for years that small email servers are being
| squelched for thier properties, and independence rather than for
| something that has actually occured.
|
| this is direct interference with a computerized messaging system,
| and it is causing harm.
| martinmunk wrote:
| I was a little discouraged after reading previous threads here,
| but decided to give it a try anyway.
|
| I tried mailinabox and mailcow which didn't work out, but mailu
| did.
|
| Final setup is a pfSense vm on vultr, VPN back to my local
| pfSense box (with snort filtering) and mailu in an LXD container.
| Mailu guides you through setting up various dns records which
| helped me a lot.
| jesprenj wrote:
| Works for me. Shrug.
| reph2097 wrote:
| It's doable, and it's quite easy
| exabrial wrote:
| Write a letter to your Senator and House representatives. This is
| an abuse of monopoly position by Google.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >How do we fix this?
|
| You start by taking every person who says "not worth it, man,
| just use GMail" and beating them with a rubber hose until they
| install and run a mail service for their vanity domains.
|
| More seriously, it's possible we've let this problem fester for
| so long that it's going to take serious effort to fix. By which I
| mean governmental intervention. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo
| cannot be allowed to dictate who gets to send and receive email,
| as they effectively do now through their massive marketshare
| dominance.
|
| Spam is a problem, but it's not an intractable one. In the 90s,
| sure, the technical problem was pretty hard. By the 00s,
| everybody just let Google handle it because Google wasn't going
| to Be Evil, and Google managed to solve it with a giant technical
| hammer.
|
| Technical people also tend to dismiss solutions because they
| don't fix every problem. The old Spam Solutions Checklist
| exemplifies this attitude. But what we have now is worse, i.e.
| just letting the world's most invasive corporation control all of
| it.
| thirdreplicator wrote:
| I wonder if a crypto-based email system would solve these
| problems. With crypto, you have cryptographically secure
| identities, and if you had to pay for sending emails, this would
| deter unlimited indiscriminate spam.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| To me it seems you can, provided you own a good IP address.
| blakebreeder wrote:
| I set up mail-in-a-box a few years ago and it works great.
| oblib wrote:
| That's what I use, but because I'm running on a DigitalOcean
| vps Microsoft still blocks me. I've not had any issues other
| than Microsoft though, Gmail was easy to get whitelisted.
| [deleted]
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Nothing can be done. Everything will eventually succumb to spam.
| Spam is omnipotent. In fact, Google and FB are just giant very
| successful spammers. The only difference between Mastodon and
| email is that email is 40 years older. As Mastodon grows,
| spammers will take over.
| tristor wrote:
| I hosted my own email for years and had no real issues. The only
| reason I stopped was that my main motivation for self-hosting was
| security, and there are now providers (ProtonMail, FastMail, et
| al) that are reasonable options to solve for my needs and require
| no maintenance effort on my part.
|
| My experience has been that all the major providers will deliver
| mail if it's appropriately signed with DKIM and you have proper
| SPF records, as long as you aren't originating from an IP that
| has a low reputation score. The biggest challenge is getting a
| clean IP, since there is limited IPv4 address space and most IPs
| have been recycled so much at this point that they all have low
| reputation scores. The best way to get an IP with a good
| reputation score is to host on physical hardware, not on VMs,
| with a smaller provider that has minimal customer churn.
| hackerbrother wrote:
| At a high level, email is two-way (email hosts have to accept
| your email servers' communication if you choose to send to them),
| but navigating to a webpage is one way (client initiates an HTTP
| download from the server). Therefore email needs some kind of
| 'web of trust', since email servers have to trust that other
| valid email servers regulate their spam and aren't malicious. Not
| saying the current situation is ideal necessarily.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Mastodon is too obscure and small for anyone to notice. If
| Mastodon ever achieved the scale of email, the necessary anti-
| abuse measures would also result in centralization of Mastodon
| services, just like we see with email.
| maestroia wrote:
| I run my business' email on a cloud VPS. It's a two step
| solution, with a FreeBSD host running a tightly configured
| Postfix as my mail gateway, and a Windows server running
| hMailServer (This is a great piece of Windows-based open source
| software. Highly recommend.).
|
| This solutions captures the majority of spam and phishing.
| Occasionally, a well-crafted piece of spam gets through, and I
| check the Postfix config to see if I can close that hole.
|
| What I do monitor closely are the valid emails that Postfix
| rejects. This happens a couple times per month, and is mainly due
| to the sender using GMail, and Google's mail servers being marked
| as sending spam.
|
| Overall, I'm pleased with this solution. It's minimal
| configuration, minimal maintenance, maximum usefulness.
| lamontcg wrote:
| I self-host my own e-mail.
|
| There's a webpage out there (https://dnschecker.org/ip-blacklist-
| checker.php) that lets you look to see if you've been blacklist
| and there's only one massively aggressive DNS rbl that blacklists
| me out of many dozens of them.
|
| I'd suggest actually trying to setup your own e-mail/dns and see
| if it works or not. If you wind up on a static IP that is in a
| ton of RBLs, move to another block or another cloud service.
| teddyh wrote:
| There are many more:
|
| * https://check.spamhaus.org/
|
| * https://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml
|
| * https://ipadmin.junkemailfilter.com/remove.php
|
| * https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
|
| * https://multirbl.valli.org/
|
| * https://hetrixtools.com/blacklist-check/
|
| * http://www.anti-abuse.org/multi-rbl-check/
| lamontcg wrote:
| I was kind of hoping someone else would followup with more
| complete info if I posted that...
|
| (Corollary to Cunningham's Law)
|
| One of those multichecks found 2 lists that I'm on out of
| ~250 checked lists (and one of the ones banning me is a .ru
| address)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I think the standard answer is to use a smarthost.
|
| The blacklisting shouldn't be permanent, though; my self-hosted
| mailserver took about a year to earn the trust of GMail. I hzave
| no idea how Hotmail's spam filtering works. I think they just
| shitcan randomly, unless it's sent from Hotmail.
|
| I'm no longer running a self-hosted server. It's hosted by my
| (obscure) ISP, but it's still a custom domain. I have no
| deliverability problems, not even to Hotmail.
| zcdziura wrote:
| The problem is that spam was/is so bad that extreme measures were
| taken to curb it. There are all kinds of invisible forces that
| you abutt that can be difficult to figure out, such as IP
| blacklists and the like. And even if you set everything up
| properly and host your email with a responsible host, Microsoft
| will still mark your mail as spam.
|
| I host my own email server with Vultr on an OpenBSD VM using
| OpenSMTPD and Dovecot, relaying all outbound mail through SMTP2Go
| (their free tier more than meets my needs). I have all of the
| necessary DNS entries set to mark my mail as legit, and I sign
| all outgoing mail using strong 2048-bit RSA keys. Thus far, I'm
| able to send mail and not have it marked as spam (at least to
| everyone that I've corresponded with thus far). It was a lot of
| work to get to that point, but not terrible.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > The problem is that spam was/is so bad that extreme measures
| were taken to curb it.
|
| Man, and there's such an easy solution, too - just use
| Hashcash[1] (invented in 1997) and 90%+ of spam disappears
| overnight (if not more, depending on how high you set the
| difficulty).
|
| Well, ok, "easy" in the sense that We Have An Algorithm For
| This - it'd still be hard to get email clients/servers to agree
| on a protocol...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
| tzs wrote:
| > And even if you set everything up properly and host your
| email with a responsible host, Microsoft will still mark your
| mail as spam.
|
| I did some experiments back when I ran my own mail. Sending
| from my mail server to my Microsoft account it not only marked
| everything as spam, it continued marking everything as spam
| after I marked a bunch of them as not spam.
|
| After that, I tried also answering several of them and
| composing several new mails to send to my non-Microsoft email
| to see if Microsoft's spam system was smart enough to figure
| out that if I'm actively corresponding with someone their
| incoming mail should not be marked as spam. It was not smart
| enough.
|
| Then I tried whitelisting. Nope, still spam.
| plainnoodles wrote:
| > There are all kinds of invisible forces that you abutt that
| can be difficult to figure out
|
| This was my main experience, and all I did was try to set up
| the ability to simply send emails to _myself_ (gmail) (and no-
| one else). Things like: this script crashed, or btrfs scrub
| finished + scrub results, and similar.
|
| The first thing I tried was just setting up a VM with postfix
| running on it locally with my residential ISP. I don't even
| remember what the error was for this scenario, but it was just
| totally dead in the water. Absolutely zero mail delivery. I
| think I eventually figured out it's because google defers to
| spamhaus, and spamhaus says residential IPs = hard no.
|
| That next thing I tried, and what I ended up doing, was writing
| a docker container that just runs an SSH port forward to jump
| from my local network to a digitalocean host, which is where
| another docker container runs postfix. I had done this bit once
| before, and I tried to just set up DKIM (since DKIM was, to my
| reading, basically bulletproof - why bother with SPF when you
| have real cryptographic identity assurance?). This led to weird
| error messages from google about my IP having a super low
| reputation. This was something I'd been worried about so I
| spent a bit of time trying to cycle my IP. But I eventually
| figured out it was just a bad error message and setting up SPF
| suddenly made my emails start delivering.
|
| My main ongoing issue is that I had to add all my sending
| addresses (things my internalhostnamehere@myrealdomain.com) to
| my contacts in gmail, otherwise there was like a 50% chance
| they'd just go to spam. I've been running this setup for about
| a year and it's still a coin toss whether emails will come
| through fine, or if they'll say "this would've gone to spam but
| it's in your contacts". When that happens, I check the DKIM and
| SPF status in "original message" in gmail, and gmail itself
| says they both passed.
|
| Absurd tbh.
|
| For my "not self-hosted but better than letting google own my
| digital identity" solution, since I use apple icloud+ or
| whatever it's called, I set up the SPF stuff to let me
| send+receive email from my custom domain, so while icloud could
| still scan my mail, at least if I get banned, I still own the
| actual domain and could move somewhere else.
| miohtama wrote:
| Even if one setups everything by the book (SPF, DKIM, DNS.)
| etc. No one at @outlook.com will receive email, based on my
| experience. Thus, it does not work well if email is important
| for business-to-business use.
|
| Outlook and Gmail are basically having opaque rules who can
| receive email and there is no process to get "whitelisted" on
| these receivers.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I had exactly this problem too. I elaborated below.
|
| If you keep an eye on your logs, when your emails are being
| blackholed (it accepts them but it does not deliver them!)
| it does provide a link in one of the 550 status messages,
| where you can get yourself unblocked. I've elaborated here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31185297
|
| However this only works temporarily, after a month you're
| back in the doghouse. Only senders which send a large
| volume of legit traffic are allowed. It's ridiculous but
| sadly true.
|
| Edit: I found the message in my old emails:
|
| ---
|
| 550 SC-001 (BAY004-MCxxx) Unfortunately, messages from
| XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX weren't sent. Please contact your Internet
| service provider since part of their network is on our
| block list. You can also refer your provider to
| http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
|
| ---
|
| In that link the "SC-001" code also refers to that
| reputation thing. This was the same at outlook.com /
| hotmail.com and live.com . It did not, however, affect
| corporate customers using Office 365 / Exchange 365. Only
| customers of MS' consumer offerings.
|
| My "internet service provider" was a legit colocation
| service and nothing funny was going on in their network by
| the way. Microsoft was the only party that had issues with
| my server. All known blocklists had no issues with it. It
| was just MS being difficult and making up their own rules.
|
| Anyway going to that link there is a form somewhere to
| temporarily unblock it. Give it a try.. Perhaps you can
| create an account at live.com yourself and send a daily
| test email or something... I thought of doing this but
| eventually I got so frustrated I gave up on it.
| exikyut wrote:
| One potential 1%-of-the-complexity answer to the problem of
| personal notification (which I presume was what email-to-self
| was solving) is to set up a Telegram bot. I recently _really_
| wanted realtime notifications on my phone (package tracking)
| and realized that all the top-level "send notifications to
| phone" type services are either mass push notification shops
| ($$$$) or bundled offerings ($$$) that were entirely overkill
| for my purposes.
|
| There are two ways to run a bot on Telegram, either by
| running the bot client directly (meh, interesting but extra
| setup) or by using Telegram's bot hosting system that works
| over HTTPS. It's the second approach that takes 3 minutes (!)
| to get to an MVP state for notifications.
|
| - You walk through a flow with a specific account
| (@Botfather) on Telegram to create a new bot account, which
| gives you an API key
|
| - Find the new bot using the search function then open a
| conversation with it and (after sending /start) send a junk
| message
|
| - Call `curl
| "https://api.telegram.org/bot$APIKEY/getUpdates"` and fish
| out the "chat"->"id" value from the JSON representation of
| the message you just sent to obtain your user ID
|
| - Call something like `curl
| "https://api.telegram.org/bot$APIKEY/sendMessage" -X POST -H
| 'Content-Type: application/json' -d
| '{"chat_id":"1234567890","text":"boop"}'` (set chat_id to
| your account id) to send a new message - yup, it's literally
| this simple to send messages
|
| - Go into Telegram's settings and add the bot as a
| notification exception (assuming you have notifications
| universally turned off by default)
|
| - If you also set the full-screen popup to "when off"
| Telegram will (even when your device is locked) show an
| instant notification containing the sent text
|
| - Because this is a conversation, the message history will be
| preserved unless you explicitly delete the messages (which
| you can do on a per-message basis)
|
| - The Telegram bot API supports both polling and push-based
| I/O, where you can periodically poll /getUpdates or have
| Telegram call a webhook you configure. IMHO the _way_ easier
| approach is just running the bot client locally at that
| point, * _but_ *, for just sending out one-way notifications
| where replies don't matter, the default polling setting (no
| webhooks) is ideal as the bot server will delete un-
| acknowledged messages after IIRC 24 hours or so - so you
| don't have to worry about queue quotas or whatever, you can
| just ignore the whole receive side and it just works
|
| Obviously the caveat is that this is 1% of the complexity and
| equally 1% of the... provenance, for want of a better way to
| put it. But in terms of "I need realtime notifications _now_
| " I am yet to find a better system. It worked perfectly.
| jjav wrote:
| Yes to the OP, you most definitely _can_ host your own email
| fully.
|
| Many of us do it. If you have any interest in the topic, either
| due to the fun of managing the servers and learning something
| along the way _or_ due to the moral high ground of supporting
| decentralization above proprietary walled gardens, do it!
|
| Ignore the naysayers, if you're interested you can do it.
|
| Will some emails very occasionally end up in the spam folder of
| a recipient? I mean, yes, but that is true of everything. You
| can end up in spam folder sending from Microsoft Office mail to
| gmail or vice versa. Heck, every now and then an email from my
| manager will end up in my spam folder in gmail even though he's
| emailing me from gmail to gmail, both of us in the same
| corporate gsuite account! So on average, once you set
| everything up correctly, your deliverability will be as good as
| gmail to gmail, which is to say not 100% perfect but no worse
| than any other solution. And you'll be in control of your email
| infrastructure and address. No longer will
| google/microsoft/apple/yahoo be able to cut you off all your
| accounts on the whim an AI gone bad.
|
| The parent post mentions a useful safety valve to know about if
| you're worried about deliverability and want to take baby steps
| to get there. You can always, either selectively or wholesale,
| use a commercial relay for outbound mail from your email
| server. Some have free tiers that are plenty for
| personal/family use.
|
| Personally I don't use any third party relay, I deliver to
| everywhere from my own infrastructure. No issues.
| leephillips wrote:
| Me too, and this is my experience as well. In the rare event
| that I find out that someone isn't getting my emails, I tell
| them that they should complain to their provider or use a
| different one. I'm no longer willing to jump through hoops so
| that hotmail delivers my email.
| leros wrote:
| This is the answer. Blocked emails happen for random reasons
| and fixing them is a black art that involves talking to ISPs
| and stuff. It's really too much for an average person to
| handle.
|
| At work we've had issues with email delivery due to things like
| outdated IP block lists at some random ISP four hops away, only
| impacting deliverability when mail gets routed through that
| part of the web.
| paulmd wrote:
| I have an email address with "spam" in the name (this is
| through gmail) and lately I've had all kinds of problems with
| emails to it disappearing - I've had to call several places
| and have them change my email because I can't log in and the
| reset emails don't ever show up... but changing to
| myfirst.mylast works fine.
|
| I've run into this with both Sam's Club and Speedway Rewards.
|
| Only thing I can think of is that some outbound mail service
| they're using is dropping them, or some relay in the middle
| is dropping them... I can see where the word "spam" would be
| a keyword you might use, but I've had this email address for
| 15 years now and it's only been a problem in the last few
| years.
| [deleted]
| rhizome31 wrote:
| > relaying all outbound mail through SMTP2Go
|
| So it's not an entirely self-hosted solution, is it?
| Veen wrote:
| No, but it's quite difficult to have email reliably and
| consistently delivered to Gmail and other major email
| providers without sending it via a relay. The relay provider
| is in the business of maintaining IP addresses with good
| reputations that aren't blocked by spam lists etc. If you can
| find and keep a reputable IP address, then you're fine, but
| it's usually easier to pay someone who does that for a living
| --you have no guarantee that the IP address assigned to you
| by Digital Ocean or whoever wasn't used for spamming at some
| point.
| cube00 wrote:
| Digital Ocean has an extremely poor reputation over a long
| period to the point where their droplets are blocked on
| mass in many places now [1]
|
| Even my local ISP refuses mail from them.
|
| [1]: https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/digital-ocean-
| ips-being...
| zcdziura wrote:
| This is also why I went with Vultr as my server host.
| They block port 25 by default and make customers file a
| support ticket with them to unblock that port. They also
| require your account be active for at least a month and
| be using their service in good standing during that time.
| Wasn't an instant process, but was simple enough to
| accomplish in the end.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, lots of places just straight up block entire IP
| ranges, such as anywhere you can get a VM for cheap/free,
| or residential IP ranges, etc.
| teh_klev wrote:
| Really sorry, I don't normally nit pick spelling and
| grammar, but it's "en masse" rather than "on mass".
| derefr wrote:
| Is there such a service that will tell me the reputation of an
| email domain, i.e. whether mail originating at that domain
| would be likely to be treated as _definitely spam_ or not? (I
| don 't really care about "no reputation"; I want to know if a
| domain has _known bad_ reputation.)
|
| I feel like, if there was such a service, it would be pretty
| useful to use it to prevent account registrations on other
| services, from users whose email addresses have domains with
| bad reputations. After all, they'd very likely just be
| registering with the intent of using the service to send or
| post spam in some way.
| TZubiri wrote:
| multirbl.valli.org
|
| Contains blacklists on the domain level, also on the ip block
| and AS level.
| derefr wrote:
| Possibly interesting... but these are rules _about_
| outgoing SMTP servers (MSAs), yes? How much of a relation
| does the outgoing SMTP server for a domain have to the
| canonical set of _receiving_ SMTP servers (MTAs) for the
| domain held in the domain 's DNS MX record? These _can_
| certainly be one and the same server; but it 's not a
| requirement. So how often are they in practice? Especially
| for people actively trying to evade these sorts of RBLs?
| wpietri wrote:
| Yup. Spam is the root problem. With an enormous amount of
| complexity between that and the mail admin's day to day
| experience.
|
| I hosted my own mail for more than 20 years. A couple years
| back I just got tired of trying to solve deliverability
| puzzles, plus the fears that deliverability issues generate.
| (E.g., "Did that potential employer get my email about the
| job?") Especially since some of the puzzles are not solvable,
| like why GMail does what it does. I even had friends at Google,
| and I still couldn't find out why GMail occasionally didn't
| like my server. And arguably, that's the right choice for them,
| as the more spammers know about how they work, the worse it is
| for Google staff and GMail users.
|
| For me, switching to Fastmail hosting was a big win. It's not
| like I'm out of technical challenges to solve, but I get to
| apply that to things where the upside is greater than, "The
| thing everybody expects to work still works."
| azinman2 wrote:
| My issue with fast mail et all is storage is so unnecessarily
| expensive. I have many gigs of email that I don't want to
| lose, but I also don't want to pay many tens of dollars/month
| to host it.
| clairity wrote:
| the spam problem advantages google, as your own story
| illustrates, so it's unlikely they'd really want to help
| solve deliverability/spam issues systemicly. making personal
| email hosting more difficult means they have a chance to
| capture your email data streams via gmail. whether you switch
| there or not, it creates a pressure for most to aggregate on
| gmail, which means they can see most email exchanges.
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. Good spam filtering was one big reason for people
| to switch to GMail. And a lot of people who gave up hosting
| their own email have switched to Gmail as well. I'm sure
| this doesn't rise to the level of conspiracy, but there's
| little incentive for them to fix the broader problems.
| tonmoy wrote:
| Microsoft had marked an email from a professor from an vt.edu
| domain email address as spam causing me to miss an interview
| for a PhD funding.
| codegeek wrote:
| Microsoft is especially notorious for flagging legit emails
| as spam if they are not from one of the regular providers.
| donmcronald wrote:
| That's nothing compared to the joy of dealing with legit
| emails that are flagged as high confidence phishing.
| cube00 wrote:
| Flagging if you're lucky, they outright 550 refused my mail
| until I joined their sender program and applied to have my
| domain unblocked. Then they proceeded to gaslight me
| claiming my mail was never blocked even after I forwarded
| their own error messages and IDs back to them.
| codegeek wrote:
| yea unfortunately I have seen those as well. It is
| ridiculous at times.
| maestroia wrote:
| Regular provider == (Microsoft 365 || an Exchange Server)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Honest question- why can't people sue for this?
| dusted wrote:
| unfortunately, access to the Internet is not well defined
| enough for this, and you basically have no right to a
| connection or any guaranteed privileges if you have a
| connection, which sucks.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Email (SMTP) has no delivery guarantees. It's basically
| "best effort."
|
| If you want guaranteed delivery with proof and tracability,
| send a registered letter at the post office, FedEx, etc.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| On what grounds would they sue for? Email is not the post;
| there is no legal right to receive one or to have one
| routed.
|
| If one wants such legal protections, there _is_ the post.
|
| (Now, should there be such a right? That's an interesting
| question. But a world in which one exists would raise the
| bar to starting one's own email server even higher).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| You can't sue if a product doesn't work as intended and
| results in harm?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| You can't sue someone (and win) for "this person did
| something that I don't like". You only have a case if you
| have a contract with them that lays out specific duties,
| or if they are otherwise a fiduciary of some form. Unless
| you signed a contract with microsoft for them to deliver
| your mail, they have no obligation to do so.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It depends on the circumstances. In some cases, when
| guarantees are made and those guarantees are broken, you
| can sue civilly to be made whole (in a context like this
| where there was no bodily harm, merely an opportunity
| missed).
|
| It's real unlikely any such guarantees were made. To do
| so would be extremely foolish for several reasons (the
| false-positive rate of spam identification is known and
| emails can fail to deliver because of an error at either
| end of the transaction).
| amf12 wrote:
| A legal protection would mostly entail disabling of spam
| filters.
| elorant wrote:
| Any chance you'll provide a detailed write-up of your
| experience with tips and whatnot?
| post-it wrote:
| Prediction: Any distributed social media (like Mastodon) that
| gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. Sure,
| you'll be able to host your own Mastodon instance, but 99% of
| people will be on the top 10 hosts and they won't peer with
| you.
|
| I think the only way to make distributed social media practical
| is to have an extremely inexpensive turnkey self-hosting
| solution for the average person. A Chromecast-like device that
| they plug into their TV that backs up all their photos, plays
| music, and also hosts a Mastodon instance. Some kind of very
| friendly backup solution where you make an "emergency contacts"
| list, and the device encrypts all of your data and stores it on
| your emergency contacts' devices as a backup, and vice-versa.
| giords wrote:
| I was reading these tweets today confirming that this is
| already happening in Mastodon:
| https://twitter.com/Gravecat/status/1518598015396818944
| rglullis wrote:
| If anything, their story is more likely than not showing
| that the centralization is _not_ going to happen. If the
| _users_ of the instances were the ones doing the
| segregation (due to some tribal /cultural divide), then
| you'd end up with a small number of highly polarized
| instances.
|
| But if this is only a fight between admins, the intuition
| is that we would end up with the big instances constantly
| losing users to smaller ones (created by those breaking
| away from the bad admins) who would then federate among
| themselves.
| omoikane wrote:
| This thread matches my experience with Mastodon and
| Diaspora*. It's fine if you are happy to live on individual
| instances and pretend that other instances do not exist,
| but they are not so great if you want a global audience. In
| this sense, they are more like the random disjoint online
| forums of the early 2000s, and not so much like the large
| monolithic social networks that people have come to expect.
| wardedVibe wrote:
| Sounds like discord without voice and with easier
| linking. It does seem like forum approaches are becoming
| more common. I've heard that groups were the only part of
| Facebook with a lot of activity, but I'm not on that
| platform.
| mypalmike wrote:
| On Mastodon, I believe it's currently somewhat backwards from
| this. The largest instances are filled with Japanese anime
| porn, and the smaller instances end up blacklisting them.
| Tao332 wrote:
| If you're not spontaneously flooded with hentai, how do you
| even know your internet is working?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Anecdotally, this has happened every time I've set up any
| kind of social media instance / discussion forum / BBS
| (back in the day!) / whatever. It immediately gets consumed
| by people who use it to host porn, and then all the
| intended users leave.
| derefr wrote:
| Have you considered creating a discussion platform where
| people can't post images, URLs / things that would be
| URLs if you added a URL scheme to them, ASCII-armored
| baseN-encoded anything, etc? For 99% of the discussion
| you want on the platform, text is all you need. For
| spammers and people who want to host porn, text alone is
| useless.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Plenty of spammers rely on text, though. A good chunk of
| my spam folder is text only.
| Induane wrote:
| I've been itching for an experiment; might be fun to make
| a modernized BBS system for people to deploy.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| Japanese anime porn is not something that would trigger a
| banwave. A few posts from Trump, however...
| lostcolony wrote:
| Well, one of them is rotting the moral fabric of the
| country, and the other is just some hand drawn people
| having sex.
| pbreit wrote:
| Disagree. If the authentication mechanism are available from
| the get-go, it could work.
| post-it wrote:
| Unless you can reliably tie a user to their real-life
| identity, authentication isn't useful in this case. If a
| spambot tries to peer with my instance, it's not super
| helpful to know that their accounts will always be the same
| spambot and not a different one.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Identities could be signed by a centralized authority,
| which would have the same desired effect as centralized
| hosting without the drawbacks.
| akimball wrote:
| A person is not required. A reputation is required.
| deltree7 wrote:
| In a digital world, with no financial penalties, it's
| easy to build reputation with 'spurious' transactions and
| exhaust that reputation for one "Large Evil Event" and
| rinse and repeat.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > Any distributed social media that gains mainstream
| popularity will share the same fate.
|
| The experience behind this predated peer-to-peer electronic
| cash and related developments. You may be right, and it may
| still be too soon. But problems can be solved.
| ozim wrote:
| I don't agree.
|
| There is no technical solution for people being assholes.
|
| Well OK there is - turn off computer or server :)
| Shish2k wrote:
| > But problems can be solved.
|
| Looking at the 30 years and millions of dollars poured into
| making email work, the evidence seems to be against this
| dotnet00 wrote:
| One idea I've had is what if the protocol were designed in a
| way that a server can't be scaled too much, thus forcing lots
| of small servers to federate instead of having single
| entities running a large server with tens of thousands of
| users.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Even a magic dongle isn't going to work. People don't want to
| buy things, let alone sysadmin their own television.
|
| I'd love a world where data was truly distributed and
| federated, but unfortunately, the barrier of entry is too
| high. Because of this people will start hosting nodes for
| people. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but network
| effects will take over, and we'll be back where we started.
|
| Look at git. It's distributed in all the right ways, but
| almost everyone uses github.
|
| The web is decentralized, but the same few websites dominate
| to the point that people -- even people on this very site --
| think that you can't post a video except to YouTube.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I noticed a lot of German sites don't peer with anyone who
| has the exact same rules (as in almost literally the same) as
| them. I was surprised to see such kind of box-thinking in a
| protocol that's been designed to be as open as possible.
| Ambolia wrote:
| I assume this is unavoidable. The only solution are
| protocols where the network is owned and stored in the data
| (cryptographically) rather than in the servers. Then the
| servers apply censorship and rules over the data, but you
| can still rebuild any conversation chain as long as you
| connect to enough servers that don't censor it instead of
| requiring 1 server to keep all the network relationships.
|
| This also allows authors to seamlessly switch servers
| without losing audience or at least being able to recreate
| it very easily.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's another problem: Moving your account to a
| different server in the fediverse. Which is indeed not
| possible currently.
|
| Perhaps some kind of blockchain would be a solution? (No,
| I'm not trying to appeal to tech investors, I actually
| think it might offer just the solution here :P )
| Ambolia wrote:
| nostr (https://github.com/fiatjaf/nostr) seems to be a
| minimal possible solution. It doesn't seem to be much in
| use though, so I guess once that happens a few issues
| will come up.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Arguably, your prediction is even a feature, not a bug.
|
| The right to peer implies the right to not peer.
| Tao332 wrote:
| Agreed. I suspect most users have been tricked into
| thinking they want massive, global social media platforms.
|
| (1) People are turning their noses up at Mastodon because
| all of Twitter isn't already there and because you'll be
| cut off from instances that aren't federated with yours.
|
| (2) People are worried about "all of Twitter" becoming more
| people than they would like. There are communities they'd
| rather be cut off from and words they'd rather not read.
|
| It's not a bug, it's a feature. Unfortunately, very
| influential companies that have figured out how to game our
| attention have tricked users into thinking they want
| something they don't.
| rglullis wrote:
| The problem with email is that identity and authentication
| are an afterthought. Don't forget that (in theory) it is
| possible to get _any_ email server to relay a message for
| you. Newer protocols do not have these kind of problems.
| upofadown wrote:
| >Don't forget that (in theory) it is possible to get any
| email server to relay a message for you.
|
| That would be an open relay. That is simply not something
| that mail servers do anymore. If one was to deliberately
| set up an open relay, one would find that their email
| server was blacklisted pretty much immediately.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| but then they just start a new relay.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I don't think so, I believe open relays are virtually
| extinct. People rarely run MTAs those days, and default
| configurations are quite protective. And if someone still
| manages to mess it up, they're gonna get famous with all
| the RBLs in days if not hours.
|
| I self-host my mail for over 17 years. Most of the spam I'm
| observing those days comes from hacked/broken websites
| (sometimes it's probably some stolen SMTP credentials,
| sometimes sent from the server directly). Legit domain
| name, SPF and even DKIM present, looks totally legit in
| this regard - only stopped by RBLs and content filtering.
| Evidlo wrote:
| What was the original intent of open relays? Why allow
| emails without authentication?
| bsder wrote:
| > What was the original intent of open relays? Why allow
| emails without authentication?
|
| Store and forward.
|
| Do remember that email was _THE_ great federated
| protocol.
|
| The goal of a mail server was to get your email "at least
| one hop" closer to your destination. And that wasn't an
| easy task.
|
| Servers came online and went offline. Users logged in and
| out. Connections came up and went down. IP wasn't the
| only transit. DNS? Oh, the hosts file? Even higher things
| --thing DECnet and Janet.
|
| Email was _barely functional_ most days. Your best bet if
| you weren 't an Internet God and weren't able to write
| your own super complicated sendmail.cf was to know a
| sysadmin at a node who had an Internet God and ask him if
| you could forward emails that you couldn't handle to
| their server.
| ehPReth wrote:
| indeed, my ISP only recently closed their open relay for
| all customers
|
| I remember back in the day having to change your SMTP
| settings whenever you travelled to whatever the ISP was
| where you were staying. then you could finally send email
| from your @homeisp.example email
| wrycoder wrote:
| If it was only open to their customers, that's a closed
| relay, and typical for an ISP.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| _cough_ XMPP federation _cough_
|
| Not only did Facebook and GChat refuse to peer with little
| players, they refused to peer among the big players too. We
| could have had something like IRC for the masses, peered chat
| servers with bring-your-own-client. Instead, we waited
| decades for iMessage to get Android support which only
| happened long after everyone moved on to IG, Messenger,
| WeChat, etc.
|
| Email is probably one of the last great open[ish] distributed
| systems we'll ever see. There are just too many incentives to
| build walled gardens instead.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Yes, exactly. GChat supported federation at the start, but
| they removed it due to spam [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11795658
| ThunderSizzle wrote:
| I'm not sure what the competitive edge could be to not wall
| garden. It's always going to be more expensive to try to
| work with those who don't work with you.
|
| Going the self-host route, I'd still want a service of some
| sort so I didn't have to maintain it myself. Almost like an
| evergreen program that self-hosts my data and synchronizes
| and backups and transfers anything and everything.
|
| Everything would be accessible outside of the program as
| local human readable or viewable files where possible.
| That'd be the best way to be non-walled garden.
| TZubiri wrote:
| If it's so easy to self host, surely attackers will host
| thousand of those instances and spam you.
|
| PoW has been the best solution so far.
| werber wrote:
| I am hardware stupid, but I have thought about this exact
| solution for so long. I hope someone figures this problem
| out!
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| I have this part:
|
| > I host my own email server with Vultr on an OpenBSD VM using
| OpenSMTPD and Dovecot
|
| But with outgoing mail being relayed internally to dkimproxy
| which signs it before being relayed back to OpenSMTPD for
| delivery to the other email server.
|
| I had to set up SPF and DKIM DNS records, and one time I had to
| request that my IP be removed from the Abusix blacklist. Other
| than that, it's pretty rare for my emails to be marked as spam.
| Outlook 365 seems to do it much more often than Gmail though.
| zcdziura wrote:
| That's very interesting. I never thought to relay mail
| internally to dkimproxy. I'll have to give that a shot. I
| like the idea of hosting the entire solution myself and not
| relying on any 3rd party solutions, but relaying through
| SMTP2Go was the only thing that I tried that actually solved
| the problem. Perhaps this will offer a good solution! Thanks!
| wahern wrote:
| I also use the dkimproxy package, but there's now a third-
| party OpenSMTPd module that can sign messages in-line.[1]
| I've always found dkimproxy setup a little confusing
| compared to a built-in/in-line solution. I might try to
| switch to the module during the OpenBSD 7.1 upgrade
| process.
|
| [1] I think this is the one I had I mind, though I didn't
| realize it was already in ports:
| https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ports/mail/opensmtpd-
| filters/dkim...
| inetknght wrote:
| > _The problem is that spam was /is so bad that extreme
| measures were taken to curb it._
|
| The problem with spam is that there's no real legal recourse
| for spam. If it's in your own country then _maybe_. But outside
| of your country? Well the easiest thing to do is to IP block
| and the next best thing to do (when IP block isn 't an option)
| is to use some sort of "smart detection" to put spam into a
| special box labeled "spam". There's no deterrence and literally
| no criminal prosecution for spam.
| yobert wrote:
| I've been using https://maddy.email/ for self-hosting from my own
| home server. It's amazing! It's the first time email setup has
| been easy for me. I don't have any problems with SPAM so far, and
| gmail accepts my messages without issue.
| daliusd wrote:
| I will second this. Using for some time and it works like a
| charm.
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| I want a whitelisting system for email where:
|
| * If you're whitelisted you get through or I can manually
| whitelist you.
|
| * If you're not whitelisted, I send a bounceback response stating
| that I'll look at your email for $X where X is set by me ( e.g.
| $0.25 or $1, but I decide). No guarantee of refund, but I have
| the option of refunding. For me, if you wasted my time, I won't
| refund. However, if you're a legit human that isn't marketing to
| me, then I would refund.
|
| Then, I just adjust the price until spam disappears or I'm
| willing to look at your spam at that price.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I want a system where I can create destroyable email addresses,
| so when I sign up for something it creates a single channel,
| and if they resell that email address I can burn that channel.
|
| Unfortunately `+alias`ing built into gmail is too easy to
| subvert as everything after the + can be removed and the email
| will still reach me.
| lardissone wrote:
| There are plenty of services that allows that. One is Apple's
| [Hide My Email](https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/what-
| you-can-do-with-...) and Firefox's
| [Relay](https://relay.firefox.com/).
| teddyh wrote:
| Please see https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| :-)
|
| Not sure about the legality and such, but rate limiting by
| economics does work for my physical mailbox. I get spam, but
| it isn't 1000+ letters a day like my email inbox. If I was
| allowed to increase the cost of delivery to my house, I think
| I could eliminate most physical spam mail in my physical
| mailbox as well or happily find a price where I'd quit my
| dayjob and just read whatever physical spam is sent at an
| hourly rate I'd like.
| lardissone wrote:
| I like the first part. In fact, Hey email had this concept and
| was the only thing I liked of that horrible email service. I
| would like to see that somewhere else.
| j45 wrote:
| Hosting email isn't hard. Hosting email that blocks out spam, and
| prevents your server from being hacked is more work.
|
| There are some nice middle grounds for self hosting like zimbra,
| or for the less adventurous, a tool like MDaemon which lets you
| self host but provides support in the right areas. Incoming email
| is pretty trivial, and outbound email can be greatly improved by
| using an external outbound email service. Whatever works for the
| level of time you want to invest and maintain.
|
| Try it out with a domain and you'll see if it's ok for you. You
| have to remember a lot of developers today don't have devops or
| hosting skills. There are developers who did have to manage
| complex web hosting themselves so it's not completely out of the
| realm of possibility. I self hosted for a long time, switched to
| cloud, and am thinking of switching back.
| the_common_man wrote:
| Nothing to fix, it's already solved . I host my mail using
| cloudron on digitalocean. Have you tried selfhosting or are you
| guessing it will be hard?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| If literally anyone could find your Mastodon address and message
| you, you'd get spammed daily there too, and it'd be the same
| problem.
|
| So you think, fine, whitelists! But you still need to be able to
| accept messages by new authors without knowing their From:
| address ahead of time. You'd have to comb through your spam
| folder past tens of thousands of messages from new authors to
| find the one new genuine sender. Rings of trust don't solve it
| either because either you get spammed by someone in a ring of
| trust, or messages end up in concentric rings of spam folders.
|
| You _can_ host your own mail. It 's just very hard to do it
| _correctly_ , easy to screw up, and there's basically no gain
| whatsoever by doing it yourself. Some problems are just difficult
| and cannot be easily solved by a single person. You can't be your
| own CA [and have anyone trust your connections]. You can't create
| your own TLD [and have everyone be able to resolve it]. You can't
| create your own ASN. You can't create your own IP address. There
| are some things in life you have little to no control over, even
| on the Internet.
| nix23 wrote:
| I host my own servers and have no problems with it, here some
| hints:
|
| https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126
|
| https://www.mail-tester.com/
|
| https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx
|
| Test test test, and you will be fine.
| dusted wrote:
| I've self-hosted my email on my own domain, own box, in my own
| home, on my own internet connection for two decades now.
|
| I've not had trouble being marked as spam, I have set up dkim and
| spf.
|
| The real reasons you cannot self host is a combination of:
|
| ISPs blocking outgoing TCP traffic with destination port 25 and
| does not provice a smart-host / relay for you to use or does
| provice a smart-host, but do not document it, or configures it in
| such a way that it only relays if you have some authentication
| that you don't, or that reverse-dns is configured (at the same
| time, they do not provide reverse-dns for you).
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The flagging and blocking of legitimate messages from domains
| with good standing is not a general problem. But it is a
| malpractice primarily of Microsoft and Google.
|
| The reason is that they have clear financial incentives to
| sabotage communications in order to press people into using their
| services.
|
| Given the centrality of email to daily life and business, big-
| tech service providers do cause a clear harm by their actions,
| and what is needed is are successful legal prosecutions against
| them for that practice.
|
| It's an interesting problem. In days of yore, the Royal Mail and
| US Postal Service had special powers of state that made letters
| sent effectively certain to be delivered. Interfering with the
| mail was a very serious criminal/federal offence. At one time in
| British law, the mere act of posting a letter was considered
| tantamount it having been received, and to this day many legal
| processes derive from that, even though the delivery has gone
| electronic.
|
| The principle agent problem is that as service providers they are
| not impartial in their actions. While they may superficially seem
| to have every right to block communications to users within their
| domains "to prevent spam", or on "security" grounds, they are
| intermediaries whose good faith is not ascertainable. Even if
| they were acting in good faith it is a classic example of
| iatrogenic over-reach of "care", by which nefarious motives may
| be veiled by an appeal to seemingly reasonable "security"
| policies.
|
| While their Terms of Service clearly make no warranty for
| delivery of important messages, this is not an acceptable level
| of service. We have hobbled along in this legal no-mans-land for
| 30 years at least.
|
| Therefore I see the problem as more akin to a net-neutrality
| issue and is more subtle as a rights issue than it first appears.
| How can big service providers with an obvious conflict of
| interest and incentive to sabotage legitimate communications be
| made to play ball?
|
| Technically we can prove, from mail relay messages, that
| communications have been delivered to the boundary of their
| digital estate, so the technical basis for a legal intervention
| is there. Part of the problem is that recipients who are harmed
| need to coordinate with senders that experience harm. And both
| parties need the basic technical competence to know and prove
| that they are being harmed.
|
| Your mileage and anecdata may vary, but I maintain multiple mail
| domains for projects and businesses in Europe I've set up for
| people which send dozens of messages per day from self-hosted
| servers. Almost none of these have any problems. The only
| problems people report come from recipients on Microsoft and
| Google systems.
|
| I sometimes politely ask people explicitly to white-list
| addresses, or carefully explain why a non-Google/Microsoft
| alternative address is a more professional and reliable contact
| point.
|
| Nontheless, the 'crimes' of these big companies causes me
| tangible cost and I do with there was a legal remedy for it.
| elric wrote:
| Currently, because MS and Google more or less have a duopoly on
| email. They don't trust you not to send spam, and they will make
| it as hard as possible for you to prove that you're not a
| spammer. Ostensibly this is so they can protect their users. More
| cynically, I suspect they're quite happy about this.
|
| Historically, because we are - for whatever reason - unwilling or
| unable to deal with spammers. I mean the people sending the spam
| and profiting from it. There are virtually no repercussions for
| spamming millions of people with garbage on a daily basis. Every
| cent you make is profit.
|
| Putting spammers in prison would make it a lot easier to go back
| to hosting our own mail servers.
| boplicity wrote:
| You can, and should, host your own email. The more people do
| this, the more companies like Google and Microsoft will be forced
| to accept email from small servers.
|
| That being said, when you set it up, make sure you set up an SPF
| record. Also, check the IP Address to make sure it is not already
| blacklisted.
|
| Cpanel makes it almost effortless to set up an email server, if
| you have just a little bit of tech know-how.
| Melatonic wrote:
| You definitely can but trust me - it is a huge pain in the ass
|
| And I generally recommend doing a lot of hosting yourself
| grymoire1 wrote:
| I run an AWS instance that hosts my own domain mail server. I
| have hundreds of email addresses, and each of them is forwarded
| to a gmail account. (I use the myaddress+tag@gmail.com to make
| each one unique. I do this to identify and squash spam - if one
| email address becomes contaminated, I delete it and change my
| email on the compromised company's server.
|
| I also run a mailing list server.
|
| So my email is usually sent from a gmail.com address, and I
| usually receive email on my own domain.
|
| Some lessons - sending email from your own domain is difficult as
| you have to not only make it accepting to spammer-averse sites.
| You also have to protect it from sites that would LOVE to relay
| email through your server.
|
| As for receiving and reading email on your own domain - you have
| to provide your own spam filters - and this is VERY DIFFICULT.
| 320 billion spam emails are sent every day, and 94% of malware is
| delivered in those emails. That's one reason I use gmail as the
| way I read email.
| zokier wrote:
| if you are running on aws, then using ses "solves" outgoing
| mail?
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| You can host your own email but there are a few things you need
| to do:
|
| 1. Setup SPF, DKIM, and DMARC - you need to do all three.
|
| 2. You want to use an IP range that is not otherwise used by
| spammers or marketing people. This may be hard with a virtual
| server in just about any datacenter.
|
| 3. Consider a 3rd party spam filter, unless you like spending a
| lot of time on spam filtering.
| porsager wrote:
| I've been runnning mailcow[1] on a small Hetzner vserver for a
| bit more than 4 years with minimal downtime and maintenance.
|
| I followed their guides for the most optimal setup, and so far i
| feel deliverability has been comparable to commercial offerings.
|
| Can certainly recommend.
|
| [1] https://mailcow.email/
| layer8 wrote:
| I believe the magic part is to find a VPS whose IP block isn't
| spam-tainted. Avoiding the largest VPS hosting providers may
| conceivably help. But really I have no idea, and maybe one just
| has to try a few. I'm one of those people who have been self-
| hosting their own domain and email for roughly twenty years,
| adding stuff like DNSBL, graylisting, DKIM, DMARC and SPF as they
| became established. But very low-maintenance overall. I never had
| any perceptible problems with mail delivery. Some spam gets
| through DNSBL/spamassassin, but it's on a very manageable level.
| I guess what I'm saying is you should give it a try. We need more
| people doing that.
| springfeld wrote:
| E-Mail isn't email.
|
| Provide as MX to your own is impossible if you only have dynamic
| ip: Most ranges are on spam lists, for good reasons.
|
| Hosting everything else is possible.
|
| I work for a company that makes use of three components: a so
| called smarthost, that does AV and Spam detection, a newsletter
| host and groupware server.
|
| Many more combinations are possible.
| cj wrote:
| > I can host my own Mastodon server, or all kinds of other
| novelty / fun things
|
| Curious, how easy it is to set up things like a self-hosted
| Mastodon? Is it a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days worth
| of work?
| warent wrote:
| It depends on skill level. I have a lot of experience spinning
| up services and own a home server, so probably it would take me
| a few minutes. That being said I've not tried it yet but will
| be doing this weekend
| [deleted]
| johnklos wrote:
| You start by grouping all sources of advice in to two categories:
|
| 1) those who say you can't and/or shouldn't do it. They don't
| know you. They might as well say you can't fix your own computer,
| you can't learn to write a shell script, or you can't fix your
| own car. They "can't" because they're afraid of failing. Ignore
| them completely.
|
| 2) those who say you can, and give you tips on what's difficult
| and how to make things better. Obviously we can self host, as
| many people, myself included, do self host, have done so for
| ages, and will continue to do so.
|
| Some people in category 1) try to make themselves seem reasonable
| by bringing up these huge lists of things you have to do, but
| it's all completely doable. Just recognize when a particular
| person happens to be in category 1), and stop wasting time with
| them :)
|
| I've self-hosted continuously since the late '90s, and I've even
| experimented with starting over, so to speak (that is, starting
| with a completely new domain and new IP), and it's work, but
| nothing beats OWNING your own data and email. Having direct
| access to logs means you know exactly whether delivery attempts
| were made, whether destination servers accepted email for
| delivery, and precisely when. If you have an interest, it's
| totally worth it.
| lazyweb wrote:
| I've successfully hosted my own private mail server [1] on a
| Hetzner system for the last 6-7 years. It's a steep learning
| curve, and a rather large time sink in the beginning to set
| everything up, but it's been running smoothly ever since.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30428882
| BaudouinVH wrote:
| you can host your own email : https://mailinabox.email/
| pmontra wrote:
| There are two sides of email: sending and receiving. They use
| different protocols and often different servers. How about self
| hosting an IMAP/POP3 server and sending mail through the SMTP
| server of the registrar for your domain? I didn't investigate the
| feasibility but I own two domains and I'm sending email for both
| from the SMTP server of one of them (can't even remember why, so
| long time passed since it happened.) I receive on their separate
| POP3 accounts, check with K9 on Android (the original UI version)
| and download and filter to folders with Thunderbird when I have
| to.
| supermatt wrote:
| Being a bit of a pedant here, but you aren't "receiving" mail
| via POP3, you are "retrieving".
|
| The sending and receiving (i.e. transfer) are both part of
| SMTP.
|
| If you want to self host your own mailboxes (e.g. IMAP/POP3)
| you will need some way to get the mail into them (mail
| delivery) which is also (usually) SMTP.
|
| But your point definitely stands - You can handle the inbound
| side and outsource the outbound mail delivery issues.
| benibela wrote:
| I have been hosting my own mails for years
|
| Although not directly. I got a webhoster, with my own domain, and
| the hoster also provides mail servers
|
| I never noticed any problems.
|
| Although often people do not respond to my mails.
| erdos4d wrote:
| Have you actually tried to? I've been running my own server for
| like 3 years now, works fine. You need to actually set up your
| SPF/DKIM/DMARC/PTR records/etc correctly, but I've never had an
| issue with my mail getting delivered or being sent to spam.
| dinom wrote:
| Apologies if I'm being dismissive, but obviously it's possible to
| host email. How much there is to fix is a matter of perspective.
|
| All that's required is to properly configure the service. Beyond
| that you probably haven't paid the people who run the other
| system enough to accept mail from you; they're under no
| obligation.
|
| I'd go on about socioeconomic factors, demand-side economies of
| scale, perverse incentives and why it's more expensive to send
| than receive but that's a whole thesis dissertation and
| belaboring the point a fair bit.
| StreamBright wrote:
| Email just like all of the first generation internet protocols
| (like FTP) suffer from the same problem. It was born in an era
| where security and issues stemming from mass usage were non
| existent. As time went by some US companies made email almost a
| monopoly (Gmail) while other parties added layers of after though
| security (DMARC, SPF, etc) while at the same time advertisment
| (spam) also made the situation worse.
|
| Hosting your own email is a problem because of these things,
| otherwise a fun exercise (that I gave up long time ago).
| julienpalard wrote:
| Why you no host? (https://yunohost.org/) ;)
| cpragadeesh wrote:
| Its true that self-hosted email servers usually get marked as
| spam but you can fix a lot of things and make it less likely to
| be blocked as spam using tools like: https://www.mail-tester.com/
| graderjs wrote:
| I "sort of" hosted my own email using Sendgrid API free tier to
| send and webhook to receive, and a custom client in a Python MPA.
| I was chuffed I wasn't paying 5 a month for GSuite.
|
| I looked later at, and set up, https://mailinabox.email/ and that
| worked fine too.
|
| I'm not sure about all the cant, it's definitely possible and I
| never had an issue with deliverability. I had no idea what I was
| doing but I made sure I got all the right dkim secret and signing
| keys or whatever that was required set up "extra special like"
| for both solutions.
|
| I was not sending mail merges though so maybe that would have
| thrown things off I don't know.
| holri wrote:
| You can host it yourself. For example with a Freedombox:
| https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Manual/Email?action=show&...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Microsoft in particular is a total pain in the ass to deal with.
|
| I was hosting my own mail server, did not have open relays and I
| know 100% sure nobody on my server sent spam. It was fully
| configured with all the DMARC and SPF trimmings.
|
| Yet one of my users needed to email users at
| live.com/outlook.com/hotmail.com and kept getting banned. Every
| time I was able to unblock it using an automated link.
|
| One time it didn't work and I actually got through to someone. He
| was like "Yeah, your server doesn't send _enough_ legitimate
| emails so it doesn 't build up 'reputation'". This sounds
| ridiculous, not sending spam is not enough, you have to send a
| certain amount of legit mails to stay unblocked??
|
| Anyway it kept happening so I eventually gave up :( It only
| happened with consumer MS-hosted emails addresses though. I had
| no issue reaching companies using M365 for business.
|
| But email is just so incredibly broken... All the patches to
| kinda try and fix it are a mess. We need a whole new protocol.
| lbriner wrote:
| It is very doable, we host our own email servers at SmartSurvey
| and send a relatively high amount of traffic.
|
| Depending on your skill/software it might take time for you to
| test your configuration is setup correctly although there are
| sites like mail-tester.com that will tell you whether you have
| SPF/DKIM etc. setup correctly.
|
| The problem you might have is with cloud IP addresses. Since
| these are reused heavily, it is possible some attacker previously
| used your IP to send spam and got it blacklisted. If not (there
| are services to check IPs) then you should be fine but note that
| some lists block /24 ranges of IPs instead of specific IPs so
| some providers are fairly unusable.
| minimaul wrote:
| You can host your own email.
|
| I have been hosting my own for at least 15 years now, and I don't
| have big issues - I can deliver email to MS, gmail, et al.
|
| Pick a decent hosting provider (not the cheapest options
| around!), make sure you have matching reverse DNS, forward DNS
| and HELO name (exactly the same is best!) on both v4 and v6 (if
| you have v6), disable IPv6 privacy addressing for your mail
| server (again, if you have v6), make sure you set up SPF, DKIM
| and DMARC, and keep your server secured.
|
| By following these rules, in 15 years I have had only had
| deliverability issues with AT&T and Deutsche Telekom - both of
| which were fairly easily resolved.
|
| In terms of software, you can use one of the out-of-the-box email
| server packages, but I personally run postfix, dovecot and rspamd
| on a debian stable VM. Stick to the versions from the repos and
| you'll have very few problems upgrading it in future, too - my
| current mailserver VM started on Debian Squeeze or Lenny around
| 2010, and is currently on bullseye (the latest stable).
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| Basically the same setup as me other than I use ubuntu.
| mattbee wrote:
| I've run the mailu.io stack for 4 years off a Hetzner dedicated
| server. It's an easy stack to set up and update through several
| major versions. About 25 different mail users, friends and
| family who aren't in IT.
|
| The issues I've had have been Microsoft
| (hotmail/outlook/office365) dumping messages into their Spam
| folder, but that went away in the last year. I had put in a
| hack to deliver to Microsoft through a more "reputable" SMTP
| host, but only when people complained.
|
| I'd say give it a go with a new email address, any software
| that seems manageable to you, and move your usage over
| gradually.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > Pick a decent hosting provider (not the cheapest options
| around!), make sure you have matching reverse DNS, forward DNS
| and HELO name (exactly the same is best!) on both v4 and v6 (if
| you have v6), disable IPv6 privacy addressing for your mail
| server (again, if you have v6), make sure you set up SPF, DKIM
| and DMARC, and keep your server secured. By following these
| rules, in 15 years I have had only had deliverability issues
| with AT&T and Deutsche Telekom - both of which were fairly
| easily resolved.
|
| How did you measure your deliverability? If this is true, then
| congratz for succeeding, but it's still bad advice to give to
| other people, as most people will not succeed no matter how
| many hours they put into that.
| minimaul wrote:
| By the fact I get answers to emails I send to others (eg
| people using gsuite, people using o365), and I don't get
| issues from the sites that I run that use the mail server for
| sending - it sends confirmation emails for a forum I run, for
| example. I know that gmail, o365, yahoo, aol, etc work,
| because people use those emails to sign up and manage to
| validate their accounts.
|
| I don't agree that most people will not succeed, I know many
| other people personally who run their own mail servers. It's
| doable, and it's not nearly as bad as some like to make out.
|
| I've run low volume mail servers and high volume mail servers
| sending (GDPR compliant!) marketing mail.
|
| edit: where low volume = <1 outbound message a day.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > By the fact I get answers to emails I send to others (eg
| people using gsuite, people using o365)
|
| Do you get answers to 100% of emails you send? I don't find
| this plausible. Now, if you get answers to maybe 30% of
| emails you send, how do you know the other 70% is just
| because people didn't write anything back? How are you
| ruling out the possibility that some of those 70% never
| received your email in the first place?
|
| > I don't get issues from the sites that I run that use the
| mail server for sending - it sends confirmation emails for
| a forum I run, for example.
|
| So far I haven't encountered a _single_ email provider that
| successfully delivers 100% of mail sent. Postmark sometimes
| fails to deliver, SendGrid sometimes fails to deliver, etc.
| But you 're claiming that you have found the secret sauce
| and you actually have better deliverability than SendGrid
| and Postmark - and that's for confirmation emails of all
| things, the type of mail that very often lands in the spam
| folder. I don't believe you.
| mattbee wrote:
| Nobody who is anxious about a first contact with someone
| new will rely on email alone, anti-spam has made sure of
| that for 25+ years. You just can't measure whether
| someone _saw_ your email, which is all that matters to
| email users.
|
| Users do complain about unexpected bounce messages (often
| it's an address typo). And I am pretty sure that people
| who use gmail & hotmail are used to "checking their spam
| folder" and fixing deliverability problems for new
| senders that way.
|
| I've been pretty slapdash about this, including selling
| 1000s of mail servers and (apart from the adoption of
| SPF, DKIM, DMARC) it's all the same as it was 20 years
| ago. So I've no problem advising technically-inclined
| people to give it a go gradually.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > You just can't measure whether someone _saw_ your
| email, which is all that matters to email users.
|
| You can still measure deliverability with different
| methods. I've used GlockApps to send test emails to a
| variety of different inboxes at different providers and
| it tells me what percent of those emails hit the inbox,
| what percent went to spam folder, and what percent
| disappeared.
| mattbee wrote:
| Yes! That site is great as a spot check, I've used it.
| But imo if gmx.de are silently binning my messages (and
| nobody else) it's their problem. If it's Gmail, it's my
| problem :)
| jjav wrote:
| > So far I haven't encountered a single email provider
| that successfully delivers 100% of mail sent.
|
| There is no email provider that will deliver 100%. None.
| As I mentioned in another comment, you can buy a gsuite
| corporate account and send email from gmail to gmail
| within your own company and still end up in spam. If you
| expect 100% from any solution, you'll be disappointed.
| minimaul wrote:
| > Do you get answers to 100% of emails you send? I don't
| find this plausible. Now, if you get answers to maybe 30%
| of emails you send, how do you know the other 70% is just
| because people didn't write anything back? How are you
| ruling out the possibility that some of those 70% never
| received your email in the first place?
|
| Most of the personal email I send is to companies where I
| do expect and get responses, or to my family, or to
| mailing lists. I know family get my emails because they
| respond. I know companies do because they respond to
| support queries. I know mailing lists do because I see my
| messages in the list archives. I know there's a good mix
| of receiving operators because I get DMARC reports etc.
|
| > So far I haven't encountered a single email provider
| that successfully delivers 100% of mail sent. Postmark
| sometimes fails to deliver, SendGrid sometimes fails to
| deliver, etc. But you're claiming that you have found the
| secret sauce and you actually have better deliverability
| than SendGrid and Postmark - and that's for confirmation
| emails of all things, the type of mail that very often
| lands in the spam folder. I don't believe you.
|
| I don't really care if my email ends up in spam folders
| as long as it does not get dropped on the floor entirely,
| but I genuinely do not get complaints where people have
| not received/can't find their confirmation emails. I _do_
| practise good automated email hygiene (automatic removal
| when things bounce permanently, etc).
|
| I don't know what to say that will convince you that I
| have not personally experienced issues except with DT and
| AT&T, but... I haven't.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > Most of the personal email I send is to companies where
| I do expect and get responses, or to my family, or to
| mailing lists. I know family get my emails because they
| respond. I know companies do because they respond to
| support queries. I know mailing lists do because I see my
| messages in the list archives. I know there's a good mix
| of receiving operators because I get DMARC reports etc.
|
| Ok, fair enough.
|
| > I don't really care if my email ends up in spam folders
| as long as it does not get dropped on the floor entirely,
| but I genuinely do not get complaints where people have
| not received/can't find their confirmation emails. I do
| practise good automated email hygiene (automatic removal
| when things bounce permanently, etc).
|
| I care very much if my email ends up in spam folders. But
| if you're only talking about your email landing (in some
| folder), then sure, you convinced me.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| You can - https://www.postfix-tutorial.com/
| orangepurple wrote:
| Is the impact of DKIM and SPF on email delivery measurable? Have
| any studies on this subject been published? Such an important
| part of our lives should be better understood. Reading this
| thread feels like witnessing clergy swinging thuribles towards
| the congregation while mumbling the gospel to build a connection
| with God.
| zrail wrote:
| DKIM and SFP by themselves haven't done a ton, but they both
| feed into DMARC which absolutely has had an effect. It's
| probably just not what you think.
|
| The point of DMARC is to protect senders from spoofing. I.e. if
| I'm PayPal I don't want anyone to be able to spoof email from
| my domain, so I set a DMARC policy to reject if SFP and DKIM
| both fail. If I own a domain that I never want to be used for
| email I can set that same DMARC policy and just neglect to set
| up SFP and DKIM, therefore ensuring they fail.
| 0ld wrote:
| i can. so you can too. the hardest part is finding a clean ip in
| a clean block. the rest is quite simple and straightforward.
| dkim+spf set up was enough for my opensmtpd to deliver my mail to
| all the big players without any going to spam
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Networks are two things: technological constructs and societal
| constructs.
|
| Technologically: email still works the way it always has.
|
| Societally: because email as a construct wasn't built to account
| for spammers, and the after-the-fact patches to address this
| issue aren't universally rolled out or universally adopted, _and_
| there 's little incentive for the big incumbents to provide
| opportunities for new players by shaking up this status quo,
| email has devolved into a (human)-trust-based network where your
| mail only gets relayed if the relaying source trusts you as a
| person, not a pseudonymous node online.
|
| So you can stand up an email server, but the real legwork is in
| getting a trusted authority to peer with you and route your
| traffic.
| raintrees wrote:
| I have run my own mail server since maybe 1995? As is the case
| with most things I have learned how to do with computers, there
| are a few guidelines to follow (SPF, PTR record, etc.) and it
| helps to have a static IP from your ISP, although not necessary -
| I have several clients still hosting email using DDNS.
|
| You may wish to consider using something like a Synology NAS
| where a stripped down mail server is a free feature for 5
| mailboxes or less. They also support DDNS...
|
| And when spam levels get high, a quick analysis of source IP
| addresses gives me new entries for a block list at my firewall. I
| wrote a simplistic visual basic script to harvest the IP
| addresses, since I still use Outlook as my PIM.
| timbit42 wrote:
| How do you manage a dynamic IP? Do you whitelist the entire
| subnet? If not, do you update the DNS records every time the IP
| changes?
| buster wrote:
| That's strange. I have a virtual server running vor about 15
| years with several upgrades. Debian stable. Email works just fine
| with the occasional spam mail coming through.
| exdsq wrote:
| I was looking for this recently but as a Web3 service (so
| emailing other Ethereum addresses) and found one that let you
| host an email account but you had to stake X amount of money to
| use it to avoid spam (spam gets too expensive /awkward to do when
| you have to hold $100 for a week before you can use it). Didn't
| sign up but seemed promising that there could be some cool self-
| hosting options in the future that somewhat mitigate spam and
| avoids the whole current email issue. Obvious giant caveat that
| you can only email other people who have Ethereum wallets but
| still, thought it was pretty cool to avoid the blacklist problem.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think this could actually be a viable system for stopping
| spam if it was retrofitted onto the existing email system.
| Rather than each account putting up the bond, though, it should
| be done at the level of domain names, and (to encourage
| adoption) all existing mail-sending domains should be
| grandfathered in (allowing them to use a $0 bond instead).
|
| The only question is how do you stop spammers walking away with
| their stake and creating another domain? There needs to be a
| way to slash someone's bond, which requires some sort of
| consensus. With DKIM signatures, it's fortunately possible to
| cryptographically prove that a given email was sent by a given
| domain, but ultimately you need to give potential censorship
| powers to some entity.
|
| My suggestion for doing that is getting the ITU to vote on a
| set of maybe 7 organisations (e.g. mail providers,
| universities, non-profits) who share spam reports with each
| other and can slash a bond if at least 5 of them agree. Of
| course individual mail providers would be able to override
| these decisions and continue to accept emails from the
| blacklisted domains (and they could obviously continue to use
| other forms of spam filtering), but ideally the bond slashing
| mechanism would only end up being used once as spammers tested
| it and then gave up.
| exdsq wrote:
| > The only question is how do you stop spammers walking away
| with their stake and creating another domain?
|
| This is why I think it makes sense for an email-by-email
| basis if you also enforce a deposit and withdrawal delay.
| It's the simplest solution that I think could work. Not
| perfectly, but who's willing to spend $100 per email account
| with a 2-week delay between addresses? Add a public blacklist
| where you can vote for people as spammers and implement on
| your email services if you so choose, and I think you have a
| pretty good system. You may well be right that there's an
| elegant domain-based system with slashing and consensus but I
| haven't thought about it long enough to think of one myself!
|
| And yes you could do this off of Web3 but then you'd need an
| escrow account and a centralised party to hold the funds
| which isn't as decentralised as I was hoping for (at least
| with Web3 the stake remains in my wallet), but definitely
| possible!
|
| Edit: Maybe you could do it at an account level - then if you
| get blacklisted you'd have to open a new wallet meaning not
| only the 2-week delay and $100 cost _but_ an additional
| network fee. That means it 's unsustainable in the longterm.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > And yes you could do this off of Web3 but then you'd need
| an escrow account and a centralised party to hold the funds
| which isn't as decentralised as I was hoping for
|
| Right. In fact I was already thinking that this was a
| (rare) situation where a smart contract on a blockchain
| _would_ make sense, because you want transparency and
| consensus and low-throughput financial transactions between
| countries that don 't necessarily trust each other (or even
| have banking connections to each other).
|
| I wouldn't necessarily call that Web3, especially as there
| wouldn't need to be any web servers involved, but I suppose
| the system would affect people's webmail, so I can't really
| object to the label.
| mdb31 wrote:
| I've hosted my own email since, at least 1993 (that's on the
| Internet: I was on UUCP at least some years prior to that).
|
| If you have a static IPv4 in a range that is not actively
| hostile, and you have proper SFF/DMARC records, things should
| generally work out?
|
| And otherwise, services like https://www.mailchannels.com/ should
| help? (Still, you will need proper SPF records.)
|
| I've literally had a 95+% delivery rate from users in actual
| Lagos Nigeria using the strategy outlined above.
| yobbo wrote:
| What do you mean by hosting? It is basically necessary to relay
| outgoing mail via a reputable ISP in order to not be spam-sorted.
| They will then make sure their outgoing IPs are respected.
|
| For incoming mail you need a spam-filter, but that is in your
| hands.
| ankushnarula wrote:
| Without scarcity, there will always be spam.
|
| https://messari.io/article/look-to-the-stars-navigating-the-...
| agentultra wrote:
| I host my own email. I'm not permanently marked as
| spam/blacklisted. Although it takes a fair bit of tedious setup
| and configuration to get it to work right. And every now and
| again a blacklist site will mark my domain temporarily when it
| detects that some server in my IP block is acting suspicious.
| This mainly happens because I host on a VPS.
|
| The only _problem_ with email self-hosting is just how many
| moving parts are involved in a typical setup if you 're using
| tools from unix-land. You need many different programs to work
| together in a typical setup:
|
| - postfix
|
| - dovecot
|
| - spamassassin
|
| - fail2ban
|
| - kerberos
|
| - ssl+tls
|
| - etc..
|
| And you have to know about how unix account security works
| because some of the older programs haven't been updated to use
| modern authentication mechanisms and so they need to be isolated
| and carefully managed, etc.
|
| The other problem is DNS/verification. You have to set up your
| DNS records with arcane configuration options that are not well
| documented in order to play along nicely with the email community
| and not get blacklisted/blocked.
|
| Some projects have popped up to try and offer containers that
| have everything pre-configured. ymmv.
| zelon88 wrote:
| You need to have a domain name with the DMARC information in the
| TXT DNS record. Also most large email providers have some sort of
| separate "registration" process that internally helps them
| perform heuristics. For example, Google calls this "Google
| Postmaster Tools" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/
| nathias wrote:
| because it's secretly a social network and those are very hard
| wey-gu wrote:
| You need to maintain your ip's reputation, which, for ourselves,
| is barely possible:(.
| cube00 wrote:
| Self hoster of 3 years here. You can do it. Don't let the big
| players scare you off when they send your mail to spam (GMail) or
| outright 550 refuse to accept it (Microsoft).
|
| So far I've managed to avoid needing to relay my mail out using
| something like SMTP2Go but eventually I may have to. For now
| GMail seems to be learning when I email my regulars and Microsoft
| unbanned me after I joined their Outlook.com Smart Network Data
| Services (SNDS)
|
| In better news, incoming mail works flawlessly. It's even spam
| free if you use a catch all address
| (dodgywebsite.example@yourdomain.example) and drop mail from any
| company that leaks your address out.
| swixmix wrote:
| I also self host but on a VPS. Incoming mail works great.
| Outgoing mail not so much unless I send it to a trusted third
| party SMTP server. No outgoing mail fees if low traffic. Might
| be an option to consider while building up reputation?
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Setting SPF, Dmark, DKIm and having a proper PTR record
| significantly increases your server acceptance.
| cube00 wrote:
| I had all that setup from day one and still ended up in the
| GMail spam and banned by Microsoft/Outlook.com (which also
| includes anyone using Office 365 in their workplace for
| mail)
|
| I assume that's because I had no reputation, although I did
| start on a DigitalOcean VPS before I learnt about their
| terrible ongoing reputation for ignore abuse reports. [1]
|
| [1]: https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/digital-ocean-
| ips-being...
| pmontra wrote:
| Which program do you use to filter incoming spam on the VPS
| and is it working well?
| TheMog wrote:
| The two typical choices are rspamd and
| amavisd/SpamAssassin, at least when you're using Postfix on
| a unity environment. I use amavisd on my primary and rspamd
| on the secondary, both seem to work OK.
|
| Yes, spam will still make it through and you have to train
| the filters in either case.
| baisq wrote:
| You can host your own mastodon server but if it fills with spam
| others will refuse to federate with you.
| [deleted]
| lazyier wrote:
| It is entirely possible to host your own email server, I do it
| for example, there is no way to reliably know that other people
| are receiving your message.
|
| That is: When self-hosting email you can reliably receive email,
| but can't reliably send it.
|
| The fundamental problem is that email is a broken protocol and
| too many people are making too much money mitigating the problem
| of spam rather than solving it.
|
| Companies that need to keep their email servers working have to
| deal with extortion from anti-spam companies to attain reliable
| message delivery. It is a racket.
|
| This means that even if you get everything working 100% with all
| the perfect security protocols and conventions in place the
| chances of anybody actually receiving your email at this point is
| roughly 50/50. There is nothing you can do to ensure reliable
| message delivery without getting your servers whitelisted by most
| of the popular spam houses. And even then you have to deal with
| large public companies like Google and Microsoft that may or may
| not forward messages to recipient based on secret rules that
| change constantly.
|
| So while it is possible, I host my own email, I can't rely on it.
| I use gmail for situations were reliability matters.
|
| It is better to use something like Mastodon for correspondence if
| you can help it.
| [deleted]
| krageon wrote:
| You can self-host, it works fine. If you want to run the server
| from a residential IP though, you will have a bad time.
| Otherwise, you may have to manually delist your IP from a few
| blacklists. It's not nearly as odious as everyone claims, it just
| isn't very fun.
| Random_BSD_Geek wrote:
| You absolutely can host your own email. I do and have since
| before Google existed. Antispam hurdles do exist but clearing
| them is just a process. For most people it isn't worth the
| effort. Sometimes I wonder why I still bother, but it is
| definitely not impossible.
| ShowalkKama wrote:
| I don't get it: I'm selfhosting my own mailserver and I have no
| issues with gmail / outlook marking me as spam, what is everyone
| talking about? You just need to set up DKIM, SPF and wait a
| couple of weeks.
| porbelm wrote:
| ...and make sure your IP range is never in any blacklists, or
| pay to whitelist your IPs
| ShowalkKama wrote:
| my ip is in the joke blacklist UCEP because "my provider
| doesn't care about spam". Still no issues sending to gmail.
|
| I'm running a tor node too (guard / middle obviously).
| TZubiri wrote:
| The biggest difference between the 2 protocols (Mastodon and
| email) are age and volume.
|
| Email is old and used by everyone, Mastodon is new and used by
| nobody.
|
| Email is targeted for attacks because it's used by a lot of
| people and there has been enough time to develop mass messaging
| tools.
| slenk wrote:
| Recently switch to Hetzner and have had 0 problems. They maintain
| clean IPs and if they catch you spamming they block outbound mail
| Tepix wrote:
| I have been self-hosting my email since 20 years. It can be done.
| I haven't had problem with mails being marked as spam for a long
| time.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I run several small business email systems in the UK. You do need
| to get at least SPF and the usual MX, A and PTR records sorted at
| a minimum. Also A and PTR and (E)HELO must agree.
|
| You can relay your mail via another service if you need to gather
| some karma for your domain but ensure you get your DNS records
| right. That way you can run your own full mail system from a
| "dodgy" IP address.
|
| It's not for everyone but neither is IT in general. If you can
| fathom a Mastodon server then you can manage an email system -
| technically speaking. However, you must get the basics sorted out
| and don't send anything that can be construed as spam!
| svdr wrote:
| First, you need to set up the technical side: rDNS, SPF, DKIM,
| DMARC, no IPv6, TLS, etc. Lots of guides on the internet for
| that.
|
| After setting up the technical side (which you can test with a
| site like https://www.mail-tester.com), you need an IP (v4)
| without a bad reputation. This is the hardest part, because it's
| less easy to control.
|
| If your IP has been used to send spam, or sometimes even the
| neighbouring IP's, you won't get through to a lot of providers.
|
| These are the best places (in my experience) to check IP
| reputation:
|
| https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center/lookup
| https://senderscore.org
| https://www.barracudacentral.org/lookups/lookup-reputation
|
| And also check for blacklists, for example with
| https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx.
|
| If your IP is on a blacklist, you can remove is most of the time
| by requesting it via their (90's looking) websites.
|
| Also, if you send a lot of mail, Microsoft and Google have
| programs for senders to monitor reputation:
|
| https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/
| https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/
|
| But... even with an IP with a neutral reputation, your mails may
| be sent to the spambox. You need some volume of legitimate email
| over time to build trust (this is called warming up an IP).
| leephillips wrote:
| There's a lot of FUD out there about hosting your own email. I've
| been doing it for years and it's great. Use postfix and dovecot,
| and research how to maximize your delivery.
|
| I notice that people recommend against self hosting by pointing
| out that gmail, aol, hotmail, etc. are likely to hide your email
| in spam folders, refuse it, or just silently drop it on the
| floor. The flip side of that is that these companies are
| providing broken email service to their customers: it's not a
| mail delivery problem for me, it's a mail acceptance problem for
| you. My email setup gives me about one false positive on incoming
| mail per year, at most. So don't use these providers; their
| service is broken.
| akamaine wrote:
| What annoys me most about email is that it's painfully hard to
| deploy. Other things are pretty straight forward, you just run
| them as service, probably some database with them, some http
| proxy and that's it, you're good to go.
|
| That's not the case with email. You have a lot of different
| components to it, like postfix, dovecot, opendkim, and wtf else
| with as many confusing configuration options and DNS fiddling. It
| is so overly complicated for what it does that I'm starting to
| think that email was a mistake....
| spoonjim wrote:
| The problem is that decentralized services only work when
| everyone is on decent behavior. When the degenerates onboard, you
| need the harsh hand of a centralized authority.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > you need the harsh hand of a centralized authority.
|
| What you actually need is reputation information, which you can
| make your own decisions based on. Unfortunately the cheapest
| way to gather reputation is with something like a panopticon,
| where one party sees all interactions and everyone trusts their
| judgement.
|
| It's at least theoretically possible, though, for individual
| nodes to securely gossip reputation information to each other,
| which is the model that the Matrix.org team are working
| towards:
|
| https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
| robrtsql wrote:
| In my opinion, the difference between Mastodon/ActivityPub/the
| fediverse and email is adoption. If Mastodon was more popular:
|
| - A handful of instances provided by large companies would
| probably crop up and end up hosting the majority of users
|
| - Spammers would notice that they could reach a large number of
| people via Mastodon, and start spamming
|
| - The providers of these large instances would moderate heavily
| to prevent their own instances being used for spam, and begin
| blocking / not federating with small instances
|
| I should add that spam is probably _already_ a problem on
| Mastodon, but perhaps not to the extent that it is for email
| since the average Mastodon user is (for now!) way less likely to
| fall for a scam and therefore a much less valuable target.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The other problem with Mastodon / the Fediverse is how
| fractured it is. Here[0][1] are some examples of the sort of
| blocks that instance admins implement, including reasons such
| as "Allows controversial content" and "A lot of trolls, very
| [My Little Pony] themed".
|
| I suppose it is to their credit that these instances are so
| transparent about their blocking policies, but I think the
| world would be a worse place if email or even Twitter made it
| impossible for people with different politics to message each
| other.
|
| [0] https://toot.cafe/about/more#blocked-instances
|
| [1] https://im-in.space/about/more#unavailable-content
| itslennysfault wrote:
| You absolutely can host your own email server. I did for over a
| decade. Spam ranking is tied to IP addresses so you just need to
| get an IP address that doesn't already have a bad reputation, and
| build it a positive reputation over time. Then, as long as you
| don't send spam from that IP you should be good as long as you
| keep the same IP for your server.
|
| That said, I abandoned running my own email server years ago. It
| only went down a couple times on me, but when it did it was
| always when I really didn't have time to fix it (which is
| basically always). It's not really difficult at all, but it's
| MUCH HARDER than just using gmail or whatever.
| yubiox wrote:
| Google still marks some of my mail as spam even though I have
| jumped through all the spf/dkim/dmarc hoops. Yet I still get tons
| of actual, obvious, previously-marked spam in my gmail inbox. F
| google.
| dmead wrote:
| You can. Ive set up mail records for jobs before. Its just a
| question of maintaining the dns records and paying whatever fee
| to your registrar like everything else.
|
| Not sure what the story is with self hosting spam filtering. I
| think most people call an external service
| planede wrote:
| What I don't get that we now have all the DMARC infrastructure,
| that should in theory enable to use the reputation of domains
| _instead_ of IP addresses, but apparently nobody cares, and your
| IP has to be reputable, no matter what.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| You can definitely self host. In terms of spam there's a bunch of
| config you need to do to not be put into the spam folder
| automatically.
|
| I've done it for my side project, not saying it was easy and
| require a bit of linux knowledge but nothing you can't google.
|
| Off the top of my head you have to setup your DNS and enable
| DNSSEC SPF and DKIM records Make sure your reverse dns is setup
| correctly DMARC as well
|
| After that it's pretty much the same as your big email providers
| you build up your reputation by not sending out spammy shit
| emails then that's it.
|
| Note: Be sure to secure your email server otherwise someone will
| try to hack it
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I've set up my own mail server with Mailcow
| (https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs/). Can't have
| taken more than an hour to get everything set up, including
| SPF/DKIM records for the domain. Set the domain, throw a `docker-
| compose up -d` at the repo and it Pretty Much Works (TM). I need
| to set up something to parse and visualize the DMARC reports from
| other mail servers at some point, but that's it: fully-featured
| mail server with ActiveSync, spam quarantines, AV, no diving into
| obscure config files necessary. Alternatives like Mailinabox
| provide a similar experience.
|
| Some mail servers (Gmail, Outlook) discriminate against small
| mail providers by marking their stuff as spam. Ironic, because
| the spam I receive almost exclusively comes from free mailboxes.
| It doesn't happen consistently, and it tends not to happen
| anymore once the other party responds.
|
| Truth to be told, I receive WAY more email than I actually send
| so I usually don't need to care about being marked as a spammer.
| I care more about control over my emails than I care about the
| occasional reminder I need to give Outlook users to check the
| spam folder.
| Mazzen wrote:
| Mailcow is the solution we use. Reliable since years and
| feature rich. A ticket to add a dmarc parser exists but no one
| ever contributed the plug and play solution discussed in the
| ticket. Works pretty straight forward.
|
| Mailcow, can recommend
| draxil wrote:
| You can, I do. It's really no problem.
|
| You _do_ have to make a bit of effort to setup DKIM, SPF etc. But
| really it 's not too difficult.
| aasasd wrote:
| After all websites started requiring email for interactivity, it
| became a proxy for the identity, propped up by some trust in
| Google and whoever else. No one is interested in letting you
| 'confirm' your identity. This is more evident now that email
| hosts require the phone number in turn.
|
| If you're reluctant to use the centralized identity, you
| obviously have some malicious intent.
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can do whatever you want. For a pull-based service, I have no
| problem with you posting things, but if you're sending to me, I
| make the rules and I'm not interested in prioritizing your
| freedom to send things over my freedom to not receive things.
| bogwog wrote:
| Of course you can. Just try it, and you'll see that the problem
| isn't _" I can't"_, but rather _" I don't want to deal with this
| shit"_
| [deleted]
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