4 ms·

And in their place, you can take on the cognitive load of learning how to set up and administer an email server for a really questionable cost-benefit ratio. T

And in their place, you can take on the cognitive load of learning how to set up and administer an email server for a really questionable cost-benefit ratio. This is like telling someone who got poisoned by E. coli-contaminated spinach that the solution is trivial, just grow your own spinach, farming was designed as a means of small-group subsistence, return to that world and all of your problems with agribusiness will be over....

emilburzo 11y ago
As someone running their own mail server, I completely agree. I love being a sysadmin and learning how everything fits together, and even I find it at times exhausting keeping up with everything related to email best practices. For someone without any interest in such activities, it would probably be a royal pain in the butt.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Fellow devops/sysadmin here: Fastmail is the ticket. Its ~$40/year, and you're supporting an independent mail company. I'd rather spend time with my wife then hacking on a mail server, but I still want to support open interoperability.
  - stevep001 11y ago
    +1 I ran my own email server for probably 20 years, starting with UUCP over USR Couriers. It got more and more difficult to keep things running, and I had better things to do with my time.
zbuf 11y ago
I run my own email server, but partly because I've done this since I started using email. I'd be unlikely to start again today (but see my final point, below) Every year the process gets more and more involved. Usually it's a new 'trick' or nuance that is needed to have Google accept my mails without marking them as spam. It's not like the solutions are necessarily particularly hard (or bad, for example they made mandatory things like SPL when when IPv6 is used). But you end up with zero information to debug on. If you're lucky the message will bounce, but worse it just festers in your recipient's spam folder. That said, I end up with something better -- SpamAssassin works great, with far greater success than Google makes of my employer's inbox (probably it has more cpu cycles per-message.) dovecot's IMAP implementation is far superior for searching and performance. Google's filtering is so bad it's of very limited use, procmail is much better. And you get to avoid Google's tiresome de-duplication of messages (a great help for mailing lists) For about 15 years we administered a personal email server as a small co-operative of 3-4 people. This is the way to go IMO.

emilburzo 11y ago

As someone running their own mail server, I completely agree. I love being a sysadmin and learning how everything fits together, and even I find it at times exhausting keeping up with everything related to email best practices. For someone without any interest in such activities, it would probably be a royal pain in the butt.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Fellow devops/sysadmin here: Fastmail is the ticket. Its ~$40/year, and you're supporting an independent mail company. I'd rather spend time with my wife then hacking on a mail server, but I still want to support open interoperability.
- stevep001 11y ago
  +1 I ran my own email server for probably 20 years, starting with UUCP over USR Couriers. It got more and more difficult to keep things running, and I had better things to do with my time.

zbuf 11y ago

I run my own email server, but partly because I've done this since I started using email. I'd be unlikely to start again today (but see my final point, below) Every year the process gets more and more involved. Usually it's a new 'trick' or nuance that is needed to have Google accept my mails without marking them as spam. It's not like the solutions are necessarily particularly hard (or bad, for example they made mandatory things like SPL when when IPv6 is used). But you end up with zero information to debug on. If you're lucky the message will bounce, but worse it just festers in your recipient's spam folder. That said, I end up with something better -- SpamAssassin works great, with far greater success than Google makes of my employer's inbox (probably it has more cpu cycles per-message.) dovecot's IMAP implementation is far superior for searching and performance. Google's filtering is so bad it's of very limited use, procmail is much better. And you get to avoid Google's tiresome de-duplication of messages (a great help for mailing lists) For about 15 years we administered a personal email server as a small co-operative of 3-4 people. This is the way to go IMO.