4 ms·

Good luck getting email to work with that setup though.

a3n 10y ago
Yeah, at that point, in this day and age, running email either has to be your day job to keep that running, or you as an individual have to at least be capable of doing that job; most people aren't, and I pay Fastmail to get that done.
- calgoo 10y ago
  I did it for 2 years until November last year. Its not... too hard. You find the pages where you can keep an eye on you address etc. Issues normally happen because of two things: 1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc. 2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :) I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.
__b__ 10y ago
"Email" as it is run today by third parties. Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer. For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers". This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other What's America's largest ISP? I think Comcast? Good luck passing SMTP in either direction over Comcast's residential network: https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-of-blocked-ports https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-... I agree with your general point, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing, even for geeks. For the Muggles it's impossible.
  - __b__ 10y ago
    An ISP will block ports -- the goal is top stop spam -- but nothing requires you to use the traditional SMTP ports that are used for spam. Because you're not sending spam. You are sending email to people you know, on a port you have agreed to, who also have reachable IP addresses and will accept connections from your IP address. ISP's are not going to do DPI on open ports like 22, 80, or 443 or any high port, in order to filter out SMTP traffic. Why would they bother? If you must use the existing "email provider" system -- e.g., you need to send commercial email -- then you must use the standardized ports they use, and yes, you must jump through their hoops. And you will experience spam and other nuisances. It's supposed to be open and decnetralized, but the reality is it's quite centralized because everyone relies on "major email providers". But there's nothing about SMTP protocol that requires anyone to use an "email provider" or any specific port, nor to accept email from all IP addresses. Two people can communicate directly via SMTP on a non-standard port and can choose to filter by IP address. Maybe no one does this anymore, but I've done it; it's possible. It's not that difficult to set up. The showstopper is not the set up, nor the ISP filtering port 25. It's that most people do not have a reachable IP address.

a3n 10y ago

Yeah, at that point, in this day and age, running email either has to be your day job to keep that running, or you as an individual have to at least be capable of doing that job; most people aren't, and I pay Fastmail to get that done.

calgoo 10y ago
I did it for 2 years until November last year. Its not... too hard. You find the pages where you can keep an eye on you address etc. Issues normally happen because of two things: 1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc. 2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :) I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.

__b__ 10y ago

"Email" as it is run today by third parties. Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer. For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers". This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other What's America's largest ISP? I think Comcast? Good luck passing SMTP in either direction over Comcast's residential network: https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-of-blocked-ports https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-... I agree with your general point, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing, even for geeks. For the Muggles it's impossible.
- __b__ 10y ago
  An ISP will block ports -- the goal is top stop spam -- but nothing requires you to use the traditional SMTP ports that are used for spam. Because you're not sending spam. You are sending email to people you know, on a port you have agreed to, who also have reachable IP addresses and will accept connections from your IP address. ISP's are not going to do DPI on open ports like 22, 80, or 443 or any high port, in order to filter out SMTP traffic. Why would they bother? If you must use the existing "email provider" system -- e.g., you need to send commercial email -- then you must use the standardized ports they use, and yes, you must jump through their hoops. And you will experience spam and other nuisances. It's supposed to be open and decnetralized, but the reality is it's quite centralized because everyone relies on "major email providers". But there's nothing about SMTP protocol that requires anyone to use an "email provider" or any specific port, nor to accept email from all IP addresses. Two people can communicate directly via SMTP on a non-standard port and can choose to filter by IP address. Maybe no one does this anymore, but I've done it; it's possible. It's not that difficult to set up. The showstopper is not the set up, nor the ISP filtering port 25. It's that most people do not have a reachable IP address.