9 ms·

How do we explain email to an “expert”?

40 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

gregatragenet3 10y ago
I haven't found a cloud email service which will let me keep my procmail filters. (A group-3)
- regecks 10y ago
  Fastmail lets you write sieve filters. Not exactly the same but you could port them over, right?
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
1. It's a massive exaggeration that it's dangerous to run your own email server. Now, he doesn't explain why he thinks that it is, but I guess there would be two major categories, both based on the assumption of vulnerabilities: (1) your server could be abused against others (yes, but so could your laptop or smartphone) or (2) your own emails could be at risk of being leaked (yes, but the solution to that obviously is not to directly give them to someone else instead). 2. None of that is actually solved by simply trusting someone else to run your email servers for you if you also can't judge whether they are doing it properly and, in particular, in your interest. 3. If you think that trusting someone else to run your email servers for you is an acceptable solution, that is functionally equivalent to trusting someone else to provide you with a software package to run on your email servers. Everything that someone else could do on an email server that they run for you, they could just as well package into, say, an install CD image, which you then could use to run your own functionally equivalent, hopefully well-configured and well-updated, mail server. So, I would think, this is at best an argument against putting together your own mail server from distro packages, and configuring everything yourself, maybe. Other than that, there is no fundamental reason why you would need to know email RFCs any more for running an email server than you need to know them for running an email client. In either case, knowing them can help you with figuring out some problems. But also, in either case, if the software is good, the programmers should have taken care of reading the RFCs for you, so you don't need to, for the most part.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  >Everything that someone else could do on an email server that they run for you, they could just as well package into, say, an install CD image, which you then could use to run your own functionally equivalent, hopefully well-configured and well-updated, mail server. Gmail won't give you their entire software stack (also good luck running it even if they did). Neither will any of the other big players.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
    Are you saying that gmail are the only ones who know how to run a mail server?
    - ivanca 10y ago
      You were claiming "they could just as well package into, say, an install CD image" which is likely not going to happen, so he was just giving an example. The perfect spam filter Gmail has its probably based on data and ML analysis, not a simple software you can put on a CD and install on some little server; so even if someone who works there wanted to help you they probably can't do it.
      - stonogo 10y ago
        GMail's "perfect spam filter" is so bad that it is the reason my institution moved away from Google services. It's also the main reason so many people consider it 'impossible' to host your own email. It's anything but perfect. It's a black box, with no user-serviceable parts inside. Completely useless for any organization with needs that deviate from Joe User.
        newjersey 10y ago
        How would you implement a spam filter? You can sort of turn off spam filtering on incoming emails but I don't most people or organizations would want that. > Completely useless for any organization with needs that deviate from Joe User. Maybe but being slightly over aggressive means a world in terms of user happiness. Think about email before Gmail. How much junk did you see in your inbox? There is a lot LESS today. Joe User would be very happy if they dried to think about it for a second.
ikeboy 10y ago
That chart has some issues http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
Normal_gaussian 10y ago
I'm toying with setting up my own email server so that I can use all the prefixes for my domains. Ideally it would make managing my actual mail so much easier. However. I know setting it up is a PITA. And if I move to it I am stuck with it. The various mailinabox solutions sound great, but I can't quite tell if they do what I want and email is too damn complex to vet myself. And they need an entire bloody box because they don't play nice with containers apparently (on last google) - all to securely parse some text files. Overkill or what.
lwhalen 10y ago
Horsepuckey. Hosting your own data services is not dangerous, if you do your homework. Email is not that complex (compared to something like a federated Kerberos environment), and there are several good, concise, HOWTOs, books, etc on the subject. Running your own stack makes you a first-class citizen of the 'net, and more people should do it.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  And it makes you a second (if we're being generous)-class citizen to all the mail servers to which you will likely attempt to deliver mail. Good luck getting GMail to accept mail to the inbox of your friends from your TurnKeyLinux MTA in a box or whatever, or just because you managed to apt-get install postfix and get it to communicate with your client. Having run mail servers for a hosting company with tens of thousands of servers, the easy answer for most people is "don't do it, not ever ever". If you're the type who understands why not to do it, but does it anyway "for fun", that's probably OK because you understand the risks and what types of bad things can happen (and probably have some idea of how to prevent and/or fix them). If you don't and "just install OwnCloud" or whatever the flavor of the week is for "own your whole social stack by installing linux on that dusty tower sitting in your garage and STICK IT TO THE MAN!", you're likely setting yourself up to get your identity stolen at the very least, with having the FBI come and seize all of your electronic equipment not out of the picture, e.g. in the case of some hacking crew using your poorly-secured box as a proxy / jump host / C&C / worse. No thank you very much. I know most of this stuff because I've been there, and the people like me who have done it for years and see the horrors are honestly trying to help those who might be tempted. I set up exim with SpamAssassin and clamav on Debian before I could drive with my own bind server hosting all the zones out of the basement, Server 2k3 running AD, Zimbra and slapd + freeradius on opensuse. I did it to learn, and after getting it all set up (which took weeks back then) and getting inbox deliver to gmail (again, in a time when doing so had a much lower bar), I thought I was some kind of Internet wizard. I did learn a ton before my first tech job doing this, and I also learned why it was a bad idea. I got a letter from my ISP a few weeks after getting this all online (of course I had remote access set up via pfsense with SSH on a non-standard port with root login disabled) informing me that there was a botnet C&C running at our home IP. Figuring this was just a mistake, as I was active on IRC at the time, I dug into the traffic and basically found that what the ISP said was true. I was able to set up a mitm on pfsense to get a log of the IRC activity in order to figure out exactly what was going on. Most of my set-up had been taken over without me even realizing it. Quite a few years later, I worked in web hosting for a few years. The amount of terrible things which happened to unmanaged colos and dedicated servers was astounding. There were quite a few legal disputes which involved data on systems we physically controlled. There were companies which went out of business due to data loss. There were others which were blackmailed by hackers. Others simply went under. There wascredit card theft, databases dumped, unsalted passwords, you name it, and plenty more we probably didn't know about. The Internet was a very hostile place for a server years ago, keeping hackers busy looting and pillaging. I'm sure it's much worse now, with more profit to be made, tons more stuff to be pwnt, and tons more people launching poorly-configured stuff. Leave the MTAs to the pros. I promise that somewhere out there, someone is getting paid a good amount to spend quite a bit of time keeping that mail server online and in good shape. They are very likely better at this than you, have way more clout with their domains than you (no one cares if your domain / NS / netblock / AS gets blacklisted, but if gmail / yahoo / aol / Comcast stops working, postmasters@ all over will jump to fix it), and are getting paid to do it, likely as a full-time job, likely for many systems. You may be able to set it up once, and make it work a few times, until it annoys someone who cuts it off, at which point you have very little recourse and very little chance of ever making it work as well again. The point isn't that you can't do it, the point is that it's not worth the risk when there are so many other great options out there.
upofadown 10y ago
It would be interesting to know exactly how one could get owned by running just an email server. It's been forever since there has been any server that could be attacked with just SMTP. IMAP has a login, as does that buggy PHP webmail program. There just isn't much of an attack surface there. The real problems are spam and convincing other mail servers to accept your email.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  There have been remote code execution exploits in mail servers before, Exim most recently. There probably are more hiding somewhere in one of the many layers that are needed for modern email servers.
  - rlpb 10y ago
    That isn't difficult to manage though, unless you consider running any server to be insecure. Use your distribution's MTA package and turn on automatic security updates. Done.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      Unless they are too slow, then you get to pick up the pieces. Since a server is a much juicier and visible target than any client, expect attacks.
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
        > Since a server is a much juicier and visible target than any client, expect attacks. Why do you think that? Isn't a web browser that has access to your gmail inbox just as juicy as your self-hosted imap server? I don't really see why a "server" would somehow be inherently a more interesting target. Google's servers, sure, they give you acess to billions of mailboxes, but your own private email server?
    - euyyn 10y ago
      I would presume the moment an adversary gains control of the server, his first order of business is to disable things like that.
baby 10y ago
Came here thinking I would learn something. Learned literally nothing reading this article. Reminded me of this other gem article: http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-black-lives-matter-isnt-racist-hate-group-then--4610 http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-black-lives-matter-isnt... Basically trying to prove a point with very... umm... poor arguments :)
femto 10y ago
Be wary when something is described "too hard", but the describer doesn't/can't give specifics on why it is too hard. If a person can't give a generally understandable description of the difficulties, one has to ask whether they understand the topic well enough to make a pronouncement of hardness. > Then you'll understand there are no experts. I disagree. There are, but experts have to keep learning in order to maintain their expertise.
- shawkinaw 10y ago
  This line is what got me: > There are literally more topics than one could read in a lifetime. Literally no part of that sentence is accurate.
  - vacri 10y ago
    The author doesn't specify whose lifetime :) It could be the lifetime of a mosquito. Or, more fitting, the lifetime of a network packet with a low TTL...
  - jethro_tell 10y ago
    Especially considering, all documentation and concepts regarding email have been written/designed in a single lifetime.
    - dllthomas 10y ago
      That's no guarantee, given that they have been written/designed by multiple people in parallel.
  - NhanH 10y ago
    I'm not sure I follow here. Why is that sentence incorrect?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Animats 10y ago
Are there any good email servers which aren't horrible legacy messes? No UUCP support, no M4 macros, no ancient C code? I once looked at writing an immediate email forwarder in Go, a mail forwarder for servers that don't receive mail. It would, upon receiving a message via SMTP but before replying with a status, open a connection to forward the email, and return the status of the send to the input SMTP connection. No local message storage at all. Runs in a jail. It's not hard to do this as a minimum viable product in Go. But all the anti-spam stuff you need today makes it a far larger project. It would be interesting to write both that, and a pure SMTP to IMAP server. No local mail access, just pure IMAP. Together, the two programs add up to a mail server much simpler than most today.
- zdw 10y ago
  Depends what you mean by "ancient C code" - if it's basically Sendmail you're complaining about (and given the m4 mention, that seems likely), then there have always been other options. Both qmail and postfix have security models pretty similar to the ones you describe - the process that accepts the mail in either has almost no privileges. See here for how postfix does this: http://www.postfix.org/OVERVIEW.html http://www.postfix.org/OVERVIEW.html
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Yep, qmail may be old but it can do all the new tricks, and it can work like you say. https://cr.yp.to/qmail.html https://cr.yp.to/qmail.html steep learning curve but it'll do it all and the design is great once you "get it".
- zrm 10y ago
  It's like sendmail et al are to email what BIND is to DNS, and what small mail servers really need is the analog of dnsmasq. The problem is it then needs to be popular enough for widespread use to sand down the rough edges, which is chicken and egg. A way out of that might be to stamp out the common refrain that you shouldn't run your own mail server.
- _cbdev 10y ago
  Not to plug my own projects unduly, but I've grown tired of writing configuration files running to hundreds and thousands of lines and kind of snapped and implemented the basic protocols (SMTP & POP3) myself - the project is @ http://cmail.rocks/ http://cmail.rocks/ (and https://github.com/cmail-mta/cmail https://github.com/cmail-mta/cmail). I've since moved all my mail for the last year (for about 10 domains) via a cmail setup and so far have not had a major hickup. Sure, it may not be as full-featured as other mail servers, but thats not the mission statement ;) One of the main reasons I'll probably never go back (besides pride) is the ease of altering the runtime configuration via our admin tools (eg. adding a new domain to the mail server is one command in the simplest form). Some of my peers who contributed code or bug reports also run instances and are very happy with the amount of configuration they need to support for cmail vs. the amount of things to do to run for example exim. Code-wise, it's still C (because that's what I'm most comfortable with), but hopefully it doesn't read as ancient :) I've tried to keep the bulk of it understandable and modular. We extensively use static analysis (clang analyzer and Coverity Scan) as well as fuzzing with afl-fuzz as part of our testing. IMAP is the only major protocol we do not yet support (though the groundwork is laid in another branch of the main repo), and that's mainly because the specification is a major PITA (at least compared with the relatively sanely specified SMTP and POP3). IMAP also implicitly requires multithreaded handling of connections, which so far cmail has managed to avoid, because in my experience multithreading is a) not necessary in most sane server designs and b) a major source of non-trivial bugs. Edit: Oh, since you mention build systems - we use a simple makefile, so yeah, no m4 macros ;)
viraptor 10y ago
> most of #3 knows running your own email server is pretty dangerous I think this could be phrased better. Or at least expanded on what "dangerous" means here. Someone breaking in is just one tiny part of it. Getting incoming emails dropped due to misconfiguration is another. Then there's the whole issue of getting your mail accepted. After such comment there's always a few people ready to say that it just worked for them and they don't have any issues. That's great. As long as they actually know that's the case (how often do you test for your mail being silently dropped? how often do you send copies to yourself on gmail, yahoo, etc and verify they don't go straight to spam), and as long as nothing around their network changes (two spammers in your /24 means you're suddenly being filtered, someone changes description of your range to dialup and you're being filtered, etc.). Running your own email long term can be easy, hard or a full time job. And that can change day to day. "pretty dangerous"? No... Closer to: suddenly requiring a great deal of work while you're wondering if you dropped an important document.
themgt 10y ago
Every time I read an article like this (the "I am certainly not writing this to defend Hillary Clinton, [but let me use the piece to subtly defend Hillary Clinton]"), I check the author's professional associations: Nat Meysenburg is a technologist at New America’s Open Technology Institute Ahh yes, "New America", who runs that again? Oh right, long-time Clinton lackey Anne Marie-Slaughter who was "devasted" when she thought Hillary criticized her a little bit that one time [0], along with Google's Eric Schmidt who runs a stealth startup for Hillary [1] named "The Groundwork" complete with an Illuminati-esque logo [2] [0] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-emails-slaughter-216285 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-emails... [1] http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working... [2] http://thegroundwork.com http://thegroundwork.com
- rtpg 10y ago
  Isn't it a little cruel to these people's agency to reduce them to "Clinton lackeys"? Not to mention that it's pretty normal to feel at least a bit bad when someone you were working for and admire says you're whining whenever you talk about your difficulties. Plus I'm pretty sure Schmidt is beholden to no-one at this point. "Fuck You" money is an understatement.... Though I can get these people rationalising a defence due to emotions, I don't think there's a big web of conspiracy. Popular people get defended by a lot of people...
  - lugg 10y ago
    I enjoyed how you attacked his use of the word lacky while ignoring his accusation. Kind of like how he was explaining how the author didn't outright defend Hillary, but subtley did defend Hillary.
- Joof 10y ago
  Wouldn't this article be calling Clinton somewhat naive and cast her in a negative light?
Joof 10y ago
He really doesn't describe why it can't be done other than some vagueries. I'm willing to bet a good chunk of people here could run a fairly secure email server (it's not like Google hides it's emails from the NSA anyway.)
Annatar 10y ago
I'm in the process of setting up my own e-mail infrastructure. I have maildir, certificates, IMAP, SASL, TLS, and antivirus working, with anti SPAM and the web GUI left to do. I built and configured the MTA and the IMAP server to use a SQL database to do their table lookups. On a platform where I had to architect, compile, link, and package everything myself, because I didn't want Sendmail so I ripped it out and then had to seamlessly integrate the MTA of my choice with the OS. (I used to admin Sendmail for a living back in the day when SASL and TLS were science fiction.) It's a nightmare. I postponed this for 15 years knowing how bad it will be. It's far worse than that. During the last two years while I've been trying to figure it all out, I seriously thought about ditching e-mail altogether. The last year was spent reading various documentation. The DNS MX records aren't even in yet, and I already see port scans and hack attempts on port 25, probing for security flaws and configuration errors, already trying to exploit my MTA infrastructure. And before I go live, I have to recompile OpenSSL, SASL, antivirus and the MTA at the minimum, to get all the security fixes rolled in. I'm not even done yet, and the antivirus engine is already complaining that it's outdated. It's a nightmare.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  > The DNS MX records aren't even in yet, and I already see port scans and hack attempts on port 25, probing for security flaws and configuration errors, already trying to exploit my MTA infrastructure. So? How many webservers are constantly _trying_ to exploit your web browser infrastructure? It's just that you don't have a log file that's telling you about it, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. And in any case, it doesn't really matter. Just because someone is testing whether your web browser is some ancient internet explorer, doesnt mean there is an actual risk to you, unless you are running an ancient internet explorer. > I'm not even done yet, and the antivirus engine is already complaining that it's outdated. Just forget about antivirus, it's snakeoil anyhow?

40 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

gregatragenet3 10y ago

I haven't found a cloud email service which will let me keep my procmail filters. (A group-3)

regecks 10y ago
Fastmail lets you write sieve filters. Not exactly the same but you could port them over, right?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago

1. It's a massive exaggeration that it's dangerous to run your own email server. Now, he doesn't explain why he thinks that it is, but I guess there would be two major categories, both based on the assumption of vulnerabilities: (1) your server could be abused against others (yes, but so could your laptop or smartphone) or (2) your own emails could be at risk of being leaked (yes, but the solution to that obviously is not to directly give them to someone else instead). 2. None of that is actually solved by simply trusting someone else to run your email servers for you if you also can't judge whether they are doing it properly and, in particular, in your interest. 3. If you think that trusting someone else to run your email servers for you is an acceptable solution, that is functionally equivalent to trusting someone else to provide you with a software package to run on your email servers. Everything that someone else could do on an email server that they run for you, they could just as well package into, say, an install CD image, which you then could use to run your own functionally equivalent, hopefully well-configured and well-updated, mail server. So, I would think, this is at best an argument against putting together your own mail server from distro packages, and configuring everything yourself, maybe. Other than that, there is no fundamental reason why you would need to know email RFCs any more for running an email server than you need to know them for running an email client. In either case, knowing them can help you with figuring out some problems. But also, in either case, if the software is good, the programmers should have taken care of reading the RFCs for you, so you don't need to, for the most part.

ikeboy 10y ago
>Everything that someone else could do on an email server that they run for you, they could just as well package into, say, an install CD image, which you then could use to run your own functionally equivalent, hopefully well-configured and well-updated, mail server. Gmail won't give you their entire software stack (also good luck running it even if they did). Neither will any of the other big players.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  Are you saying that gmail are the only ones who know how to run a mail server?
  - ivanca 10y ago
    You were claiming "they could just as well package into, say, an install CD image" which is likely not going to happen, so he was just giving an example. The perfect spam filter Gmail has its probably based on data and ML analysis, not a simple software you can put on a CD and install on some little server; so even if someone who works there wanted to help you they probably can't do it.
    - stonogo 10y ago
      GMail's "perfect spam filter" is so bad that it is the reason my institution moved away from Google services. It's also the main reason so many people consider it 'impossible' to host your own email. It's anything but perfect. It's a black box, with no user-serviceable parts inside. Completely useless for any organization with needs that deviate from Joe User.
      - newjersey 10y ago
        How would you implement a spam filter? You can sort of turn off spam filtering on incoming emails but I don't most people or organizations would want that. > Completely useless for any organization with needs that deviate from Joe User. Maybe but being slightly over aggressive means a world in terms of user happiness. Think about email before Gmail. How much junk did you see in your inbox? There is a lot LESS today. Joe User would be very happy if they dried to think about it for a second.

ikeboy 10y ago

That chart has some issues http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/

Normal_gaussian 10y ago

I'm toying with setting up my own email server so that I can use all the prefixes for my domains. Ideally it would make managing my actual mail so much easier. However. I know setting it up is a PITA. And if I move to it I am stuck with it. The various mailinabox solutions sound great, but I can't quite tell if they do what I want and email is too damn complex to vet myself. And they need an entire bloody box because they don't play nice with containers apparently (on last google) - all to securely parse some text files. Overkill or what.

lwhalen 10y ago

Horsepuckey. Hosting your own data services is not dangerous, if you do your homework. Email is not that complex (compared to something like a federated Kerberos environment), and there are several good, concise, HOWTOs, books, etc on the subject. Running your own stack makes you a first-class citizen of the 'net, and more people should do it.

seanp2k2 10y ago
And it makes you a second (if we're being generous)-class citizen to all the mail servers to which you will likely attempt to deliver mail. Good luck getting GMail to accept mail to the inbox of your friends from your TurnKeyLinux MTA in a box or whatever, or just because you managed to apt-get install postfix and get it to communicate with your client. Having run mail servers for a hosting company with tens of thousands of servers, the easy answer for most people is "don't do it, not ever ever". If you're the type who understands why not to do it, but does it anyway "for fun", that's probably OK because you understand the risks and what types of bad things can happen (and probably have some idea of how to prevent and/or fix them). If you don't and "just install OwnCloud" or whatever the flavor of the week is for "own your whole social stack by installing linux on that dusty tower sitting in your garage and STICK IT TO THE MAN!", you're likely setting yourself up to get your identity stolen at the very least, with having the FBI come and seize all of your electronic equipment not out of the picture, e.g. in the case of some hacking crew using your poorly-secured box as a proxy / jump host / C&C / worse. No thank you very much. I know most of this stuff because I've been there, and the people like me who have done it for years and see the horrors are honestly trying to help those who might be tempted. I set up exim with SpamAssassin and clamav on Debian before I could drive with my own bind server hosting all the zones out of the basement, Server 2k3 running AD, Zimbra and slapd + freeradius on opensuse. I did it to learn, and after getting it all set up (which took weeks back then) and getting inbox deliver to gmail (again, in a time when doing so had a much lower bar), I thought I was some kind of Internet wizard. I did learn a ton before my first tech job doing this, and I also learned why it was a bad idea. I got a letter from my ISP a few weeks after getting this all online (of course I had remote access set up via pfsense with SSH on a non-standard port with root login disabled) informing me that there was a botnet C&C running at our home IP. Figuring this was just a mistake, as I was active on IRC at the time, I dug into the traffic and basically found that what the ISP said was true. I was able to set up a mitm on pfsense to get a log of the IRC activity in order to figure out exactly what was going on. Most of my set-up had been taken over without me even realizing it. Quite a few years later, I worked in web hosting for a few years. The amount of terrible things which happened to unmanaged colos and dedicated servers was astounding. There were quite a few legal disputes which involved data on systems we physically controlled. There were companies which went out of business due to data loss. There were others which were blackmailed by hackers. Others simply went under. There wascredit card theft, databases dumped, unsalted passwords, you name it, and plenty more we probably didn't know about. The Internet was a very hostile place for a server years ago, keeping hackers busy looting and pillaging. I'm sure it's much worse now, with more profit to be made, tons more stuff to be pwnt, and tons more people launching poorly-configured stuff. Leave the MTAs to the pros. I promise that somewhere out there, someone is getting paid a good amount to spend quite a bit of time keeping that mail server online and in good shape. They are very likely better at this than you, have way more clout with their domains than you (no one cares if your domain / NS / netblock / AS gets blacklisted, but if gmail / yahoo / aol / Comcast stops working, postmasters@ all over will jump to fix it), and are getting paid to do it, likely as a full-time job, likely for many systems. You may be able to set it up once, and make it work a few times, until it annoys someone who cuts it off, at which point you have very little recourse and very little chance of ever making it work as well again. The point isn't that you can't do it, the point is that it's not worth the risk when there are so many other great options out there.

upofadown 10y ago

It would be interesting to know exactly how one could get owned by running just an email server. It's been forever since there has been any server that could be attacked with just SMTP. IMAP has a login, as does that buggy PHP webmail program. There just isn't much of an attack surface there. The real problems are spam and convincing other mail servers to accept your email.

ashitlerferad 10y ago
There have been remote code execution exploits in mail servers before, Exim most recently. There probably are more hiding somewhere in one of the many layers that are needed for modern email servers.
- rlpb 10y ago
  That isn't difficult to manage though, unless you consider running any server to be insecure. Use your distribution's MTA package and turn on automatic security updates. Done.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Unless they are too slow, then you get to pick up the pieces. Since a server is a much juicier and visible target than any client, expect attacks.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
      > Since a server is a much juicier and visible target than any client, expect attacks. Why do you think that? Isn't a web browser that has access to your gmail inbox just as juicy as your self-hosted imap server? I don't really see why a "server" would somehow be inherently a more interesting target. Google's servers, sure, they give you acess to billions of mailboxes, but your own private email server?
  - euyyn 10y ago
    I would presume the moment an adversary gains control of the server, his first order of business is to disable things like that.

baby 10y ago

Came here thinking I would learn something. Learned literally nothing reading this article. Reminded me of this other gem article: http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-black-lives-matter-isnt-racist-hate-group-then--4610 http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-black-lives-matter-isnt... Basically trying to prove a point with very... umm... poor arguments :)

femto 10y ago

Be wary when something is described "too hard", but the describer doesn't/can't give specifics on why it is too hard. If a person can't give a generally understandable description of the difficulties, one has to ask whether they understand the topic well enough to make a pronouncement of hardness. > Then you'll understand there are no experts. I disagree. There are, but experts have to keep learning in order to maintain their expertise.

shawkinaw 10y ago
This line is what got me: > There are literally more topics than one could read in a lifetime. Literally no part of that sentence is accurate.
- vacri 10y ago
  The author doesn't specify whose lifetime :) It could be the lifetime of a mosquito. Or, more fitting, the lifetime of a network packet with a low TTL...
- jethro_tell 10y ago
  Especially considering, all documentation and concepts regarding email have been written/designed in a single lifetime.
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    That's no guarantee, given that they have been written/designed by multiple people in parallel.
- NhanH 10y ago
  I'm not sure I follow here. Why is that sentence incorrect?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Animats 10y ago

Are there any good email servers which aren't horrible legacy messes? No UUCP support, no M4 macros, no ancient C code? I once looked at writing an immediate email forwarder in Go, a mail forwarder for servers that don't receive mail. It would, upon receiving a message via SMTP but before replying with a status, open a connection to forward the email, and return the status of the send to the input SMTP connection. No local message storage at all. Runs in a jail. It's not hard to do this as a minimum viable product in Go. But all the anti-spam stuff you need today makes it a far larger project. It would be interesting to write both that, and a pure SMTP to IMAP server. No local mail access, just pure IMAP. Together, the two programs add up to a mail server much simpler than most today.

zdw 10y ago
Depends what you mean by "ancient C code" - if it's basically Sendmail you're complaining about (and given the m4 mention, that seems likely), then there have always been other options. Both qmail and postfix have security models pretty similar to the ones you describe - the process that accepts the mail in either has almost no privileges. See here for how postfix does this: http://www.postfix.org/OVERVIEW.html http://www.postfix.org/OVERVIEW.html
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Yep, qmail may be old but it can do all the new tricks, and it can work like you say. https://cr.yp.to/qmail.html https://cr.yp.to/qmail.html steep learning curve but it'll do it all and the design is great once you "get it".
zrm 10y ago
It's like sendmail et al are to email what BIND is to DNS, and what small mail servers really need is the analog of dnsmasq. The problem is it then needs to be popular enough for widespread use to sand down the rough edges, which is chicken and egg. A way out of that might be to stamp out the common refrain that you shouldn't run your own mail server.
_cbdev 10y ago
Not to plug my own projects unduly, but I've grown tired of writing configuration files running to hundreds and thousands of lines and kind of snapped and implemented the basic protocols (SMTP & POP3) myself - the project is @ http://cmail.rocks/ http://cmail.rocks/ (and https://github.com/cmail-mta/cmail https://github.com/cmail-mta/cmail). I've since moved all my mail for the last year (for about 10 domains) via a cmail setup and so far have not had a major hickup. Sure, it may not be as full-featured as other mail servers, but thats not the mission statement ;) One of the main reasons I'll probably never go back (besides pride) is the ease of altering the runtime configuration via our admin tools (eg. adding a new domain to the mail server is one command in the simplest form). Some of my peers who contributed code or bug reports also run instances and are very happy with the amount of configuration they need to support for cmail vs. the amount of things to do to run for example exim. Code-wise, it's still C (because that's what I'm most comfortable with), but hopefully it doesn't read as ancient :) I've tried to keep the bulk of it understandable and modular. We extensively use static analysis (clang analyzer and Coverity Scan) as well as fuzzing with afl-fuzz as part of our testing. IMAP is the only major protocol we do not yet support (though the groundwork is laid in another branch of the main repo), and that's mainly because the specification is a major PITA (at least compared with the relatively sanely specified SMTP and POP3). IMAP also implicitly requires multithreaded handling of connections, which so far cmail has managed to avoid, because in my experience multithreading is a) not necessary in most sane server designs and b) a major source of non-trivial bugs. Edit: Oh, since you mention build systems - we use a simple makefile, so yeah, no m4 macros ;)

viraptor 10y ago

> most of #3 knows running your own email server is pretty dangerous I think this could be phrased better. Or at least expanded on what "dangerous" means here. Someone breaking in is just one tiny part of it. Getting incoming emails dropped due to misconfiguration is another. Then there's the whole issue of getting your mail accepted. After such comment there's always a few people ready to say that it just worked for them and they don't have any issues. That's great. As long as they actually know that's the case (how often do you test for your mail being silently dropped? how often do you send copies to yourself on gmail, yahoo, etc and verify they don't go straight to spam), and as long as nothing around their network changes (two spammers in your /24 means you're suddenly being filtered, someone changes description of your range to dialup and you're being filtered, etc.). Running your own email long term can be easy, hard or a full time job. And that can change day to day. "pretty dangerous"? No... Closer to: suddenly requiring a great deal of work while you're wondering if you dropped an important document.

themgt 10y ago

Every time I read an article like this (the "I am certainly not writing this to defend Hillary Clinton, [but let me use the piece to subtly defend Hillary Clinton]"), I check the author's professional associations: Nat Meysenburg is a technologist at New America’s Open Technology Institute Ahh yes, "New America", who runs that again? Oh right, long-time Clinton lackey Anne Marie-Slaughter who was "devasted" when she thought Hillary criticized her a little bit that one time [0], along with Google's Eric Schmidt who runs a stealth startup for Hillary [1] named "The Groundwork" complete with an Illuminati-esque logo [2] [0] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-emails-slaughter-216285 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/hillary-clinton-emails... [1] http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working-for-hillary-clinton-campaign/ http://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-working... [2] http://thegroundwork.com http://thegroundwork.com

rtpg 10y ago
Isn't it a little cruel to these people's agency to reduce them to "Clinton lackeys"? Not to mention that it's pretty normal to feel at least a bit bad when someone you were working for and admire says you're whining whenever you talk about your difficulties. Plus I'm pretty sure Schmidt is beholden to no-one at this point. "Fuck You" money is an understatement.... Though I can get these people rationalising a defence due to emotions, I don't think there's a big web of conspiracy. Popular people get defended by a lot of people...
- lugg 10y ago
  I enjoyed how you attacked his use of the word lacky while ignoring his accusation. Kind of like how he was explaining how the author didn't outright defend Hillary, but subtley did defend Hillary.
Joof 10y ago
Wouldn't this article be calling Clinton somewhat naive and cast her in a negative light?

Joof 10y ago

He really doesn't describe why it can't be done other than some vagueries. I'm willing to bet a good chunk of people here could run a fairly secure email server (it's not like Google hides it's emails from the NSA anyway.)

Annatar 10y ago

I'm in the process of setting up my own e-mail infrastructure. I have maildir, certificates, IMAP, SASL, TLS, and antivirus working, with anti SPAM and the web GUI left to do. I built and configured the MTA and the IMAP server to use a SQL database to do their table lookups. On a platform where I had to architect, compile, link, and package everything myself, because I didn't want Sendmail so I ripped it out and then had to seamlessly integrate the MTA of my choice with the OS. (I used to admin Sendmail for a living back in the day when SASL and TLS were science fiction.) It's a nightmare. I postponed this for 15 years knowing how bad it will be. It's far worse than that. During the last two years while I've been trying to figure it all out, I seriously thought about ditching e-mail altogether. The last year was spent reading various documentation. The DNS MX records aren't even in yet, and I already see port scans and hack attempts on port 25, probing for security flaws and configuration errors, already trying to exploit my MTA infrastructure. And before I go live, I have to recompile OpenSSL, SASL, antivirus and the MTA at the minimum, to get all the security fixes rolled in. I'm not even done yet, and the antivirus engine is already complaining that it's outdated. It's a nightmare.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
> The DNS MX records aren't even in yet, and I already see port scans and hack attempts on port 25, probing for security flaws and configuration errors, already trying to exploit my MTA infrastructure. So? How many webservers are constantly _trying_ to exploit your web browser infrastructure? It's just that you don't have a log file that's telling you about it, but that doesn't mean it's not happening. And in any case, it doesn't really matter. Just because someone is testing whether your web browser is some ancient internet explorer, doesnt mean there is an actual risk to you, unless you are running an ancient internet explorer. > I'm not even done yet, and the antivirus engine is already complaining that it's outdated. Just forget about antivirus, it's snakeoil anyhow?