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I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You

I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours. If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.

zeppelin101 9y ago
That's a very cool idea, but the spam filtering of gmail can hardly be matched. On the plus side, now you could send emails with much larger attachments.
- mirimir 9y ago
  All the spam filtering in the world won't help you after your account evaporates.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    No, but the odds of my email account going away (while catastrophic) seem pretty unlikely, and not having to sift through spam every single day is a pretty nice perk. Basically strong spam filtering support is a requirement for any tool I use, and I'm happy to hop off of Gmail if another tool delivers comparable value.
    - mirimir 9y ago
      I do get that. And perhaps you're discreet enough online that your Google account will never attract scrutiny. But it's something that every Google user ought to keep in mind, I think. I'm guessing that Salil Mehta never even considered it.
      - weberc2 9y ago
        Fair point, but I don't understand why people think this is a case of Salil offending Google's censors and not simply algorithms gone awry. I got downvoted for expressing this doubt elsewhere in this thread, but no one could answer. I just can't parse a motive for Google to censor him on (as far as I know, he didn't criticize Google's diversity policies or anything of the sort).
brightball 9y ago
https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
brianwawok 9y ago
Do you find you have problems delivering to other mail servers? That has always been the trick. Running the mail server is easy. Having your email show up in other servers is "hard". Right now, with so many users using GMAIL, using gmail is a huge boon to not being marked spam (Google is way less likely to market a @gmail.com email as spam compared to say a @aol.com email).
- Clubber 9y ago
  I haven't had any issues but I've been hosting my own mail server since 2000 or so. I've been blacklisted by spamhaus? before years ago but I submitted a request to remove and they did. Google has a page to help with this though. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&vid=0-107053137999-1503344039952 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&vid=0-107... Also, I personally host at home and have Comcast business internet. I have a 5 IP block of which one is a mail server. I have occasional internet outages and more frequent power outages, but it's been fine.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    I'd like to add another voice to this: I host my own email myself out of my house, and I've never really had any problems with it either. AFAIK I've never been marked as spam, even after I've sent a couple of mis-configured emails that should have probably been marked as spam.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      Have you ever done mailing list work? Like run a mailing list with a few tens of thousand users?
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        Nope. I can't say that I have. That definitely might be something that can get you flagged.
      - Clubber 9y ago
philipodonnell 9y ago
Its not the mail server, its deliverability. If you can set up a $5/month server to send email so can every spammer ever and the big mail providers know this. Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.
- Clubber 9y ago
  Wow, that seems ... anticompetitive.
  - b4ux1t3 9y ago
    Er, no, it seems anti-spam. The fact of the matter is, plenty of people use dime-a-dozen hosting to make spam bots. These days, you're better off using a reputable mail service as opposed to rolling your own, unless you have a fairly large company.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      It is anti-spam, but it is also anticompetitive to block anyone that isn't gmail or an already known big player in that space. Apparently lots of people are having trouble setting up a mail server on their own without getting blocked by Google. Can you see that as a problem for the intent at large? I wonder what kinda marketshare gmail has. It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve either.
      - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
        I mean it's not that you're automatically blocked it's just that your server's score for sending email is nonexistent which means a high likelihood of being a spam server. You have to spend a long time to build up a reputation to get places to mark your email as not spam. This is why many providers that allow you to do bulk email through them have multiple IPs and they only let the most behaved on their better reputation IPs.
      - 9y ago
weberc2 9y ago
How good are open source spam filtering tools? Besides not having to maintain my own infrastructure, spam filtering is probably the biggest value add for Gmail, or so it was when I got my account 10 years ago.
- nbanks 9y ago
  They used to be remarkably good. Shortly after PG wrote his A Plan for Spam essay, I set up a customized system that used my own spam e-mails as training data. I can't remember the tool I used, but it involved a script on top of maildir which is sure to be far more kludgy than what you could do now. The technique is powerful enough I suspect it still works remarkably well today because it's tuned to your own corpus of spam messages. Nonetheless, for the last decade I've been too lazy to do this and just forward everything to gmail, though gmail does give me a few false positives every couple years.
mrighele 9y ago
If someone doesn't want to handle his own email server, a simpler alternative is to buy email services for a domain you own; it will be easier to change provider if needed since, unlike a @gmail.com address, you won't need to change any address. Edit: of course you will need to download and keep the emails by yourself if you don't want to lose access to them, but that's much easier than handling a whole server.
nbanks 9y ago
I've been using my own kimsufi server for years, and live in Montréal so the latency to their Canadian location is superb. The low end servers are often sold out, but become available every couple months. I went for one with a spinning disk for the extra storage. The server's dedicated so performance is much better than a storage VPS where people share a spinning drive. However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.

zeppelin101 9y ago

That's a very cool idea, but the spam filtering of gmail can hardly be matched. On the plus side, now you could send emails with much larger attachments.

mirimir 9y ago
All the spam filtering in the world won't help you after your account evaporates.
- weberc2 9y ago
  No, but the odds of my email account going away (while catastrophic) seem pretty unlikely, and not having to sift through spam every single day is a pretty nice perk. Basically strong spam filtering support is a requirement for any tool I use, and I'm happy to hop off of Gmail if another tool delivers comparable value.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    I do get that. And perhaps you're discreet enough online that your Google account will never attract scrutiny. But it's something that every Google user ought to keep in mind, I think. I'm guessing that Salil Mehta never even considered it.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Fair point, but I don't understand why people think this is a case of Salil offending Google's censors and not simply algorithms gone awry. I got downvoted for expressing this doubt elsewhere in this thread, but no one could answer. I just can't parse a motive for Google to censor him on (as far as I know, he didn't criticize Google's diversity policies or anything of the sort).

brightball 9y ago

https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/

brianwawok 9y ago

Do you find you have problems delivering to other mail servers? That has always been the trick. Running the mail server is easy. Having your email show up in other servers is "hard". Right now, with so many users using GMAIL, using gmail is a huge boon to not being marked spam (Google is way less likely to market a @gmail.com email as spam compared to say a @aol.com email).

Clubber 9y ago
I haven't had any issues but I've been hosting my own mail server since 2000 or so. I've been blacklisted by spamhaus? before years ago but I submitted a request to remove and they did. Google has a page to help with this though. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&vid=0-107053137999-1503344039952 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&vid=0-107... Also, I personally host at home and have Comcast business internet. I have a 5 IP block of which one is a mail server. I have occasional internet outages and more frequent power outages, but it's been fine.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  I'd like to add another voice to this: I host my own email myself out of my house, and I've never really had any problems with it either. AFAIK I've never been marked as spam, even after I've sent a couple of mis-configured emails that should have probably been marked as spam.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Have you ever done mailing list work? Like run a mailing list with a few tens of thousand users?
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      Nope. I can't say that I have. That definitely might be something that can get you flagged.
    - Clubber 9y ago

philipodonnell 9y ago

Its not the mail server, its deliverability. If you can set up a $5/month server to send email so can every spammer ever and the big mail providers know this. Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.

Clubber 9y ago
Wow, that seems ... anticompetitive.
- b4ux1t3 9y ago
  Er, no, it seems anti-spam. The fact of the matter is, plenty of people use dime-a-dozen hosting to make spam bots. These days, you're better off using a reputable mail service as opposed to rolling your own, unless you have a fairly large company.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    It is anti-spam, but it is also anticompetitive to block anyone that isn't gmail or an already known big player in that space. Apparently lots of people are having trouble setting up a mail server on their own without getting blocked by Google. Can you see that as a problem for the intent at large? I wonder what kinda marketshare gmail has. It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve either.
    - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
      I mean it's not that you're automatically blocked it's just that your server's score for sending email is nonexistent which means a high likelihood of being a spam server. You have to spend a long time to build up a reputation to get places to mark your email as not spam. This is why many providers that allow you to do bulk email through them have multiple IPs and they only let the most behaved on their better reputation IPs.
    - 9y ago

weberc2 9y ago

How good are open source spam filtering tools? Besides not having to maintain my own infrastructure, spam filtering is probably the biggest value add for Gmail, or so it was when I got my account 10 years ago.

nbanks 9y ago
They used to be remarkably good. Shortly after PG wrote his A Plan for Spam essay, I set up a customized system that used my own spam e-mails as training data. I can't remember the tool I used, but it involved a script on top of maildir which is sure to be far more kludgy than what you could do now. The technique is powerful enough I suspect it still works remarkably well today because it's tuned to your own corpus of spam messages. Nonetheless, for the last decade I've been too lazy to do this and just forward everything to gmail, though gmail does give me a few false positives every couple years.

mrighele 9y ago

If someone doesn't want to handle his own email server, a simpler alternative is to buy email services for a domain you own; it will be easier to change provider if needed since, unlike a @gmail.com address, you won't need to change any address. Edit: of course you will need to download and keep the emails by yourself if you don't want to lose access to them, but that's much easier than handling a whole server.

nbanks 9y ago

I've been using my own kimsufi server for years, and live in Montréal so the latency to their Canadian location is superb. The low end servers are often sold out, but become available every couple months. I went for one with a spinning disk for the extra storage. The server's dedicated so performance is much better than a storage VPS where people share a spinning drive. However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.