9 ms·

So, you're telling me it's finally time to market this plug & play home email server idea?

by Ill_ban_myself 7y ago

flukus 7y ago
I've toyed with the idea myself, if you've worked around the lack of fixed IP's problem then sign me up.
- xnyan 7y ago
  Dynamic IP isn't really the issue. If a server can ping, it can update its DNS record. This obviously won't work without WAN connectivity, but neither will an email server and there lies the problem - consumer WAN access can't be 5 nines guaranteed and if we start engineering redundant fallover/load-balancing as a backup, what's the benefit of that over a hosted email service? edit: practical problem no 2 is that if your residential ISP sees activity on the standard SMTP ports, it will quickly dropped like a hot potato (if they don't outright block unsolicited connections to those ports altogether which is common). Complaining about it will garner the response "sounds commercial to me, get a business account".
  - flukus 7y ago
    > If a server can ping, it can update its DNS record Isn't there a significant delay for this to propagate? > consumer WAN access can't be 5 nines guaranteed 2 nines are more than sufficient, plus the occasional longer term outage for various network outages. Even for most business 5 nines isn't that important. > practical problem no 2 is that if your residential ISP sees activity on the standard SMTP ports Weirdly enough this isn't a problem for my ISP, I couldn't buy a static IP but they're happy to open any ports I want. YMMV.
    - Symbiote 7y ago
      You set the DNS TTL to 30 or 60 seconds, then there's no problem with caching the old IP. Email is extremely tolerant of downtime. There are also commercial backup mail servers (these accept and cache the email until your server is back up), which can be used as the only public way to receive email. Some will deliver it to a non-standard port.
      - krageon 7y ago
        > You set the DNS TTL to 30 or 60 seconds, then there's no problem with caching the old IP. This will not work. Most of your visitors will depend on some upstream resolver (for example google's resolver), which will cache you for 24h (you can explicitly request a flush - but the whole point of this system is that it's automated). AFAIK (which is a year or two out of date), every big DNS resolver that you might expect someone to use does this, to prevent the enormous performance issues from people setting their TTL to anything less than that. Edit: Of course if you use a good relay server that isn't owned by you you can mitigate this, because they'll keep the emails in a queue for you until you can be found again.
        Symbiote 7y ago
        I haven't generally seen evidence of this when I've changed the IP address of websites. After the TTL expires, the only hits left on the old IP are from China (Great Firewall?).
        jjeaff 7y ago
        Years ago, 24 to 48 hrs was the case for a DNS resolution update. But I have redirected DNS many times over the last few years and it resolves correctly, worldwide within a few minutes. Almost everytime. Occasionally, I will see a few locations in India or China cache for longer than the ttl but never longer than 4 to 6 hours. And this isn't just a record cache. Even a nameserver change seems to get picked up in less than 15 minutes worldwide.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    Is using a non-standard port a feasible option? Not that I think it's a good idea to put anything you'd expect reasonable availability to behind consumer-grade internet. Why not host your own email using VPSes?
    - NikkiA 7y ago
      No, there's no real provision in email for SMTP to be on non-port 25. You can make it listen on something else, but the only thing a remote server is going to do is look up the MX record, and then try opening port 25 on it. Since you'll want a forwarder anyway (many many email servers blacklist anything on a known-ISP IP range (ie, home users)), you might be able to find one that allows you to configure a specific port to forward to, but it'd be non-standard.
  - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
    Practical problem #3 is spam email. Google and the like are pretty good at filtering it. So good that the volume of spam has fallen. But about 10 years ago perhaps 90% of all email was spam. I wonder what the volume is now? What are the current spam filtering options available to those who want to run a home server? Are they nearly as good as what Google uses?
    - krageon 7y ago
      You use spamassasin (and maybe spamd as well). In a very practical sense it is miles better than what office365 has. It's not better than google (because what is?), but it comes close.
    - stevenicr 7y ago
      I no longer consider google to be 'good at filtering' - it's over zealous - so it could be true that the huge spam problem has been reduced by a large percent, but that comes at a great cost. To some the cost is less - to those who use email for business, I'd say there are significant loss possibilities. I have recently discovered this in several situations. I think of it more like an a middle man in the ATM or a change making machine that is looking for counterfeit bills - sure it may be great to have it shred 90% of the counterfeits, and some people may never get several hundreds passed through - but if you did and the machine shredded the hundreds being sent to you often - I would not consider that good.
  - krageon 7y ago
    Your practical problem number two sounds like a very localised issue, because this is not something that would happen in my neck of the woods (in fact, I doubt it is even legal).
sp332 7y ago
Better get started, your competition just launched 6 months ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal-server-gets-email-self-hosting-almost-exactly-right/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal...
- gsreenivas 7y ago
  yep - co-founder of Helm here here's another review from Micah Lee at The Intercept for anyone who's interested: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/ https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/
  - ikeyany 7y ago
    Why does Helm require users to have their location turned on? I use bluetooth on Android all the time with my location kept off.
NikkiA 7y ago
Which will be useless given how many places blacklist the ISP IP ranges. You'll still want a email forwarder that can do the MX store & transfer for your server.
- krageon 7y ago
  As long as you can send email to gmail and hotmail you've captured most email traffic people are likely to send. AFAIK, those services don't do what you describe.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    Those communications have more or less been replaced by IM. You still need an email address for things like job applications, legal/financial matters, bills, online shopping status updates, etc. None of those use hotmail or gmail.
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    It's more about inbound mail, many of the big mail services wont send TO you if you're on an ISP IP
pjc50 7y ago
People really do not want to run their own email. I used to, and have my own domain, but these days I pay a small ISP to manage it. People might be OK with a quasi-managed solution where you pay a fee to the cloud provider to route in and out through a non-spam IP, and the provider does regular updates and configuration on the home server.

So, you're telling me it's finally time to market this plug & play home email server idea?

flukus 7y ago

I've toyed with the idea myself, if you've worked around the lack of fixed IP's problem then sign me up.

xnyan 7y ago
Dynamic IP isn't really the issue. If a server can ping, it can update its DNS record. This obviously won't work without WAN connectivity, but neither will an email server and there lies the problem - consumer WAN access can't be 5 nines guaranteed and if we start engineering redundant fallover/load-balancing as a backup, what's the benefit of that over a hosted email service? edit: practical problem no 2 is that if your residential ISP sees activity on the standard SMTP ports, it will quickly dropped like a hot potato (if they don't outright block unsolicited connections to those ports altogether which is common). Complaining about it will garner the response "sounds commercial to me, get a business account".
- flukus 7y ago
  > If a server can ping, it can update its DNS record Isn't there a significant delay for this to propagate? > consumer WAN access can't be 5 nines guaranteed 2 nines are more than sufficient, plus the occasional longer term outage for various network outages. Even for most business 5 nines isn't that important. > practical problem no 2 is that if your residential ISP sees activity on the standard SMTP ports Weirdly enough this isn't a problem for my ISP, I couldn't buy a static IP but they're happy to open any ports I want. YMMV.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    You set the DNS TTL to 30 or 60 seconds, then there's no problem with caching the old IP. Email is extremely tolerant of downtime. There are also commercial backup mail servers (these accept and cache the email until your server is back up), which can be used as the only public way to receive email. Some will deliver it to a non-standard port.
    - krageon 7y ago
      > You set the DNS TTL to 30 or 60 seconds, then there's no problem with caching the old IP. This will not work. Most of your visitors will depend on some upstream resolver (for example google's resolver), which will cache you for 24h (you can explicitly request a flush - but the whole point of this system is that it's automated). AFAIK (which is a year or two out of date), every big DNS resolver that you might expect someone to use does this, to prevent the enormous performance issues from people setting their TTL to anything less than that. Edit: Of course if you use a good relay server that isn't owned by you you can mitigate this, because they'll keep the emails in a queue for you until you can be found again.
      - Symbiote 7y ago
        I haven't generally seen evidence of this when I've changed the IP address of websites. After the TTL expires, the only hits left on the old IP are from China (Great Firewall?).
      - jjeaff 7y ago
        Years ago, 24 to 48 hrs was the case for a DNS resolution update. But I have redirected DNS many times over the last few years and it resolves correctly, worldwide within a few minutes. Almost everytime. Occasionally, I will see a few locations in India or China cache for longer than the ttl but never longer than 4 to 6 hours. And this isn't just a record cache. Even a nameserver change seems to get picked up in less than 15 minutes worldwide.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  Is using a non-standard port a feasible option? Not that I think it's a good idea to put anything you'd expect reasonable availability to behind consumer-grade internet. Why not host your own email using VPSes?
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    No, there's no real provision in email for SMTP to be on non-port 25. You can make it listen on something else, but the only thing a remote server is going to do is look up the MX record, and then try opening port 25 on it. Since you'll want a forwarder anyway (many many email servers blacklist anything on a known-ISP IP range (ie, home users)), you might be able to find one that allows you to configure a specific port to forward to, but it'd be non-standard.
- PhantomGremlin 7y ago
  Practical problem #3 is spam email. Google and the like are pretty good at filtering it. So good that the volume of spam has fallen. But about 10 years ago perhaps 90% of all email was spam. I wonder what the volume is now? What are the current spam filtering options available to those who want to run a home server? Are they nearly as good as what Google uses?
  - krageon 7y ago
    You use spamassasin (and maybe spamd as well). In a very practical sense it is miles better than what office365 has. It's not better than google (because what is?), but it comes close.
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    I no longer consider google to be 'good at filtering' - it's over zealous - so it could be true that the huge spam problem has been reduced by a large percent, but that comes at a great cost. To some the cost is less - to those who use email for business, I'd say there are significant loss possibilities. I have recently discovered this in several situations. I think of it more like an a middle man in the ATM or a change making machine that is looking for counterfeit bills - sure it may be great to have it shred 90% of the counterfeits, and some people may never get several hundreds passed through - but if you did and the machine shredded the hundreds being sent to you often - I would not consider that good.
- krageon 7y ago
  Your practical problem number two sounds like a very localised issue, because this is not something that would happen in my neck of the woods (in fact, I doubt it is even legal).

sp332 7y ago

Better get started, your competition just launched 6 months ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal-server-gets-email-self-hosting-almost-exactly-right/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal...

gsreenivas 7y ago
yep - co-founder of Helm here here's another review from Micah Lee at The Intercept for anyone who's interested: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/ https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/
- ikeyany 7y ago
  Why does Helm require users to have their location turned on? I use bluetooth on Android all the time with my location kept off.

NikkiA 7y ago

Which will be useless given how many places blacklist the ISP IP ranges. You'll still want a email forwarder that can do the MX store & transfer for your server.

krageon 7y ago
As long as you can send email to gmail and hotmail you've captured most email traffic people are likely to send. AFAIK, those services don't do what you describe.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Those communications have more or less been replaced by IM. You still need an email address for things like job applications, legal/financial matters, bills, online shopping status updates, etc. None of those use hotmail or gmail.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  It's more about inbound mail, many of the big mail services wont send TO you if you're on an ISP IP

pjc50 7y ago

People really do not want to run their own email. I used to, and have my own domain, but these days I pay a small ISP to manage it. People might be OK with a quasi-managed solution where you pay a fee to the cloud provider to route in and out through a non-spam IP, and the provider does regular updates and configuration on the home server.