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The “mail is hard” myth

• azinman2 7y ago
  Why would I WANT to run a mail server, regardless if it’s hard or not? I don’t gain a lot of value, and now I’m on the hook for everything not fun.
• acidburnNSA 7y ago
  I have run my own mail server for years. It absolutely was complicated for me to set up but I loved the process of learning and got it going without too much trouble. Now I can get mail delivered to nearly everyone, except Charter. It's been NBD from a maintenance point of view. Spam is all tuned nicely and I generally don't have to think of it. E-mail servers are complicated. People with skills and interest can do them, no problem. It's not overly hard. I agree with that. But I sure don't go recommending it to my friends who wouldn't appreciate spending a few days learning and setting all that up. What I can do, however, is offer them e-mail accounts! So I guess as long as every group of 50-100 friends has one person willing to run an e-mail server, then we're all good. Of course, it'd probably be a pain to switch when that person dies or loses interest. Maybe we just need to make it really easy to have a email@myname.tld that is portable and easy to move around.
• nashashmi 7y ago
  OT: Thunderbird org should create/sponsor its own email server software. That's the way to spur email development by causing development on both sides of the chain. Sometimes in unison. And they should also initiate an email service to put their development in action. Imagine the innovation that could happen then. - Email encryption standards for key acquisitions - folders/labels stored as imap keywords - large file sending protocol using third party services - msg retrieval when email severs experience outages - development in mail list servers.
  • mxuribe 7y ago
    Or at least, choose an existing decent one email server software stack, and then focus efforts to make on-boarding/setup of that stack as easy as possible. I think you're onto something because the Thunderbid (and of course the mozilla) brand is respected enough to take seriously. AND, users would flock to it because it is highly respected as an org. Yeah, kudos for this idea!
  • jcranmer 7y ago
    I disagree. There is next to no code sharing between the server and client side of email--implementing the server side of the protocol is vastly different than the client side, and even the server-server versus server-client sides of SMTP and NNTP are practically different protocols. Furthermore, Thunderbird already struggles to get enough developers to avoid compounding on its technical debt; such a large undertaking is simply not possible with the current manpower. I'll also point out: > - Email encryption standards for key acquisitions This is basically a standardization problem. I've been involved in at least one failed attempt at standardization here. > - folders/labels stored as imap keywords The difficulty here is knowing when you can opt-in to this functionality, which is again basically a standardization process. > - large file sending protocol using third party services Thunderbird already supports this, and has for... 7 years or so? > - msg retrieval when email severs experience outages If I understand this right, this is basically having your MUA duplicate emails locally... which is what most MUAs do these days (at least on desktop). > - development in mail list servers. What development are you talking about? Mailman is pretty actively developed, they even had a GSoC project a few years back to add encrypted mailing list support.
• higherkinded 7y ago
  Lasting long against HN-mainpage-level load. That's what's hard.
  • Macha 7y ago
    It looks to be a static site generator. It's surprisingly easy to weather that storm with a simple web server + static sites, it's dynamic sites using Wordpress etc. that have the most trouble.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • medecau 7y ago
    >Lasting long against HN-mainpage-level load. That's what's hard. Load time is under one second, not sure where the salt is coming from. https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b3b39a913800000 https://tools.pingdom.com/#5b3b39a913800000
• zaroth 7y ago
  To this day none of the mail servers I’ve setup can send to verizon.net. It’s not “hard”, but there are servers who will not accept a single message from you, rDNS, DKIM/SPF be damned. And there’s fuck-all you can do about it.
  • J-Kuhn 7y ago
    Tell their users "I'm sorry, but there is nothing we can do to send you the mail - please complain to Verizon." If enough users complain, they might change their policies. Ehh, wait, we talk about Verizon here. Don't bother.
  • t0astbread 7y ago
    Half tongue-in-cheek but would you rather give up email than fighting back while it's still not all proprietized?
• roel_v 7y ago
  It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for. Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem, it's knowing which commands to execute, and the pain of having to figure out the new commands to execute 4 months later when for some reason something broke and now 20 people are twiddling their thumbs until you fix it. Screw that, running email servers is a horrible tedious pain in the ass you should almost never do yourself unless it's the sort of thing you enjoy (I've run Postfix, Qmail and Exchange servers from the mid 1990's until mid 2000's).
  • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    gigantic pain in the ass correlated to very little money for the effort because come on it's email, which isn't hard.
  • swiley 7y ago
    Eh, it used to be pretty bad but the other year the people from the openbsd project wrote a new mail server with a trivially easy to understand config file (I wrote mine from scratch just a couple hours after finding it.) If you’re already basically competent with the OS you’re using and have a machine with a decent connection that can be used for mail then it actually isn’t hard.
    • roel_v 7y ago
      The config file format is the least of your worries (unless you're running Sendmail, ofcourse). It's about havimg to know about DKIM/SPF/dns weirdness/ etc, and having to stay up to date; about blacklists and greylists and the social dynamics around it; about mailbox storage and backups and users complaining about quotas and attachment sizes and that sort of shenanigans; about how will I let my users set auto responders and filters etc (just send them a link to the sieve man page! Lol); about having to worry about being called over the holidays because every custom server has its own peculiarities. And his talk about 'it used to be hard but not any more!' - yeah sure, just like the dozens of times people said that over the last decades? There's a 'year of Linux on the desktop' analogy in here somewhere.
• supermatt 7y ago
  No mention of RBL? Thats what makes running a mailserver cumbersome - being put on an RBL because of bad neighbours in your subnet and your emails silently failing to deliver because of said RBL.
• lelf 7y ago
  > but my mails will not reach my users at Big Mailer Corps Unfortunately this is not a myth. rDNS/DKIM/SPF/not in any greylists, but mail from you goes to Junk folder on GMail®, experienced that myself.
  • wolco 7y ago
    A lot of mail from a variety of providers won't be accepted by gmail. That's the downside of gmail.
  • Kaveren 7y ago
    It's a bit of a black box, but how do you get around this? Is it a matter of domain age? IP trustworthiness? Or do a lot of people have to categorize it as "Not spam" first?
  • LeonM 7y ago
    It is a myth. The bigger mail providers (such as Gmail) are pretty strict on checking, and feedback is fairly limited. Thus, figuring out why you were flagged as spam is often difficult and frustrating. There are so many subtle misconfigurations you can make with the way you have your DNS records set up, but really you need DMARC reports to figure out why your email is getting flagged. It inspired me to build my startup :) We have successfully fixed dozens of email deliverability issues for our customers.
• awinder 7y ago
  I think I more understood the ethos of where the author was coming from at the end: “And by all means, we must not push everyone to use Big Mailer Corps“ which is totally fair. For the rest of the article though, it’s pretty clear that the author does admit caveats where any business would have to spend time & money figuring stuff out. And the fact is there is no real cabal of Big Email, it is such a commoditized industry. As a business you pay a pittance to protect downside risks, it’s a no-brainer.
• klingonopera 7y ago
  Let's see... Postfix, Dovecot, SPF and OpenDKIM on the server-side, each of them with their own config. Then you've got to set up your domain, and domain headers on your domain host. Oh, DMARC is also another thing. Then, most ISPs will outright refuse to accept incoming mail from your IP address, since they've basically changed from blacklisting to whitelisting. So you've also got to relay your outgoing mail via your domain host. And then spam rules. I took the recommended rules from the Debian/Postfix/something-something-sorbs.net website, and I rarely receive email from e.g. eBay, because they've been marked as sending spam. Often happens with gmail addresses, too. Despite all this... I still run my own mail server, but hotdamn, you're calling this not hard? EDIT: Oh, and nowdays you've also got to entangle your TLS certificates into the whole process somehow. I managed it, but don't ask me how, I'd need to read up on that.
  • swiley 7y ago
    I run my own mail server and as long as you use TLS and the one that’s really easy (I can’t remember if it’s DKim or Dmark) most domains accept mail from you. I really didn’t have a hard time setting mine up and I’ve done it multiple times. Dovecot is a bit of a pain if you really want imap... but overall none of it is harder than most other things.
    • xienze 7y ago
      > most domains accept mail from you. And this is precisely why I don’t think it’s worth it. I don’t want to have to worry that “most” domains will accept my mail, I want a big email service that has the clout to force domains to accept my mail. I shouldn’t have to solve the mystery of why my mail was rejected (or rather, why some provider thinks I’m sending spam). That’s why I do Fastmail.
      • danShumway 7y ago
        What do you use for automated messages (ie, login emails, password resets)? I asked Fastmail support, and they basically said, "we're not really built for that." However, most of the other services I looked at had arduous terms (arbitration agreements), and even they were talking about delivery rates in ranges of 85-95%. My takeaway has been that as an app creator, email is really unreliable, and I should try whenever possible not to make it a critical part of anything I build. If 5-10% of the people using your service can't get a password reset email, what do you do? As someone without much experience with email of that nature, it doesn't seem like the major services actually solve the deliverability problem. If they have Google-style support where I can't get one of them on the phone if my emails aren't sending, then I might even be worse off using them rather than my own setup that I can at least debug and experiment with.
• Aeolun 7y ago
  This whole post is hard. It’s a perfect example of what it is trying to disprove...
• skrause 7y ago
  I think the biggest pain in hosting your own mail server is getting your outbound mail delivered into the mailboxes of the large providers without being marked as spam. Especially if you don't actually send a lot of mail, so you can never really build up a good IP reputation. That's why I generally recommend a hybrid setup: Host inbound mail completely by yourself so that you have full control, but ship off outbound mail to a trusted relay of a privacy oriented provider. For example https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en doesn't filter any outgoing messages by sender, so you can send mail from your own domains. Your local Postfix can DKIM sign your mail before sending them to Posteo and if you add include:posteo.de to your SPF record all your mail will be DKIM signed, SPF authenticated and coming from a reputable IP, so all your deliverability issues will be gone.
  • SahAssar 7y ago
    This is also talked about in the article, is your experience to the contrary?
    • akerl_ 7y ago
      The article handwaves this by pointing out that it’s “proof-of-work”. Which is a fancy way of saying “it requires a bunch of work, continuously as the rules change over time”. Which is why I’d consider it “hard” to run my own mail server. The complexity of running a daemon with a config file isn’t the issue, nor is it that any individual task of SPF/DKIM/etc is complex. It’s that I generally want to put 0% of my time into making sure my emails are being received, and I’m receiving other peoples’ emails.
      • brianpgordon 7y ago
        It would be nice if these big mail services accepted actual proof of work as a way to guarantee that your mail gets through. Maybe someone could extend SMTP with a bitcoin-like challenge where the server sends the client a nonce and a difficulty factor, and the client has to reply with a suffix that you can append to the nonce so that the whole string hashes to something with the corresponding number of zeroes at the end. People sending personal emails will be happy to burn a penny of CPU time as "postage" but spammers won't be able to send their spam profitably, especially if you increase the difficulty factor based on how many emails you've sent in the last hour.
• notyourday 7y ago
  People do not run their own mail server for the same reason people ( including the author of that guide ) do not host jquery and bootstrap on their own servers -- it is not that it is hard, it is that not running their own mail server or not hosting their own jquery and bootstrap code is easier.
  • wolco 7y ago
    Most people drop jquery locally on the server in a js folder. It's probably the easiest part of the project.
    • notyourday 7y ago
      Yet the author of the blog post did not do it, which is a point. It is not about what is 'hard' or what is 'easy'. Rather it is about what is easiest.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• esotericn 7y ago
  The thing I've always worried about is that to my knowledge there's no ACK for outbound mail. The potential impact of one email I send not being received is absolutely enormous to the extent that certain mails I'd pay a decent amount of money to ensure delivery, probably more than an actual postage stamp.
  • jcranmer 7y ago
    Do you want read receipts or delivery receipts? Both versions exist.
• jasode 7y ago
  The "host-your-own-email-server" being "hard" vs "not hard" is an unresolvable discussion because everybody has a different mental threshold of "hard". I'm still amused that back in October 2017, a commenter (lucb1e) argued[1] that I was exaggerating the difficulties of reliably sending email but a year later in 2019, he confirmed the same difficulties![2] The discussions in that thread (May 2019) and today's HN thread (September 2019) contradicts author's claim that mail stopped being "hard" 10+ years ago: >Another reason is because it used to be hard a long time ago. [...], citing the very real difficulties they faced over a decade ago, Hosting your own email is certainly not impossible and lots of people are successfully doing it. (Or they they're actually not successful because their outgoing emails are sometimes getting silently spamholed without them realizing it.) In my case, I'd rather expend mental energy on other pursuits (machine learning, learning Swift language, etc) than constantly worrying about a personal email server's "reputation health" and then debugging whatever goes wrong. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607
  • swiley 7y ago
    There are also different sets of features people want, some are actually pretty difficult to set up.
    • jasode 7y ago
      >There are also different sets of features people want, some are actually pretty difficult to set up. That's true but I think if we analyze discussions (see this thread and old threads I cited) of one group of HN experts (email is "not hard") debating other HN experts (email is "hard"), the most contested issue isn't the difficulty of advanced SMTP features and enhancements -- it's about outgoing sent emails being reliably accepted.
• tschellenbach 7y ago
  Fun thought experiment. Let's rephrase hard. If you have to hire a team to manage your email for you, how much would it cost you? The author of the post just explained how most of his friends think this is hard. I don't think email is very hard. But the ROI of doing this in-house is insanely terrible.
  • wolco 7y ago
    One person a few days a year.
  • nocman 7y ago
    "But the ROI of doing this in-house is insanely terrible." ^ this is far too much of a blanket statement. I've done it, in house, for both personal and work purposes. The cost in my time was not very high, and the ROI was very good. Obviously there is a much broader range of experiences with managing your own mail server than many on this thread think there is.
• ridaj 7y ago
  To all the folks answering basically "yes it's hard" I think the headline is a bit clickbaity but there are some interesting takeaways... To summarize, (a) yes it's harder than setting up Big Corp Mail, but (b) a lot of the horror stories are either old or secondhand, and (c) it's a lot less hard to set up than it used to be. If the suggestion is, why not give it a try, one thing I feel is missed is, how hard is it not just to set up but to run over the long run, when the technology evolves and you have to keep up, and why would any IT manager or CIO want to gamble their careers on this?
  • klingonopera 7y ago
    What exactly changed in the last ...5? 10? years that has simplified the process?
    • gingerlime 7y ago
      Exactly. I'm curious too. It seems like the author has something up their sleeves -- OpenSMTPD, apparently. But when I look at the homepage[0], I see a very typical linux-y man-page-style homepage... A far cry from what I would consider simple. There are a bunch of guides floating online for Postfix, Dovecot etc, and some of them are pretty decent. But they go out of date quickly, or if you want to do something slightly different, you're on your own... And even if you end up with a running system, maintaining or enhancing it is a different kettle of fish. You can't just follow the guide again, you're back to man pages and usenet mailing lists with some info inside a thread 23 levels deep. [0] https://www.opensmtpd.org/ https://www.opensmtpd.org/
  • al_form2000 7y ago
    On redhat derived systems, setting up a basic mailserver was never harder (post 2010) than service "sendmail start & & service dovecot start" + adding a couple of DNS records. Not knowing this means not having done one's homework. Which is also a good indication that one should not be messing with email. And knowing it is still being long way from running an effective mail server.
  • al_form2000 7y ago
• grobibi 7y ago
  “The configuration reads almost as plain english and a usable configuration file can actually fit … in a tweet.” That tweet is way too hard for me.
• ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  Everything is easy to folks that have the time to grok the tech. I like to write software. I don't like running a Linux server, although I know that i could learn to be an excellent admin. It's just that every second I spend learning Linux admin, is a second I'm not spending learning Swift. So I just use shared hosting for my sites; even though I'm perfectly capable of running a VPS.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    To add to your point, I like writing software, I know how to set up networks, load balancers, VMs, databases, messaging servers, etc. I have no interest in doing it or being on call. I mercilessly recommend managed alternatives anytime I can. I have a manager who was glad to kill our SFTP server and pay more money for AWS’s managed solution. He would much rather hand his boss - the founder - a bill than have to explain why our server went down.
    • nocman 7y ago
      That's all great until interruptions in the service you are depending on interferes with your business getting done (and you can't fix or mitigate the problem yourself). Don't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such things over to someone else. Services aren't always as reliable and partners aren't always as resposive as they are advertised. I totally get why people don't want to do such things themselves. I just think it is important for people to realize that doing so has its own set of consequences and risks that they should be aware of. I suspect most of the folks on HN are aware of this, but there does seem to be an awful lot of "it would be dumb to do that yourself" sentiment here.
      • scarface74 7y ago
        Don't get me wrong, if you choose your partners carefully you can make this work in many (probably most) scenarios, and save yourself some headaches in the process. But even with the bigger players (like AWS), there is a tradeoff to handing such things over to someone else. Services aren't always as reliable and partners aren't always as resposive as they are advertised. AWS is a lot more reliable than almost any in house solution. As far as being responsive, if you have a business support plan with AWS, you can always reach live, helpful support. Trust me, being on the Dev side, when I need resources on AWS, it’s just a click, script, or CloudFormation template away. Getting resources provisioned through the infrastructure gatekeepers can literally take weeks. And just from the CYA standpoint and “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. If your colo goes down everyone looks at you crazy and you have a lot of questions to answer. If AWS goes down and you took the appropriate steps at least making your infrastructure AZ redundant if not multi region redundant, it’s going to make news and no one is going to question why you chose AWS.
• calvinmorrison 7y ago
  Work at a email provider. Mail is not "hard", definitely tricky. Deliverability is a problem, spam is a problem. How do I know? We spend a lot of time working to improve on our services because of these issues. In general : computers don't solve the issue of trust. End of story.
• fareesh 7y ago
  Which user demographic is running one's own email server ideal for? My consultancy handles "all things technology" for multiple small businesses (sized 1-50 people, located mostly in South Asia). Anecdotally: A lot of these folks are happily using mybusinesname.accounts@gmail.com and so-on, but decide to get their own domain for the added veneer of "professionalism". Many are happy to use Yandex (1000 users with your own domain for free @10GB/inbox. Probably not appealing for some Americans given US-Russia political issues). Startups/sole entrepreneurs typically come to us after they've purchased a GoDaddy domain and selected the "Business Email" option upon checkout, so they just continue using it. There's a small sample of companies who are willing to pay for Google Apps because they like Gmail's web UI, and they want the rest of the Apps Suite too. We also deal with a lot of local big corporations for project work. They're almost always using some kind of in-house corporate email system running Microsoft Exchange Server with a number of different rules like no attachments over 5 MB and other such silliness. For us to invest time in setting up a mail server for a customer there would have to be a very rare confluence of: a) I don't want Yandex b) I don't want to pay for Google Apps / Zoho / other c) (Optionally) I want to send 500000 marketing/transactional emails per day but I don't want to pay Sendgrid/Mailgun/Mailchimp/SES To set it up we'd have to establish pricing and SLA. Would I agree that we do it for less than $5/user/month? Nope! I can't really see a compelling case to do it unless you're a hobbyist with strong philosophical perspectives on this topic. Maybe my point of view is different because of Geography but I doubt things are very different elsewhere in the world as far as cost/effort is concerned.
  • bluedino 7y ago
    Lots of businesses run their own email server. It's not that complicated. The easiest way to do it is to buy an email server, you can use Exchange or you can use something like iMail or Kerio. Install that on a server, get a static IP from your ISP, put the server behind a firewall, and point your DNS servers for your domain to it. Then generate an SPF record, and you should be good. That's how many people do it. As a bonus, you don't need to pay $10/user per month for hosted mail, or deal with Exchange licenses, but you will probably want to back the server up from time to time. You even get webmail with it! The advantage/disadvantage of this setup is that it's now up to you get to get yourself off spam blacklists and such. When BIG_EMAIL_HOST is having problems, there's nothing you can do but wait. But with your own servers, you are the one who gets to email the spam department of BIG_ISP to request removal, and then there's nothing you can do but wait. If you know Linux, you can setup Postfix, but I did say 'the easy way'.
• vogelito 7y ago
  How hard is it to do your email yourself and make it secure? For example, adding 2FA to your users, monitoring access, spam detection, etc...?
• morpheuskafka 7y ago
  Is there any reason you can't forward all outgoing mail through AWS SES with a custom MAIL FROM domain so it looks like it's coming from you? That way you would have a high reputation IP pool at nominal cost for a low volume.
• soheilpro 7y ago
  I don't understand why it has to be so difficult to run a mail server on Linux, BSD, etc. So many different pieces to set up and configure. I've been running SmarterMail on a Windows VPS for years and it's been rock solid. It's just a single Windows service and all the configuration is done via its web interface. Why no one has come up with a simple solution like this for Linux/BSD yet?
• arc33 7y ago
  It's an interesting thing that with the emergence of cloud computing, we get so many open source library and tooling almost for free but all of this came at the cost of killing the market for professional desktop software. The installers from 90s and 2000s in windows that people used, were really good at extracting config questions from the users in a very user friendly way. The cloud services today are basically hiding the installation wizard but at the cost of rent seeking as opposed to running unfettered software on your own hardware.
• xrisk 7y ago
  Heres the point though: I want to be writing email, not configuring email servers. And if I need a Google/Apple email for usage on my phone, I'd rather just use that one instead of hosting my own email solution. This is without even considering the fact that configuring email is not as trivial as say, setting up a website. And you're never going to get spam filtering as good as the Big Email corps.
• isoos 7y ago
  This tool needs more attention: https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ (tagline: "Take back control of your email with this easy-to-deploy mail server in a box.") I haven't uses it for a while, but last time I wanted to setup a self-hosted server for a domain, this came out the best. (I've handed over the task to somebody else, so no idea how it went.)
  • apecat 7y ago
    Long-term vise I think this is a dubious solution to "set up and forget", or advise people with few resources or limited Linux skills to use. Mail in a Box makes it seem passably easy to someone with basic skills to get everything up and running, but then don't support in-place upgrades of the underlying operating system. This might be fine, but I really hope people realize what they're getting themselves into. https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box-version-v0-40-and-moving-to-ubuntu-18-04/4289 https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box-version-v... This critique is somewhat shallow, if the backup/restore option is easy enough. But I just have a hunch there's going to be a lot of non-upgraded boxes running fullstack-EOL everything. Of course, a system that does in-place upgrades and then fails is going to leave no-one any happier either. I guess that my point really is that appliances requiring "complicated" upgrades by moving to a new OS install aren't all that mature. But I acknowledge I have a hard time determining who this product really is for.
• jancsika 7y ago
  Here's the difference: * setting up gitlab ce is easy * setting up LE certificate is easy * setting up wordpress is easy * setting up mail is easy If at some point in the future any of the first three stop being easy in an obvious way, there's a whole team of developers who will work hard to restore easiness. That's quite different from a blog author shrugging because their configuration-in-a-tweet is obsolete in three years.
• jchw 7y ago
  This person keeps saying “Big Mailer Corps” which is extremely annoying. That’s a really easy way to blame someone without actually calling out either specific entities or behaviors. I work for what they probably consider a “big mailer corp” and I wholeheartedly and deeply doubt there is some weird conspiracy against people running mailservers, it just actually is difficult and yes some of us really have tried. It’s kind of unfortunate that it’s hard because I don’t think, for example, you can use a personal gmail with custom domains, unless you have a separate Google Apps account. Fastmail and Protonmail do support this, and probably at least a couple other providers. It’s probably worth the paltry $5/mo that Fastmail charges for the saved time and effort debugging, updating servers, and fighting spam filters over years. Disclosure: Google employee. (I do not work on anything related to mail.)
• rpcwork 7y ago
  Managed mail server clusters for years with an ISP. Agreed, too many things that can break and cause PITA. However, ‘Hard’ is a subjective term. The deeper you are in a trade or the longer you have done it, the easier it comes to feel. I visited a family farm and found it very very hard to squeeze milk outta buffalo. My great uncle however has dealt with that buffalo that for years and didn’t sweat it one bit. In a similar vein, do I really want to tend a buffalo in my backyard, when I can get the milk I need from a supermarket?
  • xrisk 7y ago
    This is a great analogy. Why do more work when you can get the same result with less effort?
    • bad_user 7y ago
      If you're living at the country side, producing your own milk is healthier, can be a good hobby while you're young and a great occupation after you're retired. Manual labor is good exercise and can be fulfilling. But I'd probably go with goats instead. I don't think maintaining your own email server can be very fulfilling, but hobbies are a matter of taste.
      • purple_ducks 7y ago
        > producing your own milk is healthier How's that?
        • bad_user 7y ago
          Growing up in communism, under the Iron Curtain, we weren't finding too much milk in the eighties at the store, so our source for dairy was the country side, friends, family, grandparents, so I grew up with raw milk. Raw milk from grass fed animals has a very different, much richer taste. For one you can control what you feed your animals. The taste and quality of milk varies greatly depending on what they eat. You can feed them high quality grass, although in winter some cereals are fine. Anybody that drinks raw milk knows that the taste of what they eat really is reflected in the milk. E.g. if you let them graze on a field with flowers, it will have a flowery taste. Leave raw milk on the table to turn sour and you get yogurt. It's quite good too. And you can't do that with the pasteurized milk from the store, it doesn't matter if it's whole or not, doesn't work. Goes without saying that with high quality raw milk it's quite easy to make cheese too, which again, you can't with the milk your can find at the store. As for why it's more healthy, the pasteurization process reduces the nutritional quality of milk. There are also weak indications that people with a lactose intolerance can tolerate raw milk better than they can tolerate pasteurized milk. It might be that it contains some lactase. Although this claim you should take with a grain of salt. And in the US at least you can argue that the pasteurized milk you find in stores is ultra-processed. Read the following article: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-02-fo-62752-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-02-fo-62752... Note that I'm not saying that you can't find a good source of raw milk from a farm with free range, grass fed animals and great quality control. But it's harder to do so and if you're living in the city, depending on the city, next to impossible. I do encourage you to try find such a source. The difference in taste is well worth it. And if you grow it yourself, it's much like anything else. For example tomatoes no longer taste well due to being picked too early. Grow your own tomatoes in season and the difference is night and day.
• jefftk 7y ago
  Another voice saying: I've done my own mail, and it is hard. When my messages don't get through to the recipient due to my unusual choice of running my own mail, from their perspective it's as if I never sent the messages.
• moonbug 7y ago
  Completey ignores any economic argument for making it someone else's problem.
  • MiscIdeaMaker99 7y ago
    What argument is that, exactly?
    • moonbug 7y ago
      opportunity cost.
• iamgopal 7y ago
  Making your own electric car is easier. But still I wouldn't do it.
  • nocman 7y ago
    I realize you are likely using hyperbole, but in my experience managing my own mail server is trivial compared to the complexity of building your own electric car.
• tams 7y ago
  Been there, self-hosted my email for more than half a decade, gave up on it a few years ago for a couple for reasons: If you are self-hosting the most important authentication fallback for your online identity, an ill-timed downtime or deliverability problem really hurts. Your reputation can be affected by neighboring bad actors you have no control over. For example, SpamRATS punishes full subnets without an actual appeals process. From the point of view of a major provider, the same email from your tiny server is going to have a lower score than one from their system. Encountered this a lot against Gmail. And it's a commitment. If you go the self-hosted route, you will need need to keep up on new security and filtering practices, even if you use a turnkey solution. You might get bored with this after a while.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• nothrabannosir 7y ago
  In addition to the other comments about what is meant by “hard”, there is a crucial omission in this article: the failure mode of e-mail deliverability can be both hard to detect, and extremely costly. I wouldn’t mind hosting a blog, because worst case scenario I’m offline for a few minutes, pingdom alerts me, and we’re back. Total cost: some lost blog readers. If I fail my outbound email setup, it can be months before I realise that most of my emails have been getting dropped. Total cost: I depend on email for work and family, so very high. I used to host my own email. Tested with gmail: delivery was fine. Half a year later it turns out Hotmail was silently dropping my mails. I felt betrayed, and learned my lesson: email is hard.
• zawerf 7y ago
  While the email experts are in this thread, can I get a guide on how to setup a simple email address @ my own domain? If you google, most of the top hits are for free mail forwarding using your domain registrar. I tried this and it was pretty terrible with a ton of caveats. For example using namecheap you can only receive but not send from that domain, can't receive attachments, and can't even send an email to yourself for testing purposes. I think the easiest way is to pay GSuite $6/month?
  • mynegation 7y ago
    Don’t have experience with gSuite, but I use fastmail and very happy with them. The idea is you go to your registrar or DNS provider and change MX records to the Fastmail servers (they provide the host names and comprehensive setup help in their documentation).
  • crispyporkbites 7y ago
    There’s many options, but it boils down to two approaches: - pay someone to send and receive your emails (eg. update your MX records to point to gsuite, fast mail etc) - host your own mail server (something like http://mailu.io/ http://mailu.io/ will work), basically you’re going to need a program that listens for and stores incoming emails, and a program that sends them, plus all the glue inbetween (IMAP, pop3, webmail, storage etc etc) If you’re going for simplicity, then the first option would be the easiest. I think Zoho offers this for free for one address, and it works just fine.
  • bluedino 7y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-to-run-your-own-e-mail-server-with-your-own-domain-part-1/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/how-t... That what you're looking for?
  • zelly 7y ago
    The simplest is Yandex Connect. It's like GSuite, but the intro tier is free: https://connect.yandex.com/pricing/connect https://connect.yandex.com/pricing/connect
  • 7y ago
• tehabe 7y ago
  I remember that I had to set up sendmail via m4 scripts to use mutt on a local machine. Those were fun days.
• flurdy 7y ago
  A mail server is hard. Writing applications is hard. Designing a website is hard. Professional work is hard. But setting up your initial mail server is not hard. Read some guides (ahem: https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix), fix a lot of typos, and you're up an running. Same with developing the initial version of an application, or designing the first draft. Not rocket science. Not easy but not that hard for an experienced person with simple initial requirements. But what is hard is keeping it running with more and more users, more requirements and evolving tech and less time to maintain it. Never mind forgotten skills and less priority. Mail servers have a special knack for running out of disc space or going down for some reason only when you are on holiday and can not get online easily. And you usually only find out after a day or more as you start not receiving messages but don't really notice it for a while. Or you friends, family or colleagues using it start complaining that some random person they are emailing is not receiving their email and you need to look into it... (Ps. Use DKIM and then DMARC reporting) If you just want a reliable mail service, just use https://fastmail.com https://fastmail.com. If you want even more freedom and configurations, do try to set up a mail server. But it is hard. A bit hard.
  • octorian 7y ago
    > If you just want a reliable mail service, just use https://fastmail.com https://fastmail.com. If you want even more freedom and configurations, do try to set up a mail server. But it is hard. A bit hard. I used to run my own mail server, but I eventually migrated to Fastmail. I liked then because their software stack was similar enough to mine (compatible filter rules) and I knew where to find their admin on IRC. The reason I made the switch is because I was sick and tired of my Email reliability depending on the reliability of my home Internet connection, and my co-lo/remote-hosting situation (at the time) had different reliability issues I didn't want to risk.
    • kbenson 7y ago
      You switch to a third party mail provider for the same reason you buy a new car instead of driving around your classic you've been fixing up as a daily driver. Not because you don't like it, but because sometimes there's benefit in offloading the annoying bits of your hobby so you can focus on the interesting bits. Fixing up an old car is fun. Doing it in chunks of a few hours so you can drive it work the next day is less fun. Running your own mail server is a fun challenge at first, as you have to figure out why some random site won't talk to your server, or why your load spikes at random times. Then you decide that diagnosing other people's broken configs and dealing with drive by spammers is annoying and boring.
• dsukhin 7y ago
  I would venture a guess that even the most technically savvy users who could set up their own mailsever now, still flock to "Big Mailer Corps" for the easy to use mail client filled with useful AI features, etc. and that even in the presence of an easy alternative to set up their own, will end up forwarding to their "Big Mailer Corp" of choice that offers them the most efficient user experience for their workflow. IMHO, the most important thing missing right now to promote more decentralzied mail is a cometivtive open source mail (web) app, with a simple UI and a vibrant plugin system for every use case.
  • octorian 7y ago
    > a cometivtive open source mail (web) app Yes, this is a big deal. So many web applications provided by companies as "cloud services" are orders of magnitude better than equivalent web applications you can run on your own damn servers.
    • jethro_tell 7y ago
      Which is hardly shocking since they pay a bunch of people to work on it.
• jcranberry 7y ago
  I thought the pain of setting up your email server was doing all the IT stuff to make sure that it's always working and you're not going to end up losing all your mail and all that.
• luxuryballs 7y ago
  I remember a story where a guy had the DNS of his custom mail domain changed after a malicious actor social engineered his domain name provider. The story was coupled with the recommendation to use a mail provider for the added protection that it would in theory be way less likely for their domain used by many accounts to be hijacked in this way. The guy got really screwed because once they got his domain and thus his email they could change passwords all over. I finally ditched gmail once I realized how politically motivated Google was, and I also realized that I’d rather have a company owe me the service rather than using a free one where they could technically disable my email at any time.
  • jethro_tell 7y ago
    I mean for the last part, you can pay for it. Gmail yes but there are others that are still a product but not Gmail. Fastmail comes to mind.
    • luxuryballs 7y ago
      That’s exactly who I went with.
• gfodor 7y ago
  Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero. There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just one incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider wrt email. That prior could change if there is a privacy related incident with these providers, but so far their track record has been good.
  • pera 7y ago
    Not everybody weights privacy (and decentralization and control) vs convenience in the same way. By the way, how many times did you get locked out of your Gmail account vs how many times did the same happen with your own server?
    • gfodor 7y ago
      Not once. Tbf, I am considering the herculean task of getting off of gmail, but if I were to go with my own server the burden has basically nothing to do with setting up the email server (easy) as this post might suggest, but instead the burden and latent risk involved of having to be personally responsible for operating, maintaining, and being exposed to externialities (like 0days, being blocked by filters, server outages, etc.) Setting up services is trivial compared to the aggregate cost in time, money, and context-switching tax over time of operating them.
      • zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
        > being blocked by filters That's the part that I really don't understand. If the recipient hired someone to throw away their emails, why would that possibly be my job to rectify? I sent them a legitimate email, they hired someone who promised them to throw away spam, but obviously is incompetent at doing so, so it's up to them to hire someone else!?
        • kilburn 7y ago
• nathankunicki 7y ago
  His assessment on how “Big Mail Corps” accept mail is plain wrong from my experience. When I ran my own mail server, I had SPF, DKIM, rDNS and strict DMARC setup correctly, and got 10/10’s on mail-tester.com. Admittedly my main problems were with people on Microsoft hosted emails. They seem to run some kind of IP address based blacklist-by-default operation. My emails to Hotmail/Outlook.com users would randomly get either rejected or go straight to spam. I went through countless online forms, Twitter conversations with clueless CSR’s who kept asking me what Outlook client settings I was using, and finding random people on LinkedIn I could message. In the end the solution that seemed to work was to reach out separately to everyone I was sending an email to on Hotmail/Outlook.com and getting them to explicitly mark my email as not spam. After a while it seemed to take and stop rejecting/marking my emails.
  • tyldum 7y ago
    I run my own, but from time to time large blocks of IP space on Digital Ocean seems to get put into some blacklist. My solution was to use a fallback delivery through SendGrid and their free tier (happens rare enough, and my volume is low). Postfix handles this nicely for me.
• stdcall83 7y ago
  Lately I've been having issues sending mail to Linux kernel mailing list, mail was just rejected and not sent through Gmail SMTP server. After countless attempts to fix that or to understand why Google think I'm spamming I set up my own mail server on DigitalOcean Droplet. I used mailinabox and the setup was a piece of cake. it works flawlessly now.
• al_form2000 7y ago
  TFA is so wrong on so many levels, I do not even know where to begin with. It surely does not make me want to rush to test the author's MTA. Unless he's talking of a one mailbox server, accepting outgoing only from localhost and somehow endowed with a non residential ip (or good luck with rdns, rbls, etc.). But that was always trivial, post UUCP era. Background: I've been running mail servers from 1996, several different MTAs, for my company and for customers. Getting the thing up and running is not (very) hard -for a primary MX net facing machine. That's where work begins though. My primary MTA is still sendmail, and sendmail.cf was never one of my problems - I do not have a degree in compilers, whatever that is, and surely I never read sendmail.cf
• grafelic 7y ago
  And when you finally have a well-running setup, use: https://mxtoolbox.com/ https://mxtoolbox.com/ (No affiliation) To verify you have everything set up properly.
• awinter-py 7y ago
  this article doesn't have the word 'security' in it
  • MiscIdeaMaker99 7y ago
    And why does that matter, please?
    • awinter-py 7y ago
      I think one of the hard things about operating any server is securing it. If the author is arguing that 'mail is easy now' you can't make that argument without addressing the security aspect. I hate google and I still use gmail because their project zero team is so good. Big consumer tech companies are finding their own ways to make this argument: apple with privacy, google with security research, even facebook with providing better privacy controls, although this isn't in their DNA and they'll fail. More products are supporting MFA/FIDO now. If 'mail in a box' etc are going to convince me to self host (which I would love to do), security is the missing piece.
• flas9sd 7y ago
  Setting up and maintaining a mail server is not hard for the initiated, but I fear is archaic and endangered to be irrelevant as basis for interpersonal communication beyond a work context. It has its place as identity provider, able to receive invoices, but this can be subject to change too - and only newsletters and mailing lists will remain.
• fit2rule 7y ago
  Running your own mail server is like having a pet dog. You have to keep it in good shape, exercise it, feed it well .. chain it up when necessary, clean up after it and so on. Keep the neighbours kids from stealing it and using it to deliver drugs, etc. If you treat it like a pet, it makes it a lot easier to manager. "Oh, did I forget to check the mail logs this week", and so on..
  • MiscIdeaMaker99 7y ago
    I don't see self-hosting email as being any different than any other self-hosting service. I mean, take "mail server" out of our your analogy above, and replace it with "web server," and everything still applies.
    • al_form2000 7y ago
      No, it does not. Read the thread to know why.
      • MiscIdeaMaker99 7y ago
        I've been a sysadmin for 20 years, so I suppose I just see things differently than you.
        • al_form2000 7y ago
          Been a sysadmin for 25 years myself.
          • fit2rule 7y ago
            30 years here. Still got my old dogs, through thick and thin.
• gsliepen 7y ago
  My experience with running my own mailservers for the last 20 years: it's definitely not hard. It's not painless, you need to spend a little bit of time now and then, and you need to know a little bit more about email than how to hit "send" in your mail client. It's annoying that the default settings of almost all mail server software are suboptimal, but once I set it up correctly (yes, that took some time but nowadays there are plenty of tutorials) I had to do almost no maintenance at all. Apart from power failures that were unavoidable, the biggest issue has been spam blocker lists becoming outdated or going out of service. After that, the occasional hickup after a dist-upgrade or moving to a different country. But on average, my mail server is working perfectly fine 364 out of 365.2425 days. And, this is considerably better than the mail servers at the universities and companies I've worked at. Your Gmail might have given you no problems, but it is not working 100% of the time for everyone either. So I'd say maintaining your own mailserver is as hard as painting rooms yourself, or changing the battery or light bulbs of a car. Not everyone wants to do that, and that's fine. If you're not afraid of it, it's a rewarding experience.
• kbwt 7y ago
  From a few days ago: * CVE-2019-11500 : Critical Dovecot and Pigeonhole vulnerability (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3 https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3) I still run my own mail server, but I hate having to keep up with these security vulnerabilities which can come up at the most inconvenient time.
• y42 7y ago
  Last time I installed a mail server was a couple of month ago. I consider mysql a pro, I feel pretty familiar on command line, working in this busines as a SysOp and Developer for a couple of decades. But one not just "set up a mail server". Saying "mail is not hard" sounds kind of cynical to me. You need to handle more than one setup, you need to consider compatibilities, you need to make it right, if you want to have a secure and reliable solution. If your not in the busines of setting up mail servers every day: Mail is hard. As long as there is no download-and-run-solution for a mail-server: Mail is hard.
• ethhics 7y ago
  The only issue I had setting up a mail server was sending mail to servers using some service which blocks my domain. Places like my university and my work using Proofpoint, for example, seem to only allow mail from large, easily verifiable domains.
• earenndil 7y ago
  > Let me tell you a secret: Big Mailer Corps are not worried about you but are worried about big senders harassing their users. They do not care about your personal server sending a few mails, even if its in the thousands per months. What they care about is the infected computers or compromised servers flooding their users. What they care about are the marketing companies that are literally shitting over them, sending individually millions of commercial mails per day, trying to work-around spam filters, and that sometimes manage to go for a while without being rejected. Unless you are sending hundreds of thousands of mails to them on a daily basis, quite frankly and without trying to hurt your feelings, you fall waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay below the radars. This is absolutely not true. A server I had mailed out daily run outputs to local users, and was also configured to send an email to one of the users' gmail accounts. I also used that server for personal email, but eventually had to stop because the daily run outputs got us blocked by gmail.
  • rhizome 7y ago
    the daily run outputs got us blocked by gmail Are you sure? How many tens of thousands of daily run outputs were you mailing?
• zelly 7y ago
  I've done this a couple times, and I think it's sufficiently difficult that if in the future I were hiring for a Linux sysadmin, I'd have them set up a mail server (that doesn't get spamfiltered) in less than 24 hours. I never got spam filtered once DKIM/SPF/rDNS/DMARC were properly configured. I think _this_ is the myth that Big Email spreads. Linux mail servers are hard, but getting past filters is actually not hard. Spam filters are really good today not just in their true positive rate but also their true negative rate. Given that a lot of services use your email as a 2FA mechanism, I wouldn't want to use a self-hosted mail server as my _only_ personal mail. You have to have a good reason[1] to make the time and maintenance commitment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy#Domain_names_and_email_server https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controve...
  • donmcronald 7y ago
    Getting past the filters isn't hard. It's impossible. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945846 That's a super high value domain (facebookmail.com) with perfect config getting filtered as SPAM by Google.
• andrerm 7y ago
  > We can’t let that happen: allowing e-mail to be fully controlled by a small set of cooperating multi-million users hosts is just accepting to be screwed. I agree but don't say it isn't hard. It's hard and it's not for everyone but if you can the benefits are worth it. Now I don't think having more small mail servers will stop big mail servers abusing their power but without a significant number not small servers better just give up. For the record I do have my mail server on a vps
• raintrees 7y ago
  The only "hard" part I find with running my own mail server for the last 25 years is switching platforms. Deriving a large part of my income by supporting Microsoft software in small business environments, I have been running Exchange versions all that time. I have enjoyed Outlook as a primary business tool, and looking at the conversion strategies to move over to a *nix mail server that will support that client and the 25 years of horded emails I now store (don't mess with my jokes folder, dude) has been the most daunting part of it. Even though I have been on Debian releases as my primary workstation OS for over 12 years now, I still have virtual Windows sessions to keep using Outlook. And granted, that also lets me simulate what my clients "see" when I am assisting.
• vbezhenar 7y ago
  For me mail is hard because software is convoluted. I need to install for a minimal usable personal mail server: SMTP server (postfix), IMAP server (dovecot), DKIM software (OpenDKIM), Spam filter (Spam Assassin). Also I would likely need to install Procmail for some basic mail sorting. So that's 3 huge projects and 2 small projects. They need to hook up with each other. I need to learn configuration files for every of those projects. Add to that dozen of different DNS things (and, recently, HTTPS thing), that you need to configure. Also TLS certificates. Well, that's a daunting task for me. Some kind of simple personal web server software which does it all (may be not for 100k users scale), runs on low end VPS server (10 MB RAM consumption) and requires zero configuration for typical use-cases would help a lot. And, yeah, don't tell me that delivering is easy. I did everything right, DKIM, SPF, PTR, all those things. No black lists. Gmail still does not deliver my mails sometimes.
• AndyKelley 7y ago
  https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver I invested 3 hours of time setting it up, $4/month in hosting, and now I have andrew@ziglang.org as my main email and have never looked back.
• leepowers 7y ago
  Email is hard across time. Meaning yes, I can setup a mail server, and yes I can configure DKIM+SPF, and yes I can initially get good delivery to all the major providers. But that's just the beginning. Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility. And problems with mail delivery are almost always an emergency for yourself or your clients. Nothing quite matches the gut punch of being on time for a deadline then having to push it back to troubleshoot mail problems. Or losing a weekend because while you know enough to get started your experience isn't deep enough to fix deliverability problems in a timely manner. > I work on an opensource SMTP server. I build both opensource and proprietary solutions related to mail. I will likely open a commercial mail service next year. Translation: "I am an intelligent guy who works hard. My entire professional career is devoted to designing and maintaining mail systems. I work full time to achieve mastery of my craft. Yet I can't understand why people outside my specialization might find it difficult to do my job." Email _is_ hard. That's why I'm very happy to outsource mail to experts like OP.
  • cpncrunch 7y ago
    >Email is an ongoing maintenance responsibility. True, but it is generally fairly minimal.
    • wolrah 7y ago
      > True, but it is generally fairly minimal. That's actually kind of the problem. It's the same thing with phone systems. Any IT person worth a shit can follow a decent tutorial and end up with a system that works. Until it doesn't. What happens when it doesn't is the issue. For a lot of businesses this will be an immediate critical problem. This is not a great time to be learning by experimentation. If these services are not critical then go nuts, but if your business depends on these services you really want to have someone whose full time job it is to run them. If your business is not large enough to support having a person's primary role be administering these systems you should really have a third party vendor do it for you. The article is right, you don't have to use one of the big names, but most of the time it's not a good idea to run your own if you consider email to be a critical service.
  • 7y ago
• quotemstr 7y ago
  I've run my own mailserver since the late 2000s. I've never had much trouble with deliverability. Spam hasn't been a real issue either --- I run with deliberately light spam filtering because I find the occasional ridiculous spam email hilarious. (My favorite spam of all time begins "Yes, I am Bernie Madoff".)
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  "Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it" Actually I repeat it because I ran mail servers for years, for personal use, for small businesses, for large businesses. It was hard because spam was difficult to deal with, I don't know if that's gotten easier. It was hard because managing mailboxes, spam boxes, whitelists, webmail, etc for users was non-trivial. It was hard because occasionally you would be blacklisted and it took days to un-blacklist you, either from a spam list, or from a "big provider" because for whatever reason they just didn't want to take your mail. It was hard because you couldn't just run an open relay on most ISPs, you usually had to use your ISP's relay, and thus suffer their own issues; if you used commercial IP space that was less of an issue. It was hard because it had to be secure, and follow standards. It was hard because as your own hosting provider, you had to do all the things providers do: have a stable connection, manage your DNS, do backups, manage configuration, upgrades, patches. We're not trying to bullshit you. We did it, and it was hard. Maybe it won't be for you, or maybe the "hardness" is just fun for you. But it's not a myth.
• reti 7y ago
  Had been running my own mail server for the last 10 years, doing mail forwarding for a few friends domain names. Finally just moved all those domains to mailgun, and it's been great. 10,000 forwarded emails a day, for free. To be honest it wasn't that hard doing it myself, but it broke 2-3 times over that number of years when providers changed their delivery requirements (see DKIM, DMARC etc). It was never something I enjoyed troubleshooting.
• locusm 7y ago
  Just like to offer an alternative view to the "if I move to G. Suite all my problems will go away" myth. Ive had quite a few clients over the years that have faced deliverability issues on G.Suite with sending IP's being on blocklists. Google isnt immune to this people. e.g. http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/209.85.208.194.html http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/209.85.208.194.html
• jjav 7y ago
  Email infrastructure is very important for an open and interoperable Internet, way too important for us (techies) to abdicate it to gmail. That alone is a good motivator to run your own email services. Of course, there are other benefits. "It's way too hard" is a HN meme I've noticed regularly. It's really not, if you have any tech skills or the willingness to learn. I set up my email server in two days between jobs in 2011 and it's been running with minimal attention ever since. I don't have precise numbers, but to try to give some context I'd say about 2-4 hours a year worth of maintenance. Over the years I've expanded it to handle a few more domains (consulting companies for self and family members). No issues. To anyone even slightly interested or curious in the technology, just do it. You'll gain some freedom, gain some experience and help (even if just a grain of sand) decentralize the Internet. Don't fear the naysayers.
• commandersaki 7y ago
  A tale of caution for those would-be self hosters: a friend of mine had a Linux system running mail operations and somehow got ransomwared (theory is via supermicro IPMI). All the filesystems were encrypted and the console login banner was changed to an attacker controlled advertisement to a TOR address for getting the system unlocked. He didn't pay. Logs show there was no data ex-filtration. But as usual, his backups were a couple months old so he lost a significant chunk of his email (he used web interface/imap and I don't think he cached his email locally). I felt vindicated, giving up self-hosting of email and pushing it towards a third party provider because I was concerned about backup/disaster recovery scenarios. When something fundamentally shakes up your life - you might not have the ability to function well and managing a mail server is a stress you could live without.
• pcamen 7y ago
  In the late 90's I worked for an email server software company. Since then, almost 20 years now, I've been running my own mail server. I wouldn't say it is hard so much as a PITA and very time consuming. I spend quite a bit of time reviewing logs making sure that my server has not gotten hacked or compromised in some new way. Over the years, a new exploit type comes along, like backscatter, that I then have to figure out how to secure my server against. And I'm also very proactive at reviewing logs and banning IP's against the constant barrage of probing. I must spend a few hours a week dealing with the mail server. And then there are periodic "someone isn't getting my mail" problems that I have to track down, where Yahoo or pacbell.net or some other large mail system decides that my server is insecure for some reason, despite not being on any DNS RBLs (which are also sometimes a problem for no good reason). If it weren't for the fact that I have so much more flexibility and ease-of-use on my own mail server for setting up many domains and multiple email addresses, I would move everything to a provider and not manage it myself.