11 ms·

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 s

by 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.
  - al_form2000 7y ago
    The config format is the least of your worries also if you're running sendmail - which I do.
    - roel_v 7y ago
      You're a much braver soul than I have ever been :)
      - al_form2000 7y ago
        Yeah, that's the folk wisdom on sendmail. But really, since version 8.0, writing your own .cf (or reading it) should have been regarded as bizarre as crafting your own object files with an hex editor. And sendmail has served me well, over the years; its scariest feature (sendmail.cf) is also a strength - as a Turing complete programmiong language, it allows you to tie your incoming/outgoing mail in square knots, if you feel so inclined, or to solve some unforeseen mail routing configuration/problem/whatever. Of course, if you find someone that has gone to the lenght to write a _LOCAL ruleset that does it - and alas that is a creaft I do not possess, and is dying out. When it does, I will probably make the postfix jump. I cannot claim prescience, because I started ont the trade when sendmail was THE mail program (though ed was no longer THE text editor): but consider, had I listened to the sendmail bashing crowd a couple years later I would have gone qmail (!!!). For not having done that, I thank the almighty weekly.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > just send them a link to the sieve man page! That would work if mail providers actually used Sieve, but almost none of them do. I've never understood why.
    - roel_v 7y ago
      ... Can't tell if you're serious or not - but if you are, just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that. I mean I used it for many years but I'm a nerd weirdo.
- detaro 7y ago
  Config files really are not the problem with running email. The "why the hell is provider/BigCo/... XYZ rejecting our emails again" dance is, with the answer typically being "no clue, they certainly won't tell us, let's hope it works in 48 hours?"...
- el_cujo 7y ago
  People also have different ideas of what "hard" is. I've never tried setting up a mail server so I'm talking out of my ass a bit, but after reading the article it sounds like you'd need to do a bit of googling/trial and error changes to get things set up, probably one of those projects that would take up most of a saturday or at least a saturday afternoon and might run into some hiccups every few months that requires more googling/tweaking. Even if I'm way off base about the mail server set up being this way, some people still consider this type of "saturday afternoon" project hard compared to something that just works out of the box without any fiddling and can be set up in 20 minutes. I'm not trying to be elitist by suggesting these people are dumb or lazy, just that the semantics of what "hard" is varies for people, especially with little projects that require fiddling/tweaking/looking for outside help.
Izmaki 7y ago
Your comment is perfet. Let me quote: "OK, then why is everyone saying it’s hard ? [...] Another reason is because it used to be hard a long time ago. People got traumatized by how hard it was to not screw up and never reevaluated the situation. Some people today genuinely discourage other people from running their mail server, citing the very real difficulties they faced over a decade ago, far before some of today’s tools even existed."
- scarface74 7y ago
  How does running my own mail server save me time, money, or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else? What other criteria should I use?
  - ekianjo 7y ago
    > or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else? The same can be said "why should I grow my own veggies when I can buy them from the supermarket?" - The point is always, always, about Freedom.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is. If you were running your own restaurant and your home grown vegetables caused a worse customer experience would you do it? Running your own mail server which causes more of your mail to go to spam is worse than using a commercial provider.
      - nocman 7y ago
        "When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is." ^ I both run my own mail server and use someone else's service for another purpose. My experience running my own mail server is objectively WAY BETTER than using the commercial provider (and I've been doing this for many years in multiple scenarios). Just because your experience (even if it is repeated) with certain technology goes one way, that doesn't make it universally true.
leothekim 7y ago
This. Even running your own IRC, while not "hard", is a PITA enough that companies will shell out a chunk of change to have someone else do it for them. And, they may even get better features as a result.
the_jeremy 7y ago
There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.
- wolco 7y ago
  That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.
  - oblio 7y ago
    "Yeah, but I don't have this bug for my 200 friends that have Gmail plus you want my business and I like Gmail so it's your problem."
  - guggle 7y ago
    This is both true and irrelevant, because your boss/customer/whatever doesn't care about this story.
- number6 7y ago
  Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves
  - acidburnNSA 7y ago
    Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.
    - guggle 7y ago
      > So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience. You made the point.
eythian 7y ago
The article points it out, but it used to be harder than it is now. These days (for a long time now, really), it's hard to set one up that's, say, an open relay by accident. The default configs are pretty much all you need, just replacing a couple of values with those that are custom. Basically, what you're saying is exactly what they're debunking. Also, the article isn't "just execute these 20 commands", it's deliberately non-technical. I've been running a tiny Postfix mail server since ... 2000 or so, still doing so today. It had grown in to a bit of a monster configuration over 17 years or so, complete with a custom PHP interface to allow me to add user accounts, etc. I learnt a lot doing that, but a couple of years ago I started it all from scratch, with a default config and writing the config into my ansible setup so I don't have to remember it. It was very easy to do. Since then, I've touched that configuration once. One thing I will mention because I haven't seen it around enough, and didn't know of it until someone said it in passing: if you're getting smap-trapped by gmail a lot, turn on TLS support for outgoing. Made a lot of difference. For postfix that's just adding: smtp_tls_security_level=may to main.cf. Don't know why that isn't default.
- roel_v 7y ago
  So despite your claim that it's 'very easy to do', in the very next paragraph you are basically saying that you need to be around people who 'mention in passing' obscure details of email server configuration, otherwise it will 'make a lot of difference'? I mean it seems you disagree with me at first, but then in the rest of your post you seem to be making my point for me, so...
joeblau 7y ago
I totally agree with this and this is actually something that my Engineer Brain and Product Brain are constantly in conflict about. I ran gitignore.io for 6 years and it was not "hard" to run. It was two commands on a web server. The problem was when I was on vacation or at work and AWS/Heroku crashed and I got flooded with GitHub issues/Tweets telling me the service as down[1][2]. All of a sudden, I have to go take a look. Martin Fowler said something in a talk a few years ago[3] and I think it speaks to this exact mindset. This post is lacking any economic reasons for people to run their own mail server — tell me why me running my own mail server saves me time and/or money. As another tangent, I'm actually looking at running my own mail server. For me, it's privacy which coincidentally is not even mentioned once in the article. [1] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/369 https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/369 [2] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/2 https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/2 [3] - https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0?t=460 https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0?t=460
jwr 7y ago
> 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 I've been running my own mail server since 2000 or so. It isn't hard, it takes almost no time at all, and I have my own independent mail that nobody reads, and I make the decision of which mail to accept. I will take the liberty of classifying the above comment as FUD.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  You can use hosted mail with pgp/gpg if you don't want anyone reading your mail. Otherwise your mail is read in transit on the way to you anyway, so self hosting is false privacy.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    Isn't most SMTP traffic over TLS, these days?
    - pseudalopex 7y ago
      Most SMTP traffic is to or from a few large companies.
- jwr 7y ago
  Incidentally, it is threads like these that make me regret posting anything on HN. Respond to a vaguely worded FUD with a specific first-person example (of doing something for almost 20 years, no less), and get downvoted into negative territory.
guggle 7y ago
I absolutely agree. > - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it No. Been there, done that. It was a major PITA. It's not even something I would consider again for small organizations as it's an economic nonsense too.
duxup 7y ago
I wonder how much background knowledge is needed to execute those 20 commands with confidence.
corford 7y ago
Amen. I ran my own personal mail server for ~15 years (started with qmail+squirrelmail, moved to postfix+dovecot+opendkim+zpush+roundcube at some point). I enjoyed it but eventually just didn't have the time to care anymore. Moved everything over to Fastmail about a year ago and haven't looked back. My inner geek still feels bad about not doing it myself but my rational brain is happy.
slenk 7y ago
No, it's not a gigantic PITA anymore. Yes, _15 years ago_, which is what everyone's reference time frame seems to be, it was hard. Now, there are many solutions that with 1 click do all the painful integrations. https://mailinabox.org/ https://mailinabox.org/, https://mailcow.email/ https://mailcow.email/, https://iredmail.org/ https://iredmail.org/ So please, everyone, stop saying mail is hard now when you don't have any recent experience. A lot has changed in 15 years

by roel_v 7y ago

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.
- al_form2000 7y ago
  The config format is the least of your worries also if you're running sendmail - which I do.
  - roel_v 7y ago
    You're a much braver soul than I have ever been :)
    - al_form2000 7y ago
      Yeah, that's the folk wisdom on sendmail. But really, since version 8.0, writing your own .cf (or reading it) should have been regarded as bizarre as crafting your own object files with an hex editor. And sendmail has served me well, over the years; its scariest feature (sendmail.cf) is also a strength - as a Turing complete programmiong language, it allows you to tie your incoming/outgoing mail in square knots, if you feel so inclined, or to solve some unforeseen mail routing configuration/problem/whatever. Of course, if you find someone that has gone to the lenght to write a _LOCAL ruleset that does it - and alas that is a creaft I do not possess, and is dying out. When it does, I will probably make the postfix jump. I cannot claim prescience, because I started ont the trade when sendmail was THE mail program (though ed was no longer THE text editor): but consider, had I listened to the sendmail bashing crowd a couple years later I would have gone qmail (!!!). For not having done that, I thank the almighty weekly.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > just send them a link to the sieve man page! That would work if mail providers actually used Sieve, but almost none of them do. I've never understood why.
  - roel_v 7y ago
    ... Can't tell if you're serious or not - but if you are, just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that. I mean I used it for many years but I'm a nerd weirdo.
detaro 7y ago
Config files really are not the problem with running email. The "why the hell is provider/BigCo/... XYZ rejecting our emails again" dance is, with the answer typically being "no clue, they certainly won't tell us, let's hope it works in 48 hours?"...
el_cujo 7y ago
People also have different ideas of what "hard" is. I've never tried setting up a mail server so I'm talking out of my ass a bit, but after reading the article it sounds like you'd need to do a bit of googling/trial and error changes to get things set up, probably one of those projects that would take up most of a saturday or at least a saturday afternoon and might run into some hiccups every few months that requires more googling/tweaking. Even if I'm way off base about the mail server set up being this way, some people still consider this type of "saturday afternoon" project hard compared to something that just works out of the box without any fiddling and can be set up in 20 minutes. I'm not trying to be elitist by suggesting these people are dumb or lazy, just that the semantics of what "hard" is varies for people, especially with little projects that require fiddling/tweaking/looking for outside help.

Izmaki 7y ago

Your comment is perfet. Let me quote: "OK, then why is everyone saying it’s hard ? [...] Another reason is because it used to be hard a long time ago. People got traumatized by how hard it was to not screw up and never reevaluated the situation. Some people today genuinely discourage other people from running their mail server, citing the very real difficulties they faced over a decade ago, far before some of today’s tools even existed."

scarface74 7y ago
How does running my own mail server save me time, money, or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else? What other criteria should I use?
- ekianjo 7y ago
  > or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else? The same can be said "why should I grow my own veggies when I can buy them from the supermarket?" - The point is always, always, about Freedom.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is. If you were running your own restaurant and your home grown vegetables caused a worse customer experience would you do it? Running your own mail server which causes more of your mail to go to spam is worse than using a commercial provider.
    - nocman 7y ago
      "When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is." ^ I both run my own mail server and use someone else's service for another purpose. My experience running my own mail server is objectively WAY BETTER than using the commercial provider (and I've been doing this for many years in multiple scenarios). Just because your experience (even if it is repeated) with certain technology goes one way, that doesn't make it universally true.

leothekim 7y ago

This. Even running your own IRC, while not "hard", is a PITA enough that companies will shell out a chunk of change to have someone else do it for them. And, they may even get better features as a result.

the_jeremy 7y ago

There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.

wolco 7y ago
That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.
- oblio 7y ago
  "Yeah, but I don't have this bug for my 200 friends that have Gmail plus you want my business and I like Gmail so it's your problem."
- guggle 7y ago
  This is both true and irrelevant, because your boss/customer/whatever doesn't care about this story.
number6 7y ago
Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.
  - guggle 7y ago
    > So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience. You made the point.

eythian 7y ago

The article points it out, but it used to be harder than it is now. These days (for a long time now, really), it's hard to set one up that's, say, an open relay by accident. The default configs are pretty much all you need, just replacing a couple of values with those that are custom. Basically, what you're saying is exactly what they're debunking. Also, the article isn't "just execute these 20 commands", it's deliberately non-technical. I've been running a tiny Postfix mail server since ... 2000 or so, still doing so today. It had grown in to a bit of a monster configuration over 17 years or so, complete with a custom PHP interface to allow me to add user accounts, etc. I learnt a lot doing that, but a couple of years ago I started it all from scratch, with a default config and writing the config into my ansible setup so I don't have to remember it. It was very easy to do. Since then, I've touched that configuration once. One thing I will mention because I haven't seen it around enough, and didn't know of it until someone said it in passing: if you're getting smap-trapped by gmail a lot, turn on TLS support for outgoing. Made a lot of difference. For postfix that's just adding: smtp_tls_security_level=may to main.cf. Don't know why that isn't default.

roel_v 7y ago
So despite your claim that it's 'very easy to do', in the very next paragraph you are basically saying that you need to be around people who 'mention in passing' obscure details of email server configuration, otherwise it will 'make a lot of difference'? I mean it seems you disagree with me at first, but then in the rest of your post you seem to be making my point for me, so...

joeblau 7y ago

I totally agree with this and this is actually something that my Engineer Brain and Product Brain are constantly in conflict about. I ran gitignore.io for 6 years and it was not "hard" to run. It was two commands on a web server. The problem was when I was on vacation or at work and AWS/Heroku crashed and I got flooded with GitHub issues/Tweets telling me the service as down[1][2]. All of a sudden, I have to go take a look. Martin Fowler said something in a talk a few years ago[3] and I think it speaks to this exact mindset. This post is lacking any economic reasons for people to run their own mail server — tell me why me running my own mail server saves me time and/or money. As another tangent, I'm actually looking at running my own mail server. For me, it's privacy which coincidentally is not even mentioned once in the article. [1] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/369 https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/369 [2] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/2 https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/2 [3] - https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0?t=460 https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0?t=460

jwr 7y ago

> 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 I've been running my own mail server since 2000 or so. It isn't hard, it takes almost no time at all, and I have my own independent mail that nobody reads, and I make the decision of which mail to accept. I will take the liberty of classifying the above comment as FUD.

lonelappde 7y ago
You can use hosted mail with pgp/gpg if you don't want anyone reading your mail. Otherwise your mail is read in transit on the way to you anyway, so self hosting is false privacy.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  Isn't most SMTP traffic over TLS, these days?
  - pseudalopex 7y ago
    Most SMTP traffic is to or from a few large companies.
jwr 7y ago
Incidentally, it is threads like these that make me regret posting anything on HN. Respond to a vaguely worded FUD with a specific first-person example (of doing something for almost 20 years, no less), and get downvoted into negative territory.

guggle 7y ago

I absolutely agree. > - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it No. Been there, done that. It was a major PITA. It's not even something I would consider again for small organizations as it's an economic nonsense too.

duxup 7y ago

I wonder how much background knowledge is needed to execute those 20 commands with confidence.

corford 7y ago

Amen. I ran my own personal mail server for ~15 years (started with qmail+squirrelmail, moved to postfix+dovecot+opendkim+zpush+roundcube at some point). I enjoyed it but eventually just didn't have the time to care anymore. Moved everything over to Fastmail about a year ago and haven't looked back. My inner geek still feels bad about not doing it myself but my rational brain is happy.

slenk 7y ago

No, it's not a gigantic PITA anymore. Yes, _15 years ago_, which is what everyone's reference time frame seems to be, it was hard. Now, there are many solutions that with 1 click do all the painful integrations. https://mailinabox.org/ https://mailinabox.org/, https://mailcow.email/ https://mailcow.email/, https://iredmail.org/ https://iredmail.org/ So please, everyone, stop saying mail is hard now when you don't have any recent experience. A lot has changed in 15 years