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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 ha

by 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.
  - dundercoder 7y ago
    I love the car analogy. Once something becomes your lifeblood, tinkering is much less fun.
newscracker 7y ago
> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use... non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.
- jmiserez 7y ago
  Google Apps for Domains is great too, has been rock-solid for years.
- darekkay 7y ago
  > and provide more, like Posteo Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".
  - eikenberry 7y ago
    Hasty generalization. Many of those in that list support custom domains. Only checking the first and applying that to all is just lazy.
    - darekkay 7y ago
      Where did I apply it to everything? To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample. I'm happy with all the alternatives (as mentioned before), but I'm not happy with a claim that can be falsified with the first example.
      - eikenberry 7y ago
        > To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample. If you want to apply logic like that, you have to apply it correctly. To falsify a universal claim you only need one counterexample, but the original poster never used a universal term (all, never, etc). If it wasn't a universal claim then you can't apply the rules for universal quantification to it. More to the point, my comment wasn't attacking your logic, but that you seemed to dismiss the entire list based on the one example. I didn't see where you mentioned you were happy with the alternatives and only critical of the one, if that was the case then I just missed the larger context and I apologize.
__mp 7y ago
I also use Fastmail to host my calendar and contacts - next to my email. I enjoy the web interface and lI especially like that the iOS integration just works.
jojoo 7y ago
> A mail server is hard. yeah, but compared with other services like WWW mail is IMO harder. You deal with two main Protocols and a lot of software. While mail takes 11 components in your tutorial, you'd get a website in 4. And some parts are hard to debug. I have very little means to debug why my mail wasn't delivered to my bosses gmail.
ozim 7y ago
Running mail server is easy, if you do it for yourself. If you do it for "friends and family" it is not. Not because DKIM and DMARC those you setup once and don't care. Because doing something for people and for free is hard.
Shorn 7y ago
I've built https://kopi.cloud https://kopi.cloud to try to provide an alternative option in between being locked in to a big mail service and running your own mail servers. It's a consumer-oriented SaaS for taking control of your personal mail - there is no enterprise pricing, nor even a subscription pricing option - though you can you can choose to pre-pay for the service years in advance. Kopi uses Amazon SES for email delivery. We know Amazon wants to make sure that their service is a viable product for mail delivery at the commercial enterprise level. The idea is that Kopi can survive as a viable retail product by riding on the coat-tails of that desire and arbitraging the cost of mail handling via SES so it's cost-effective at consumer level. The intention is to run it as cheaply as I can, ($1USD / month at the moment, though I make no guarantee that it can stay that cheap forever) and to give people the ability to choose between different mail services. The idea is that you can manage your own domain, and setup your DNS to use Kopi as your mail exchange via DNS MX records to forward your email to whatever mail service you choose to use. If people don't want to even run their own domain, they can can use the shared Kopi domains if they want - with the understanding that those mail addresses are locked to the Kopi service, but at least they can change mail service whenever they want. The goal is to be easy enough to use that you can set up your email handling via a smart phone, and cheap enough that running your own email handling using free software should seem expensive by comparison. Though I'll admit - marketing this thing is a bit of a problem right now :)

by flurdy 7y ago

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.
- dundercoder 7y ago
  I love the car analogy. Once something becomes your lifeblood, tinkering is much less fun.

newscracker 7y ago

> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use... non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.

jmiserez 7y ago
Google Apps for Domains is great too, has been rock-solid for years.
darekkay 7y ago
> and provide more, like Posteo Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".
- eikenberry 7y ago
  Hasty generalization. Many of those in that list support custom domains. Only checking the first and applying that to all is just lazy.
  - darekkay 7y ago
    Where did I apply it to everything? To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample. I'm happy with all the alternatives (as mentioned before), but I'm not happy with a claim that can be falsified with the first example.
    - eikenberry 7y ago
      > To falsify an argument you only need one counterexample. If you want to apply logic like that, you have to apply it correctly. To falsify a universal claim you only need one counterexample, but the original poster never used a universal term (all, never, etc). If it wasn't a universal claim then you can't apply the rules for universal quantification to it. More to the point, my comment wasn't attacking your logic, but that you seemed to dismiss the entire list based on the one example. I didn't see where you mentioned you were happy with the alternatives and only critical of the one, if that was the case then I just missed the larger context and I apologize.

__mp 7y ago

I also use Fastmail to host my calendar and contacts - next to my email. I enjoy the web interface and lI especially like that the iOS integration just works.

jojoo 7y ago

> A mail server is hard. yeah, but compared with other services like WWW mail is IMO harder. You deal with two main Protocols and a lot of software. While mail takes 11 components in your tutorial, you'd get a website in 4. And some parts are hard to debug. I have very little means to debug why my mail wasn't delivered to my bosses gmail.

ozim 7y ago

Running mail server is easy, if you do it for yourself. If you do it for "friends and family" it is not. Not because DKIM and DMARC those you setup once and don't care. Because doing something for people and for free is hard.

Shorn 7y ago

I've built https://kopi.cloud https://kopi.cloud to try to provide an alternative option in between being locked in to a big mail service and running your own mail servers. It's a consumer-oriented SaaS for taking control of your personal mail - there is no enterprise pricing, nor even a subscription pricing option - though you can you can choose to pre-pay for the service years in advance. Kopi uses Amazon SES for email delivery. We know Amazon wants to make sure that their service is a viable product for mail delivery at the commercial enterprise level. The idea is that Kopi can survive as a viable retail product by riding on the coat-tails of that desire and arbitraging the cost of mail handling via SES so it's cost-effective at consumer level. The intention is to run it as cheaply as I can, ($1USD / month at the moment, though I make no guarantee that it can stay that cheap forever) and to give people the ability to choose between different mail services. The idea is that you can manage your own domain, and setup your DNS to use Kopi as your mail exchange via DNS MX records to forward your email to whatever mail service you choose to use. If people don't want to even run their own domain, they can can use the shared Kopi domains if they want - with the understanding that those mail addresses are locked to the Kopi service, but at least they can change mail service whenever they want. The goal is to be easy enough to use that you can set up your email handling via a smart phone, and cheap enough that running your own email handling using free software should seem expensive by comparison. Though I'll admit - marketing this thing is a bit of a problem right now :)