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It’s true, but it is only half the story. I’ve used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, a

It’s true, but it is only half the story. I’ve used a paid provider other than gmail for 18 years. I occasionally had problems starting a couple of years ago, and every single one of them was caused by google not delivering a mail (or marking it spam, which is for almost all practical purposes, not delivering it). I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then. Google is giving you no trouble because the main instigator of trouble these days is google. You may find it acceptable to use them with this in mind. I do not.

gfodor 7y ago
My point was that running your own server isn't about just getting Hello World working, its about the fact that you basically are now living in a world where you will potentially have delivery failures of your email, or incidental things you need to fix at random. Imagine if this is how your phone worked: on a given day, you may find yourself suddenly having to learn about why your phone calls stopped going through, or in general, 0.01% of the time people can't reach you with no explainable reason. The idea I could wake up on a random Tuesday and find myself debugging ancient erlang code to diagnose my phone calls regressing feels no less disastrous than having to read the source code to my email server if/when it mysteriously stops working. In any case, this is a argument as to why it's an uphill battle to convince people that running your own server is an easy endeavor. (Which seemed to be the point of this post.) It says nothing about switching off of gmail to another provider as you did, or if the actual burden of running a server is worth the privacy trade-off for an individual (i'd argue for most it isn't, but wasn't really the point i was trying to make.) Switching from Google to another 3rd party provider doesn't eliminate privacy risk, it shifts around the probability distribution for certain kinds of events to occur. (Arguably, so does hosting your own server, but hosting your own server does rule out large classes of failures.)

gfodor 7y ago

My point was that running your own server isn't about just getting Hello World working, its about the fact that you basically are now living in a world where you will potentially have delivery failures of your email, or incidental things you need to fix at random. Imagine if this is how your phone worked: on a given day, you may find yourself suddenly having to learn about why your phone calls stopped going through, or in general, 0.01% of the time people can't reach you with no explainable reason. The idea I could wake up on a random Tuesday and find myself debugging ancient erlang code to diagnose my phone calls regressing feels no less disastrous than having to read the source code to my email server if/when it mysteriously stops working. In any case, this is a argument as to why it's an uphill battle to convince people that running your own server is an easy endeavor. (Which seemed to be the point of this post.) It says nothing about switching off of gmail to another provider as you did, or if the actual burden of running a server is worth the privacy trade-off for an individual (i'd argue for most it isn't, but wasn't really the point i was trying to make.) Switching from Google to another 3rd party provider doesn't eliminate privacy risk, it shifts around the probability distribution for certain kinds of events to occur. (Arguably, so does hosting your own server, but hosting your own server does rule out large classes of failures.)