3 ms·

This criticism came up last time too, and I replied that I've been running my own mail server for 20 years off of a DSL line, and I have no trouble sending to a

This criticism came up last time too, and I replied that I've been running my own mail server for 20 years off of a DSL line, and I have no trouble sending to anybody (that I've heard of from recipients nor MAILER-DAEMON). I have DKIM, SPF and no relaying and the only issue in recent memory was when AT&T started bouncing me for some reason. I emailed postmaster@ saying "hey wats up," and the block was removed a day or so later.

syntheticnature 7y ago
Do you know that your messages arrive in all cases? Not merely fail to bounce, but arrive? I help with IT for a small non-profit membership org, and the problem isn't the places that throw errors when you send, but the ones that silently accept the message without complaint and route it to /dev/null. We get through fine to Google, but the other big providers are random at best about it.
- LIV2 7y ago
  Some mail systems can tell you if a user is valid or not during the initial connection while some forward to another mail system or delivery process and therefore cannot tell your MX during their conversation that the recipient is invalid. The downstream MX could be configured to then send an NDR email itself but this lands you on spam lists as "backscattering" will then send spam back to whoever owns the email address the spammer is spoofing so it's generally not done.
- rhizome 7y ago
  >Do you know that your messages arrive in all cases? "I have no trouble sending to anybody (that I've heard of from recipients" might not be as artfully written as I would like, but that's what that refers to. Furthermore, blackholing emails like you suggest is generally rare. RFC 5321 (SMTP) states: "[D]ropping mail without notification of the sender is permitted in practice. However, it is extremely dangerous and violates a long tradition and community expectations that mail is either delivered or returned. If silent message-dropping is misused, it could easily undermine confidence in the reliability of the Internet's mail systems. So silent dropping of messages should be considered only in those cases where there is very high confidence that the messages are seriously fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate."
jasode 7y ago
>I've been running my own mail server for 20 years Yes, maybe rhizome is successfully running his own personal mail server but your anecdote isn't really relevant. We can't learn from your example because the hidden rules of reputation & spam may not affect you but will affect others. For example, a commenter (lucb1e) argued[0][1] that I was exaggerating the difficulties of reliably sending email but a year later in 2019, he confirmed the same difficulties! [2] Do you see why we can't reliably extrapolate from personal experience? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607
- rhizome 7y ago
  I'm at least an instance of one that demonstrates that it's possible. The person you link to sounds misconfigured to some degree, but in the main two things they don't mention are whether they are using static IPs (as I am), or if they tried emailing postmaster@ to try and smooth out their difficulties. There is still a collegial network of people who run this stuff all over the world, and I'm certainly not the only person running a closet mailserver.

syntheticnature 7y ago

Do you know that your messages arrive in all cases? Not merely fail to bounce, but arrive? I help with IT for a small non-profit membership org, and the problem isn't the places that throw errors when you send, but the ones that silently accept the message without complaint and route it to /dev/null. We get through fine to Google, but the other big providers are random at best about it.

LIV2 7y ago
Some mail systems can tell you if a user is valid or not during the initial connection while some forward to another mail system or delivery process and therefore cannot tell your MX during their conversation that the recipient is invalid. The downstream MX could be configured to then send an NDR email itself but this lands you on spam lists as "backscattering" will then send spam back to whoever owns the email address the spammer is spoofing so it's generally not done.
rhizome 7y ago
>Do you know that your messages arrive in all cases? "I have no trouble sending to anybody (that I've heard of from recipients" might not be as artfully written as I would like, but that's what that refers to. Furthermore, blackholing emails like you suggest is generally rare. RFC 5321 (SMTP) states: "[D]ropping mail without notification of the sender is permitted in practice. However, it is extremely dangerous and violates a long tradition and community expectations that mail is either delivered or returned. If silent message-dropping is misused, it could easily undermine confidence in the reliability of the Internet's mail systems. So silent dropping of messages should be considered only in those cases where there is very high confidence that the messages are seriously fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate."

jasode 7y ago

>I've been running my own mail server for 20 years Yes, maybe rhizome is successfully running his own personal mail server but your anecdote isn't really relevant. We can't learn from your example because the hidden rules of reputation & spam may not affect you but will affect others. For example, a commenter (lucb1e) argued[0][1] that I was exaggerating the difficulties of reliably sending email but a year later in 2019, he confirmed the same difficulties! [2] Do you see why we can't reliably extrapolate from personal experience? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525505 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15526127 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19757607

rhizome 7y ago
I'm at least an instance of one that demonstrates that it's possible. The person you link to sounds misconfigured to some degree, but in the main two things they don't mention are whether they are using static IPs (as I am), or if they tried emailing postmaster@ to try and smooth out their difficulties. There is still a collegial network of people who run this stuff all over the world, and I'm certainly not the only person running a closet mailserver.