5 ms·

Or more strict enforcement by the world on SPF, DMARC and DKIM policies The problem of spam is actually solved, the problem is no one setups any of these secu

by syshum 5y ago

Or more strict enforcement by the world on SPF, DMARC and DKIM policies The problem of spam is actually solved, the problem is no one setups any of these security parameters correct, large and small companies alike all have bad SPF Records, bad or no DMARC, etc etc etc

jtchang 5y ago
How is that solved then if no one setups any of the security parameters correctly? That sounds like the exact opposite.
- teknopaul 5y ago
  https "solves" Internet security, your bad of you don't use it.
friendzis 5y ago
Go to any internet-related forum and search history for those keywords. You will find countless stories of seemingly technically people who in the end give up on self hosting and switch to managed mail provider. Because even if you solve those policies perfectly, a personal mail server will have such a low rate of outgoing mail that all the big players will effectively treat it as history-less server and will occasionally route the mail into the black hole. There is no recourse for that. If 99% of contacts you want to send mail to are on google/yahoo/microsoft you have to play by their rules. And those rules are effectively "send mail internally or gtfo".
- nanidin 5y ago
  I have self hosted personal mail for over a decade. There are occasional hiccups with deliverability to new gmail addresses, but that is it. In those cases, once a recipient marks me as not spam once, there aren’t any more problems. I think maybe once in the last 3 years I ended up in someone’s spam box, total. In fact I just sent to a new gmail address and to a university I have never contacted before this week and both were delivered without issue. Setting up DKIM/SPF/etc isn’t that hard and it’s fairly easy to verify with existing tools FYI.
  - generalizations 5y ago
    It would be amazing if those of you who have successfully self-hosted would get together and make a comprehensive write-up of how to self-host without getting blacklisted. I frequently see comments on both sides of this ("I can't send anything!" vs. "You just have to do it right") and it seems like if there could be some resource (that cuts down the complexity as far as is reasonable) on how to do this from the ground up, there could be much more wide-spread adoption of self-hosting. Personally, I'm hesitant because I don't know if the end of all my effort will be constant blacklisting. If I could be confident that if I do it right I won't get blacklisted, I probably would.
    - tomschlick 5y ago
      The biggest thing people do wrong with self hosting email is using residential IPs which are almost universally black/grey listed. Using a provider like linode, and checking the IP reputation ahead of time gave me better results when I self hosted.
      - Dah00n 5y ago
        That's not them doing something wrong though. There's nothing wrong in hosting a server at home. The problem is clearly the black/grey lists if they black/grey list residential IPs just because.
        syshum 5y ago
        Might want to check the Terms of Use / AUP on your Residential service, because every one I have ever read says you can not host email, and 80% of them say you can host any server of any kind. Now most of them do not actually enforce it unless you become a problem, but most of them do put active measures on the network to stop SMTP Servers For example here is a Exerpt from Comcast AUP prohibiting email and web hosting [1] >>>use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers; [1] https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspeedinternetaup https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspe...
- syshum 5y ago
  Self-Hosted Mail servers have the problem that most ISP's will automatically add all of their Service IP;s to BlackLists specifically to prevent people from running mail services on their Internet connections. Unless you have a Commercial Line that has be specifically designated for hosting content then it is likely any IP you are issued is added to Google/Microsoft/etc Blacklist by the ISP. Most of them clearly spell out in their terms that running a Mail Server on the circuit is forbidden.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    No one self hosts email on their home internet. You rent out a cheap VPS to do it on.
- nh2 5y ago
  Running a mailserver with correct DKIM, DMARC etc is not that difficult. I recently made a presentation that has a full explanation of the techniques, why they exist and how they work, on Hetzner Cloud (from the original post): https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf I find it very easy to configure with simple-nixos-mailserver (much easier than the manual setup on Ubuntu that I ran the years before): https://gist.github.com/nh2/6814728dc3bea1508323e9bf2213c28d https://gist.github.com/nh2/6814728dc3bea1508323e9bf2213c28d
judge2020 5y ago
I don't see why this is downvoted. Domains assign reputation to mail instead of the source IP, and it's fairly obvious that just buying a new domain and spamming from it would tank that domain's reputation for quite a while, even with proper spf/dkim and dmarc p=reject. If all of these are set up, you won't have issues sending from bad shared IPs like the default SES ones.
Avamander 5y ago
Spammers have no trouble making those perfect, you're massively inexperienced on the topic.

by syshum 5y ago

jtchang 5y ago

How is that solved then if no one setups any of the security parameters correctly? That sounds like the exact opposite.

teknopaul 5y ago
https "solves" Internet security, your bad of you don't use it.

friendzis 5y ago

Go to any internet-related forum and search history for those keywords. You will find countless stories of seemingly technically people who in the end give up on self hosting and switch to managed mail provider. Because even if you solve those policies perfectly, a personal mail server will have such a low rate of outgoing mail that all the big players will effectively treat it as history-less server and will occasionally route the mail into the black hole. There is no recourse for that. If 99% of contacts you want to send mail to are on google/yahoo/microsoft you have to play by their rules. And those rules are effectively "send mail internally or gtfo".

nanidin 5y ago
I have self hosted personal mail for over a decade. There are occasional hiccups with deliverability to new gmail addresses, but that is it. In those cases, once a recipient marks me as not spam once, there aren’t any more problems. I think maybe once in the last 3 years I ended up in someone’s spam box, total. In fact I just sent to a new gmail address and to a university I have never contacted before this week and both were delivered without issue. Setting up DKIM/SPF/etc isn’t that hard and it’s fairly easy to verify with existing tools FYI.
- generalizations 5y ago
  It would be amazing if those of you who have successfully self-hosted would get together and make a comprehensive write-up of how to self-host without getting blacklisted. I frequently see comments on both sides of this ("I can't send anything!" vs. "You just have to do it right") and it seems like if there could be some resource (that cuts down the complexity as far as is reasonable) on how to do this from the ground up, there could be much more wide-spread adoption of self-hosting. Personally, I'm hesitant because I don't know if the end of all my effort will be constant blacklisting. If I could be confident that if I do it right I won't get blacklisted, I probably would.
  - tomschlick 5y ago
    The biggest thing people do wrong with self hosting email is using residential IPs which are almost universally black/grey listed. Using a provider like linode, and checking the IP reputation ahead of time gave me better results when I self hosted.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      That's not them doing something wrong though. There's nothing wrong in hosting a server at home. The problem is clearly the black/grey lists if they black/grey list residential IPs just because.
      - syshum 5y ago
        Might want to check the Terms of Use / AUP on your Residential service, because every one I have ever read says you can not host email, and 80% of them say you can host any server of any kind. Now most of them do not actually enforce it unless you become a problem, but most of them do put active measures on the network to stop SMTP Servers For example here is a Exerpt from Comcast AUP prohibiting email and web hosting [1] >>>use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers; [1] https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspeedinternetaup https://www.xfinity.com/corporate/customers/policies/highspe...
syshum 5y ago
Self-Hosted Mail servers have the problem that most ISP's will automatically add all of their Service IP;s to BlackLists specifically to prevent people from running mail services on their Internet connections. Unless you have a Commercial Line that has be specifically designated for hosting content then it is likely any IP you are issued is added to Google/Microsoft/etc Blacklist by the ISP. Most of them clearly spell out in their terms that running a Mail Server on the circuit is forbidden.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  No one self hosts email on their home internet. You rent out a cheap VPS to do it on.
nh2 5y ago
Running a mailserver with correct DKIM, DMARC etc is not that difficult. I recently made a presentation that has a full explanation of the techniques, why they exist and how they work, on Hetzner Cloud (from the original post): https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf https://nh2.me/recent/Running-your-own-mailserver.pdf I find it very easy to configure with simple-nixos-mailserver (much easier than the manual setup on Ubuntu that I ran the years before): https://gist.github.com/nh2/6814728dc3bea1508323e9bf2213c28d https://gist.github.com/nh2/6814728dc3bea1508323e9bf2213c28d

judge2020 5y ago

I don't see why this is downvoted. Domains assign reputation to mail instead of the source IP, and it's fairly obvious that just buying a new domain and spamming from it would tank that domain's reputation for quite a while, even with proper spf/dkim and dmarc p=reject. If all of these are set up, you won't have issues sending from bad shared IPs like the default SES ones.

Avamander 5y ago

Spammers have no trouble making those perfect, you're massively inexperienced on the topic.