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It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam

It’s a sad situation, email today. I ran my own self hosted email for close to a decade but finally gave up on it because mail that I send gets flagged as spam every now and then and I also received a ton of spam. Those two things were eating away my time. And either way, basically everyone who I correspond with use third party mail hosting so it’s not like it did much good that I was self hosting it anyway. Email as a whole really is a mess. An outdated protocol with too many bandaids and a fundamentally broken model. But what can we do?

ggfgg 5y ago
I think the best answer is put up with it because it actually mostly works better than anything else out there. New things will have new problems.
superasn 5y ago
>But what can we do? You're definitely right about that. I remember back in the day of Slashdot whenever somebody posted a solution to fixing spam this used to a default reply (1) and it was pretty hard to refute. (1) https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
yosito 5y ago
> But what can we do? Use Fastmail, or anything other than Gmail, basically.
eloeffler 5y ago
I've been running a mail server for about 8 years now for me privately. I use it only for ordering stuff and for communicating with vendors but it works very well. Large e-mail providers never block me as far as I can tell, small ones i don't know. But I never get the feeling that my mails don't arrive in time. I've also run servers with applications that send out automatic mails and there, problems were bigger. I think this is because there are a lot of mechanisms such as SPF that miss when an application simply uses sendmail. I've followed the archwiki instructions [1] mostly, a couple of years ago, and it works very reliably. This won't help protonmail with abusing users but for a private server, it works well. I think a server also builds reputation over time. But honestly I don't understand why it works entirely. However, I wanted to say that private mailservers are not doomed :) [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mail_server https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mail_server
- sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  Same here. Had my own mail server for 20+ years. Occasionally tweak it when things change, e.g. SPF being enforced or DMARC. Registered in most postmaster tools, but at my rate of sending, this is only to have a chance of being herd if problems arise. There were a few blockages over the years, the last ones came from Microsoft: once in a while they refuse to use A records if MX is not present, or just swallow your mails. For the important mails to first-time recipients I ask to RSVP, which works out beautifully. People know that email can be unrealiable.
  - technofiend 5y ago
    I gave up on my domain registered back when an ISDN 64k channel was a viable internet connection, partly because the amount of inbound email spam was absurd. The spammers ruined email long before Gmail was a thing.
    - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
      I see a dozen spam emails per day at most, there are weeks when I do not see spam at all. This is not a big price to pay for independence. The rest is caught by spamassassin. I retrained it several years ago last time. Sometimes I miss being part of a larger network of email providers that share spam signatures, but not enough to start searching.
      - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
        > a dozen spam emails per day Jesus Lord. I don't receive that much email in a week, legitimate plus spam combined. I get what you're saying about independence, but using your own domain and pointing MX to any decent email service gets you 90% there with way less pain IMHO.
        lambada 5y ago
        How much of that difference is because your external email provider is silently swallowing the most egregious spam such that you don’t even realise they’ve done so? I suspect the folks who run their own are monitoring all the email with none being missed from their stats.
remus 5y ago
> Email as a whole really is a mess. An outdated protocol with too many bandaids and a fundamentally broken model. Perhaps true at a technical level, but in a practical sense it's vastly successful. Super-quick communication between a few billion people, where all you need to get in touch with someone is their address.
Jansen312 5y ago
Payment. Every emailed sent needs a payment token. Maybe like a few cents similar to postage. If your reputations got screwed because doing spamish activities, rates go up cost say 1 dollar per email. Each sender must have verified account just like FB that maps to your national IDs. Over night spam will plunge. Of course getting this implemented across the world would be impossible. We could wage war with any countries that refuse to participate...just like any countires wishing to undermine USD. So to summarize, just live with it. Nothing can be done without you sacrificing something dear to you. Spam is a minor nuisance we all can tolerate.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  So instead of hacking servers to mine crypto, we hack them to send paid spam and possibly collect the delivery fees too for some double dipping. I had this same idea as you, and I simply don’t see why people would pay to send emails when they’re already nearly free for most personal use cases. Businesses already pay to send email via third parties usually. Wouldn’t fake email signups get spammed to receive the sending fees from compromised email servers? I could foresee a sending fee in the form of attention, with captchas for email sending, possibly attached to the outgoing email as metadata.
dTal 5y ago
>But what can we do? Bring a class action antitrust suit to Google?
jareklupinski 5y ago
move to the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing staying ahead of each Eternal September means getting up and moving :) Discord/SMS/WhatApp/Signal... so many competitors trying to ferry our ASCII... maybe its not the tech that's broken?
hakfoo 5y ago
I feel like the problem is that people got too touchy about spam delivery. This gave large email providers license to nuke everyone but other large providers or impose various performative-dance "standards" like SPF/DKIM which seem to just be footgun factories for non-experts. The other problem was some very black-and-white models of mailer behaviour. Back when ISPs actually published delivery guidance, it was either "you're an individual sending 10 messages a year" or "You're sending a mailing list of 500,000 per day." The guidance was usually limited to nonsensical for things like transactional email or notifications, and I suspect smaller "regular mail services" hit similar corner-cases. I have to wonder if these conditions eventually became a perverse incentive: oh, deliverability sucks for your small business? We'll happily host your domain and emails and make sure they get through. It's now in their best business interest to be as balky and hostile as possible. To me, spam filtering rules should be entirely at the USER level. The provider can offer an array of tools, but they have no business blocking unless there's a distinct "the user checked this specific box and this is why the message was denied" paper trail available. Maybe I'm an outlier -- I'm far more worried about false positives than false negatives. My work email gets negligible spam, but I've definitely seen the "can't be fully disabled" filters chuck actual time sensitive business-related messages into the spam folder repeatedly, and had to patch together anti-filtering rules for it.
upofadown 5y ago
Why not just do things like instant messaging? Everyone signs their email and you only accept email from people you know. Define an introduction message format that would get run through a spam filter and be put in a separate folder. If you want to interact with the entity that sent the introduction then you add them to your keys. Can be done entirely with stuff available in the fundamentally broken model. I mean, if you want to accept email from just anyone, how can you complain when just anyone sends you email? Not a technical problem, it is a people problem.

ggfgg 5y ago

I think the best answer is put up with it because it actually mostly works better than anything else out there. New things will have new problems.

superasn 5y ago

>But what can we do? You're definitely right about that. I remember back in the day of Slashdot whenever somebody posted a solution to fixing spam this used to a default reply (1) and it was pretty hard to refute. (1) https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

yosito 5y ago

> But what can we do? Use Fastmail, or anything other than Gmail, basically.

eloeffler 5y ago

I've been running a mail server for about 8 years now for me privately. I use it only for ordering stuff and for communicating with vendors but it works very well. Large e-mail providers never block me as far as I can tell, small ones i don't know. But I never get the feeling that my mails don't arrive in time. I've also run servers with applications that send out automatic mails and there, problems were bigger. I think this is because there are a lot of mechanisms such as SPF that miss when an application simply uses sendmail. I've followed the archwiki instructions [1] mostly, a couple of years ago, and it works very reliably. This won't help protonmail with abusing users but for a private server, it works well. I think a server also builds reputation over time. But honestly I don't understand why it works entirely. However, I wanted to say that private mailservers are not doomed :) [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mail_server https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mail_server

sam_lowry_ 5y ago
Same here. Had my own mail server for 20+ years. Occasionally tweak it when things change, e.g. SPF being enforced or DMARC. Registered in most postmaster tools, but at my rate of sending, this is only to have a chance of being herd if problems arise. There were a few blockages over the years, the last ones came from Microsoft: once in a while they refuse to use A records if MX is not present, or just swallow your mails. For the important mails to first-time recipients I ask to RSVP, which works out beautifully. People know that email can be unrealiable.
- technofiend 5y ago
  I gave up on my domain registered back when an ISDN 64k channel was a viable internet connection, partly because the amount of inbound email spam was absurd. The spammers ruined email long before Gmail was a thing.
  - sam_lowry_ 5y ago
    I see a dozen spam emails per day at most, there are weeks when I do not see spam at all. This is not a big price to pay for independence. The rest is caught by spamassassin. I retrained it several years ago last time. Sometimes I miss being part of a larger network of email providers that share spam signatures, but not enough to start searching.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
      > a dozen spam emails per day Jesus Lord. I don't receive that much email in a week, legitimate plus spam combined. I get what you're saying about independence, but using your own domain and pointing MX to any decent email service gets you 90% there with way less pain IMHO.
      - lambada 5y ago
        How much of that difference is because your external email provider is silently swallowing the most egregious spam such that you don’t even realise they’ve done so? I suspect the folks who run their own are monitoring all the email with none being missed from their stats.

remus 5y ago

> Email as a whole really is a mess. An outdated protocol with too many bandaids and a fundamentally broken model. Perhaps true at a technical level, but in a practical sense it's vastly successful. Super-quick communication between a few billion people, where all you need to get in touch with someone is their address.

Jansen312 5y ago

Payment. Every emailed sent needs a payment token. Maybe like a few cents similar to postage. If your reputations got screwed because doing spamish activities, rates go up cost say 1 dollar per email. Each sender must have verified account just like FB that maps to your national IDs. Over night spam will plunge. Of course getting this implemented across the world would be impossible. We could wage war with any countries that refuse to participate...just like any countires wishing to undermine USD. So to summarize, just live with it. Nothing can be done without you sacrificing something dear to you. Spam is a minor nuisance we all can tolerate.

aspenmayer 5y ago
So instead of hacking servers to mine crypto, we hack them to send paid spam and possibly collect the delivery fees too for some double dipping. I had this same idea as you, and I simply don’t see why people would pay to send emails when they’re already nearly free for most personal use cases. Businesses already pay to send email via third parties usually. Wouldn’t fake email signups get spammed to receive the sending fees from compromised email servers? I could foresee a sending fee in the form of attention, with captchas for email sending, possibly attached to the outgoing email as metadata.

dTal 5y ago

>But what can we do? Bring a class action antitrust suit to Google?

jareklupinski 5y ago

move to the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing staying ahead of each Eternal September means getting up and moving :) Discord/SMS/WhatApp/Signal... so many competitors trying to ferry our ASCII... maybe its not the tech that's broken?

hakfoo 5y ago

I feel like the problem is that people got too touchy about spam delivery. This gave large email providers license to nuke everyone but other large providers or impose various performative-dance "standards" like SPF/DKIM which seem to just be footgun factories for non-experts. The other problem was some very black-and-white models of mailer behaviour. Back when ISPs actually published delivery guidance, it was either "you're an individual sending 10 messages a year" or "You're sending a mailing list of 500,000 per day." The guidance was usually limited to nonsensical for things like transactional email or notifications, and I suspect smaller "regular mail services" hit similar corner-cases. I have to wonder if these conditions eventually became a perverse incentive: oh, deliverability sucks for your small business? We'll happily host your domain and emails and make sure they get through. It's now in their best business interest to be as balky and hostile as possible. To me, spam filtering rules should be entirely at the USER level. The provider can offer an array of tools, but they have no business blocking unless there's a distinct "the user checked this specific box and this is why the message was denied" paper trail available. Maybe I'm an outlier -- I'm far more worried about false positives than false negatives. My work email gets negligible spam, but I've definitely seen the "can't be fully disabled" filters chuck actual time sensitive business-related messages into the spam folder repeatedly, and had to patch together anti-filtering rules for it.

upofadown 5y ago

Why not just do things like instant messaging? Everyone signs their email and you only accept email from people you know. Define an introduction message format that would get run through a spam filter and be put in a separate folder. If you want to interact with the entity that sent the introduction then you add them to your keys. Can be done entirely with stuff available in the fundamentally broken model. I mean, if you want to accept email from just anyone, how can you complain when just anyone sends you email? Not a technical problem, it is a people problem.