28 ms·

Running your own email is increasingly an artisanal choice, not a practical one

• unixhero 5y ago
  I use Orchestration service Cloudron (cloudron.io) to run email for my small company. It has worked flawlessly with dkim, SPF and dmarc working great! Email together with all the other preconfigured goodies make it a totally worthy investment,the yearly cost, for me.
• skratlo 5y ago
  > It's cute, decent enough, and hand-crafted, but it doesn't measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers What a BS, wake up dude. > usability, features, and performance? you really make me laugh, it's so bloated it's barely usable.
• emptybottle 5y ago
  I’m starting to think that “don’t self host” messages like this are coming from people with incentives to steer people towards paid mail hosting. A big reason it’s getting harder to self host is because so few people do.
• h2odragon 5y ago
  Could've said this in 2007. The wild west days of email, with bang paths and "store and pray" delivery systems, those were fun. By the time `sendmail.cf` hacking was no longer a necessary skill, email had become industrialized. Today, why would you even want to try routing internet email through an RBBS net to WWIV net to some hackers custom Amiga board? SMTP was the Ford Model T of electronic messaging. It slaughtered the previous visions of what the field needed to be. We can look back fondly at the older ideas and even re-implement their insights now, but the lessons of the market are written in big bold letters now.
  • 300bps 5y ago
    I would’ve said email was deceptively complicated in 1996 when I set up qmail on Slackware Linux for my ISP clients. I never linked it to WWIV though I was my area code coordinator for WWIVLink. That had to be around 1988 or 1989?
    • h2odragon 5y ago
      the time frame sounds about right, yes. It was wilder before that, think "B news" times.
• necovek 5y ago
  I've got a personal email server and an old gmail address from gmail-beta days. I've never used gmail itself (that model doesn't fit my mind), but O do use that Google account for some minor stuff. Unfortunazely, I've repeatedly gotten email targetted at someone else having same first name initial and same last name on gmail (address is in the form of FLastname@gmail.com). I've usually been able to get through to those people to stop them and to get them to reach their targets, but in the last 24 months, a lady from Michigan is repeatedly giving out my email address for everything (I've got covid appts, doctor appts, movie tickets, responses to home buying inquires...). I have no idea how to stop this: this would've never happened with any provider that's not owning like 60% of the market. I am constantly annoyed and I've considered both stopping mail forwarding from this account to mine (but then I might miss that YT premium notification) and I've tried reaching out to many humans on the other side. But I've so far resisted the urge to cancel those movie tickets or vaccination appts, but things just keep coming in. I can't imagine how are people not overwhelmed by wrongly targetted email: there's more of it than spam I get on my personal server, so spam filtering would definitely not move me towards gmail. And actual spam also gets through on gmail!
  • efficax 5y ago
    I also get an endless amount of email for a few different people with the same name as me at my Gmail from 2005. I used to try to deal with it but now it's just amusing, especially the photos, family chain emails etc. My name alike is Canadian so it's a little glimpse across the border
  • nkrisc 5y ago
    I don’t think you can stop it. I have to imagine that this woman doesn’t have an email address and just gives out what she thought was a fake one, since so many things require it. Otherwise, how could she not notice she never receives anything?
    • rwmj 5y ago
      Someone signed up for an Amex card using my wife's gmail address. This was years ago, and she still gets the Amex emails regularly (like, between daily and weekly). It's incredible both that the Amex customer doesn't notice, and also that Amex has absolutely no method whatsoever for a non-customer to contact them and fix the problem.
• upofadown 5y ago
  Wait, is email spam still a thing? I only get a few spam a day and Spamassassin easily identifies them. I had assumed that the spammers had moved off to other mediums. Either that or they are specifically targeting big servers like Gmail and are leaving the smaller servers, with their varied (artisanal) anti-spam approaches alone.
  • rwmj 5y ago
    It never stopped. What is however more annoying are all the "marketing messages" from all the companies you ever bought a single thing from in your life. It's incredible how often some companies spam you with this (often more than once a day). Really not sure what they are trying to achieve, but for me it's the resolution never to buy anything from them again as I filter their whole domain permanently.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Those I usually forward to their legal department with a little extra bit that says that I have stopped doing business with them on account of their UCE.
  • scandox 5y ago
    A lot of it is luck. You can go years not seeing much of the really malicious spam and then one day you're on the list and you'll find yourself being bombarded with stuff Spamassassin doesn't touch. Especially if your organization is a potential financial target.
  • flyinghamster 5y ago
    If anything, it's worse than ever. The favored technique these days is "snowshoe" spamming, where $SPAMMER sends a trickle of spam from a large number of IP addresses. About the only way to stop it is to block the /24, and then they just move on to the next block of IPs they want to ruin. RBLs like Spamhaus are helpful, but there will always be a few spammer IPs that haven't yet been listed. SpamAssassin can be handy, but it's a pain and there's a lot of rope you can hang yourself with. Blocking certain TLDs outright (.cam is a good candidate not just because of this, but also the phishing potential) can be an option.
• rmdes 5y ago
  Someone should try "artisanal email server" using cloudron or yunohost ! the bigger problem is that "authoritative" email monopolies such as Gmail, 365 and the other big ones arbitrarily define and impose what is a legit email server or not and even with better score than gmail an "artisanal" email server can suffer from being classified into spam by the big tech players just because they can and will do anything to maintain their monopoly.
  • beebeepka 5y ago
    Indeed. Only that's not the bigger problem. It is the actual problem with email.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    This is exactly it. Email is now just another way to squeeze companies and private individuals alike instead of a cheap, secure and free way to communicate. Peer-to-peer email was worth having, in spite of the downsides.
    • donmcronald 5y ago
      I’ve seen a lot of small businesses go from $50 / year to $500+ / year. And from their point of view all they get is a bunch of nagging about 2FA and a much bigger target on their back when it comes to phishing.
  • hannob 5y ago
    I'm running an email server and I can tell you that this is by and large not the case. If you put some decent effort into making sure that you don't send spam, try to monitor if anyone thinks you send spam and react when someone complains that you send spam (and stop it), it works. In my experience people telling these stories often do send spam, but they don't believe they do. ("It's not spam, it's a Newsletter. No, it has no unsubscribe link. These are people that agreed to be put on the newsletter by clicking on some ToS they never read, and they can unsubscribe by some arcane mechanism that we will make as complicated as we can. But we're definitely not spammers.")
• rwmj 5y ago
  I run my own email server and it's not so bad. gmail is obviously the most troublesome "peer" - if it wasn't for the fact I need to communicate with some gmail users regularly then I'd just cut gmail off. You have to set some headers and DNS stuff, having a static IP helps, and obviously not allowing that IP to send spam too. Largely it works fine.
  • jacob019 5y ago
    I do too, gmail is not a problem at all, but I have had the same static IP on AWS for about a decade, reverse DNS is mandatory for deliverability. My problem with Gmail is it is difficult to filter SPAM coming from their servers. My biggest problem with mail delivery is sending mail to Microsoft properties. I've had to resort to sending those messages via SES. Open source webmail solutions suck, so now I'm paying fastmail and forwarding incoming messages there.
    • gbuk2013 5y ago
      Also run my one server for years without too much trouble. Hotmail is the one giving me the most hassle - for some reason they periodically block my IP address for apparently belonging to an ASN they block … except it belongs to an entirely different ASN. My provider (RamNode) say they’ve been trying to get someone there for years to fix their system but didn’t help, so I just fill in their unblock form now and again.
      • dorfsmay 5y ago
        If you have any neighbourgh on your block that has sent spam, then the entire IP block gets a bad reputation. I moved away from OVH because of this. I no longer get the issue )on Vultr) but still get 100% blocked by outlook.com and blocked by Gmail if I'm the one initiating the conversation (I can mail people once they've emailed me at least once)
        • gbuk2013 5y ago
          Their email referenced AS3150 ... Here is what the (clearly frustrated) RamNode support person had to say last time I enquired: AS3150 is NTT, a large backbone provider: https://bgp.he.net /AS3150 RamNode runs AS3842 and AS198203. We have contacted them before - they don't know why nor care why their system is raising issue with AS3150 in regard to emails from our network. But this issue isn't exclusive to our network either, and no other major email provider blocks emails like this. I have no reason not to believe him. :)
• lixtra 5y ago
  > … general security will not be as good as they have. > Entirely "on premise" email is now an inferior thing for almost everyone. I disagree on this one. Placing your email with a big player means that by definition, they have access to your mailbox (with sensitive stuff hopefully encrypted). To allow that you have to trust the big player and the countries where they reside. They can drop you any time for political reasons, for dealing with a country that is considered an enemy of the host country of your provider. They may sell out your data. You may still choose a big player, but understand how screwed you are.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    They may also kick you out any time for arbitrary reasons. "Your account has been suspended for suspicious activity."
  • jms703 5y ago
    Once you’ve sent or received email containing “sensitive stuff” you no longer control your data. Folks need to come to grips with the fact that email security is dead and hosting it yourself doesn’t fix this. The author of the post should have included that in his post.
    • rsync 5y ago
      "Folks need to come to grips with the fact that email security is dead and hosting it yourself doesn’t fix this." Sort of, but not entirely true ... If you run your own mailserver then users of that mailserver can send and receive mail, to each other, without traversing a network. The mail never goes out on the net. That can be valuable/interesting. This is true in both the webmail use-case (the text goes to the browser, ephemerally, encrypted with SSL) or the terminal/console (alpine) use-case (the text goes to the terminal, ephemerally, encrypted with SSH). There's a certain cloud storage provider I know of whose internal / intra-company emails have never traversed the Internet ...
  • sneak 5y ago
    Most people have no idea that email is not secure.
• LeonM 5y ago
  > (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices) DMARC does not provide signatures, DKIM does. DMARC adds the DKIM 'alignment' requirement. Meaning that not just any DKIM signature will do, the public key (the DKIM DNS record) must be published under the administrative domain (the part after the '@' in the sender address). DMARC also mandates SPF alignment (not that your should rely on SPF), meaning that the rfc5321.MailFrom and rfc5322.From address should be from the same administrative domain for the SPF to pass DMARC. When either SPF or DKIM is aligned, you have a DMARC pass. Because SPF breaks with forwarding services, you shouldn't rely on it. DKIM + DMARC is the way to go. Also funny that the author calls DMARC 'modern practice', since DMARC was introduced in March 2015, almost 7 years ago.
  • switch007 5y ago
    > Also funny that the author calls DMARC 'modern practice', since DMARC was introduced in March 2015, almost 7 years ago. Oh come on, in terms of protocols, that's modern. Your other points have merit but that's just a pointless dig at the author.
  • morsch 5y ago
    I suppose that's relatively recent for a technology that's 40 years old.
• sys_64738 5y ago
  Isn’t the fear getting your domain blacklisted? You’d never know unless somebody contacted you through alternate means to ask about lack of response.
  • dqv 5y ago
    It's obvious when your domain (well, the IP really) is blacklisted. You either get a nasty error from the mail system saying it didn't go through or that the server was unreachable or what have you. You're always going to get some notice that it failed. In that case I contact the recipient a different way and say, "hey, you're mail server is broken, can you please fix it?" Usually this means them contacting their mail provider and asking why they are blocking mail from someone they need to communicate with. If it's someone like Google, they'll realize they can't actually get any support and think twice about using Google for mail. A lot of people will say, "no they'll blame you for it not going through", but that's rare. Most people will be receptive to your insistence that you're trying to send them mail but their provider is in the wrong. Now, if you mean blacklisting in the sense that the server has shadowbanned you and is sending back "221 OK", then, again, you have an affirmative defense: "hey, you're mail server said it accepted the mail, can you please check with your provider on what they did with it?" In either case, this is actually not a good thing for the recipient's mail provider especially if they pay for that provider. "Why did you accept the email from the sender but not put it in my mailbox? Who else have you done that for? Why am I using you as my mail provider again?" I have a circle of influence... about 100 people. All 100 of those people would switch mail providers if I asked them to. And I think a lot of people have a circle of influence around this size as well. So there actually is an amount of control over these bigger mail providers. They will be receptive to "I just told your customer to switch because you won't let me email them" especially if it's widespread. In exchange for that "power", I make sure my mail server is as clean as possible and quickly respond to any notices sent to my abuse@ address.
• sascha_sl 5y ago
  Also, a lot of software in the field has never made sense to me. I know what the parts do, but I couldn't tell you how to assemble it all. It all seems very old and seperate software more for historical reasons than anything else. I ran mailinabox for a year or two, but eventually I just didn't want to maintain a piece of software I didn't understand where the documentation seemed actively hostile and presumptuous about me having read all the other parts. I'm sure the postfix docs make an okay reference, but understanding it as a whole, god no. I'd rather do Kubernetes from scratch. Fastmail is just fine for me.
  • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Postfix and Dovecot are classic magic word projects - completely useless unless you can work out the magic words, and then they work fine. The docs for magic word projects never to seem to prioritise essentials. So [obscure feature someone last used in 1984] gets equal billing with [essential fundamentals] and you have no idea which is which because - you haven't understood the docs yet. I'm still running my own servers. I sorted out the spam issues, and they're basically zero maintenance now. But it certainly took a while, and a fair amount of copying other people's ideas of what a config file should look like, with plenty of trial and error.
    • ssl232 5y ago
      Agree regarding learning the magic words. There''s probably no substitute to just diving in and setting up a server with a domain you can afford to get blacklisted for a few weeks while you make mistakes. But once you know the magic words, Dovecot's documentation is actually fairly decent these days: https://doc.dovecot.org/ https://doc.dovecot.org/.
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      Useful step-by-step instructions: * https://workaround.org/ispmail https://workaround.org/ispmail
    • jjav 5y ago
      IMO the postfix documentation is particularly good.
• zyftay 5y ago
  It is a wonderful world we live in. Everything from salary negotiations to love affairs is on someone else's servers, all in plaintext. Apart from email this also applies to Slack, which is a goldmine for keeping dossiers on developers. This is one thing the authoritarians like Biden (Clipper Chip, Patriot Act) won't want to fix. There will be no law that companies with more than 100 employees must accept mail from individual servers (they would still have the correspondence anyway, but it would be a start). There will be no law that all mail must be encrypted.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server. Speaking of which, how long before it won't be possible to host your own web server? On another note: the biggest source of spam is gmail itself, and guess what, that makes it to my inbox just fine, because what could possibly be wrong with someone using google as their source. Spam was annoying but it was never an actual problem. The consolidation of the internet into a handful of players is a problem.
  • tdrdt 5y ago
    "Except of course that it isn't an artisanal choice, a very practical one that is made increasingly impossible by the few very large email providers that are left. It should be as simple as hosting a web server." I don't get this one. How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? I host my own email. It was a pain to setup so I try not to touch it since it is running fine. Setting up email on your own server is just complicated unless you install server management software. I am not sure big email providers are to blame for this.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      > How do large email providers make it difficult to host your own email? By randomly marking your email as spam without any recourse. This may be because they blacklist your provider en bloc, your IP address or some subnet, because they feel like it, it's Tuesday or because their spam filters suck. But it happens and it happens often enough that running a business in that way will cost you money, sometimes lots of it.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retric 5y ago
        Business use of email tends to look a lot like spam and people mark it as such. An appointment reminder or notification that something just shipped is generally fine. Send out mass notification of your holiday sales and that’s going into someone’s spam folder.
• _abox 5y ago
  Yeah I stopped running my own. I kept getting blocked by Microsoft in particular (mainly consumer recipients at live.com and outlook.com, strange enough not corporate O365 users!). I'm 100% sure I did not send any spam, the only emails going to those addresses were legit from a family member. DMARC and SPF were all set perfectly, relays blocked, I was not on any spamlist and I never have been either. Literally every month I got blocked again because my server did not have enough reputation. Kept logging tickets to get it unblocked and then a month later it was back. One time I did manage to get a personal email back from a guy in India. Said that it was because my mailserver did not send enough legitimate mail for their algorithm to trust it. So the lack of spam is not enough anymore to be blocked. You actually have to send a load of legit traffic to build up 'reputation'. Now just being a small time sender is a problem. This way the big players can just carve out a bigger market for themselves. They basically break the decentralised concept of email by doing this. In the end I moved to O365, which felt bad because I didn't want to reward them for their behaviour. But we moved to it at work too and I wanted an instance with full admin rights to explore. My contract is up next year so I may change then if I can find a party that does it well and ideally cheaper.
  • jacob019 5y ago
    You can configure postfix to relay emails to certain domains through a 3rd party SMTP service like SES. The MS domains give all of us the same problems, there is no other solution.
    • GekkePrutser 5y ago
      Thanks I wasn't aware of this option. I'll consider it. Thanks for the tip! At least I'm not the only one but I'm sorry you're experiencing this too.
  • ssl232 5y ago
    You may just have been unlucky with your IP block having spammers. How were you hosting it - own ISP or another provider? I have not had deliverability issues for years with my Kimsufi (OVH France) server. While I am confident my server is well configured using best practices, I suspect some of it is also just luck not to be in the same IP block as a spammer.
• zzless 5y ago
  I would agree that setting up a robust personal email system is difficult and may be exceedingly so for an organization of any significant size but I am not sure I would attribute that to the quality of services from large providers. Our organization (a university) outsourced its email to MS (outlook) and it is simply awful. No IMAP or POP, no forwarding (this is of course the policy of the university, not MS' fault per se), important emails getting lost as 'spam' (including some once in a lifetime conference invitations) just because they came from the outside. The search is a complete nightmare. No way to send mass emails to one's class with, say individually generated temporary passwords, which I can easily do from my own server. The interface is clunky to say the least. In comparison, even Thunderbird shines (although why TB cannot implement its quick search function for years now is beyond me). So it is not the quality that the big providers supply. Security, maybe (even though they are a large target by default) but not convenience.
  • jodrellblank 5y ago
    > "simply awful. No IMAP or POP" Microsoft seem to disagree with you there: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/pop-imap-and-smtp-settings-8361e398-8af4-4e97-b147-6c6c4ac95353 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/pop-imap-and-smtp...
    • realityking 5y ago
      I suspect OP’s organization disabled it. Not really Microsoft’s fault but that how a lot of Enterprise products get a bad name - user hostile configuration.
    • zzless 5y ago
      As I mention in my post, this is the setting our admins chose so I do not blame MS for this (they support both, I know). Another setting they chose is to delete emails over six months of age and there is nothing I can do about it either. The search and the interface are entirely the fault of MS as are the lack of more subtle features such as mass emails (which I have to use often while teaching online).
• superluserdo 5y ago
  I run my own personal SMTP and IMAP server and haven't found it too hard to maintain after the initial setup phase. The main problem I had with getting emails accepted was my lack of reverse DNS PTR records on my domain. If you're unable to fix that (eg, you're not using a commericial internet connection that allows this) the solution is just to use another SMTP relay service. Some, like SMTP2go, are free if you're only sending a personal-use number of emails a day/month. That way you're still in charge of everything except the relaying of outgoing mail, which is easy enough to swap out.
• pacija 5y ago
  As usual, it is a financial one. Do you have ~30,000 EUR / year for skilled admin? Plus ~20,000 EUR / year for hardware and other running costs? If you do, you can have your emails safely and reliably exchanged from your basement. If you don't, you can rent whatever on the 'net that suits your budget.
  • adtac 5y ago
    It absolutely doesn't cost 20k EUR/yr in hardware to run a email server, but the time sink is ridiculous.
    • vbezhenar 5y ago
      In my experience the time sink is high when you're setting it up. Then it's mostly zero. Though I'm not sure I'd recommend to invest into it. Back in the days that unix knowledge was valuable and setting up your own e-mail was a good way to learn thing or two. These days those skills are useless for most people, so I'd say use hosted mail and spend that time learning some more valuable skills.
  • fguard 5y ago
    I think those numbers are too high. Even if not, companies like Airbus have that money and are using G-Suite. So Google has all corporate information (does the swamp redirect some of it to Boeing?).
  • dorfsmay 5y ago
    This is not true. Regardless of how secure and properly setup your server is: Outlook blocks anybody that does not send enough mail, even if you've never sent any spam and are on a clean block. They're happy to let their users to send you spam, but ironically they still block you when you you try to report it to abuse. The good thing is they block you, so the email bounced and you know it wasn't delivered. Gmail classify messages to a user who has never communicated with you before as spam. This is silent, so you never really know if an email to a Gmail box has been filtered out as spam or not. Their abuse inbox accepts messages but I'm not sure they do anything with it. Basically, email has been hijacked by two companies.
• FpUser 5y ago
  I do away with the middle ground. I rent email services from businesses that specialize in email hosting and I own domain name. No way I will have my email serviced by Google / MS / Apple and the likes.
  • matt123456789 5y ago
    Who do you use? After seeing all the horror stories posted on HN, I have been worried about getting banned from $MegaCorp randomly and would like to minimize the blast radius if that were to happen.
    • FpUser 5y ago
      Just do a google search. There are plenty and I do not want to recommend anything particular
    • wrycoder 5y ago
      I’ve been using Fastmail for decades, with great results. You can bring your own domain.
    • runiq 5y ago
      I'm using mailbox.org (1€/month) for my domain and I have nothing but praise so far.
• blop 5y ago
  I still run my own email system (postfix/dovecot for imap), mostly for one reason: the virtual username function of postfix: I configured postfix with: recipient_delimiter = . which gives me unlimited dynamic virtual addresses (username.<something>@mydomain), so I know where spam/leaks come from if I get unsolicited mail directed to `username.<unique_name_per_registration>`, and it makes it trivial to block. I know that you can do the same thing with google addresses using + as a delimited, but the + sign is often not allowed in dumb email checks. Also spammers probably know about + and strip it automatically anyway...
  • desas 5y ago
    Gmail works with . as delimiter as well as +
    • blop 5y ago
      with gmail you can do: foo+anything => redirected to foo foo.something => redirected to foosomething (so . is not the same as +) The + isn't always accepted in dumb email checks though, and spammers know about it...
    • MaKey 5y ago
      I believe you can insert dots as you wish but not use it like the plus sign. So abc@gmail.com is the same as a.b.c@gmail.com but abc.new@gmail.com is another account than abc@gmail.com.
  • authed 5y ago
    > so I know where spam/leaks come from unless they use BCC
    • quesera 5y ago
      Deliver to address is always in the headers, even if message is Bcc'ed to you.
      • authed 5y ago
• dusted 5y ago
  I've been running my own email since i was 14 years old, back then it was hosted on my home ADSL connection. Now I'm on fiber and still running my own email setup, but the end is near.. For the reason not mentioned in the article, it's getting increasingly harder to actually get a public routable static IP address and also be allowed to either send traffic on port 25, or use the ISPs relay host to actually send the email.
  • moltar 5y ago
    Can you host it on vultr? Just $2.50/mo for half a gig of RAM instance.
    • adtac 5y ago
      I don't think you get a static IPv4 address with that instance.
      • baggachipz 5y ago
        Not anymore. The one with IPV4 is $3.50/mo now.
    • southerntofu 5y ago
      This defeats the entire point of selfhosting whether it's for security concerns or autonomy. The ecological impact of VPS hosting every single service you need is also not negligible: datacenters require huge amounts of resources and infrastructure which a simple second-hand machine at home doesn't. (also worth mentioning: email protocols were explicitly conceived so that uptime is not a worry)
      • elondaits 5y ago
        Datacenters use energy and computer resources more efficiently than a machine at home, unless the machine at home is already running some other tasks that you can't move to the datacenter. A computer that's 99% idle is wasting most of the energy it consumes.
• EarthIsHome 5y ago
  The main problem I've run into while running my own email server is IP reputation issues. It is still an ongoing issue for me. You can read my previous IP reputation issue in this comment [11]. You should make sure your server's IP address isn't blacklisted. If it is, you're going to have major delivery issues with some email server providers (ESP). Some blacklists you can check are listed here [0]-[3]. I think my main problem now is the UCE Protect [5] blacklist. I think some of the major ESPs use their harshest blacklist from UCE Protect, which is their Level 3 blacklist [6]. This blacklist will include your IP if your ISP meets a spam threshold for any of their other IP addresses. This makes running a mail server on cheap hosting providers like Digital Ocean or Linode very difficult. My conclusion is I should switch to a more expensive ISP that isn't in danger of getting on the UCEPROTECTL3 list or find an email forwarding service for a next hop destination for outgoing mail. You can read more about UCE Protect here [7]-[10]. [0]: mailtester: https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ [1]: mxtoolbox blacklists: https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx [2]: proofpoint blacklist: https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com https://ipcheck.proofpoint.com [4]: outlook blacklist: https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/index.aspx https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/index.... [5]: UCEPROTECT: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php [6]: UCEPROTECTL3 blacklist: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5 http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=3&s=5 [7]: UCEPROTECT Blacklist Scam https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2170592-uceprotect-blacklist-scam https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2170592-uceprotect-bl... [8]: UCEPROTECT: When RBLs Go Bad https://blog.sucuri.net/2021/02/uceprotect-when-rbls-go-bad.html https://blog.sucuri.net/2021/02/uceprotect-when-rbls-go-bad.... [9]: ASK HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26064722 [10]: SQLite3 IP blacklisted: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/bb61881d7a?hist https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/bb61881d7a?hist [11]: Previous IP reputation issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25437841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25437841
• ToddWBurgess 5y ago
  I think I am showing my age when I say, I remember when Linux by default came with sendmail enabled by default. You could use your Linux box to send e-mail anywhere without it getting caught up in spam filters. Fun times.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Personally, I'd prefer to have to deal with the spam than to have to deal with the duopoly in email that we have today.
    • ToddWBurgess 5y ago
      I think you misunderstood. If you fire up a mail server on your Linux box today and try using it for mail the big mail servers are sending your mail to spam due to a bunch of spam rules. These days, you need an organization with a known reputation for sending good e-mail to handle your e-mail so you don't end up in a spam folder. It's how the big players stay big.
• throwoutway 5y ago
  I want to, but I can’t afford getting my email silently swallowed when I’m contacting attorneys, etc.
• lnxg33k1 5y ago
  As a person running his own email system, I think it's taking more efforts from people to convince everyone to don't run their email systems than managing it effectively, and I don't have any bouncing even towards gmail et similia. As a company the only concern for me is not managing an email, is more to give third party private for profit companies access to all my communications (even if I guess sending it to other unaware people using gmail / 365 has the same effect), but for me it's crazy that the world has accepted that
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    Yeah, when everyone uses gmail, that's kind of pointless to run your own server, because Google will have most of your conversations either way.
• bachmeier 5y ago
  Not the best choice of title. I didn't realize until I got to the end that this was about large organizations. No doubt for a large university or company this is true.
• tdrdt 5y ago
  I run my own email. But I think it is a software problem. It would be nice of you could just install an email program that will set all the right settings for you. DNS, database, roles and rights, certificates, firewall and so on. There is server management software that can do this but then you have the same problem: it is just complicated for most people.
  • pmlnr 5y ago
    There is such thing: https://maddy.email/ https://maddy.email/
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I've run mail servers. These days, it's probably easier than it was, back then (about twenty years ago). It was a nightmare. I didn't do it for a living, so I was consumed by the task. It screwed up my other work, something fierce.
• 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  i kinda have to disagree. i decided to take the plunge and i used a cheap racknerd vps and used Mailinabox. 5 minutes setup and occasional updates. i got set as spam by google for the first few months but nothing since then. sure, one day i managed to spam like 200 emails in quick succession and that put me into spam but a quick "please select as unspam" solved it. i've been running this for like a year and it has been a good experience. i recommend people try this out, it doesn't cost a tonne
• chrisweekly 5y ago
  Fastmail is, IME, an excellent email service provider. No, it's not really "running your own", but it's exactly what most people who want to avoid gmail are looking for, re: deliverability, featureset, privacy, UX, etc. Highest recommendation, from an unaffiliated happy customer.
• ajdude 5y ago
  A couple years so I set up a mailinabox server on a vm for my personal email. Incredibly simple, $5/month and “just works”; I can even sync my contacts and calendar. My only complaint was the graylisting but I quickly resolved that with a configuration file.
  • slenk 5y ago
    Mailcow enables greylisting too and they highly suggest not to disable it...but I really can't see a valid reason for it in the first place.
• designium 5y ago
  Just use mailinabox https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
• api 5y ago
  This has been true for a very long time. Spam really destroyed SMTP as an open protocol just like it did for all the other old-school federated protocols.
• mattbee 5y ago
  Pffff people said this 15 years ago. Hotmail is an occasional pain for the self-adminstered email server, everyone else works fine IME.
• pyrale 5y ago
  I would really say that "running your own email" is a set of things that can be done independently: - Getting your own domain and using a provider such as fastmail or proton is a first step that gives you lots of security fom arbitrary. Because you own the doorstep, you can change provider without having to inform all your contacts of the move. You're also more secure from unilateral moves from your provider. -Hosting your own mail server means that you are responsible for the persistence of your mail. It's a nice artisanal thing to do, and you may be satisfied to know that no one is reading your mail. -Sending your mail yourself is the real hard part, because you need a stable IP that is accepted as a legitimate mail sender. Moreover, you need to monitor this property in the long term. Every mail server has their own way to choose who is a legitimate mail sender, and it's an ongoing pain to check that. You're not forced to go all the way, you can simply pick a domain to secure the frontdoor, or you can host your mail server without sending mail by yourself, etc. You can also self-host, and change your mind later without much impact. I personally would incite everyone to do at least #1 for safety reasons, #2 if you want to fiddle with the system to know how it works, and to avoid #3.
  • koolba 5y ago
    There’s a midpoint at #1.5 where you control the domain and rely on an external host, but also have a continuous archive of your historical mails on your own server. Otherwise with a standard IMAP setup, if your provider locks you out, you’re limited to only the most recent N messages on connected devices.
    • charwalker 5y ago
      Buy a domain for $20, get a GSuite account with it for $6 a month or similar, then archive all your mail via Outlook or your desktop email app of choice. You also get a lot of other tools and storage space for very low cost which I find useful. It's still using Google but it allows plenty of control and management, and I can take my domain anywhere with minimal stress. It's a decent compromise.
      • bxparks 5y ago
• 6c696e7578 5y ago
  qmail since 2003. No intention of changing, well, maybe to postfix. There's several advantages for me, I can easily backup Maildir with find -mtime +90, tar and purge. Using mutt to read my own mail makes filtering off spam very easy. Maybe gmail has some advantages, somehow the domain looks more "professional" than hotmail or outlook addresses do. Can't explain that though. If you run your own mail, you have a domain, so running your own web site comes naturally too.
• yosamino 5y ago
  > Your IMAP access might be as good as theirs, but things like your webmail, your spam filtering, and almost certainly your general security will not be as good as they have.[...] > Especially, open source can't compete on features like webmail and performance in things like spam filtering. If anything roundcube is a better webmail client than many of the mail-provider ones. And that's ignoring all the ads and tracking that these come embedded with, even if you pay for them. I haven't used gmail-for-organizations but if it's anything like the normal gmail interface then ... I guess some power users will prefer it? But in my experience many people prefer roundcube, because it's simple and usable. Not that it's perfect or better in all the ways, it's just from my experience and the users I talk to, it is just as good and fills a need that gmail doesn't. Same goes for spam-filtering. It's not that spamassassin/amavisd/rspamd/postscreen/RBLs/whatever is 100% perfect, it just get's you pretty far, and from my experience also gmail, as the main contender, has varying success on how close they achieve 100%. And even security is not magic. A large mail provider doesn't have access to magically different security tooling than everyone else. They have a threat model that is slightly different and their scale allows them to do some things that not everyone can. But wrt to one's userbase it's perfectly possible to be "just as secure". Running your own org-mailinfrastructure is certainly not "artisanal" - for some reason this comes off slighly dismissive in the article - it's just that, as anything, it's work that you have to want to invest in. A trade-off where it often does make sense to outsource. But then email is not so different from any other service you want to provide. ... but then I see that the article seems to partially be writing off of the experience of using the U of Toronto mail system, which seems to be using squirrelmail and procmail. I didn't even know squirrelmail was still developed - this impression kind supported by there being no news between 2013 and October 21, 2021 on the frontpage https://squirrelmail.org/ https://squirrelmail.org/ while procmail is unsupported since approximately forever (it feels like pre-9/11 but I am not sure). If you compare that experience with outlook.com - then I can certainly see why one could come to the conclusion in this article. EDIT: Heh: my guess of procmail being pre-9/11. Wikipedia says: "Final release 3.22 / September 10, 2001"
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    > A large mail provider doesn't have access to magically different security tooling than everyone else. Actually various big FAANG companies have very privileged access to vulnerability disclosures. However, the threat model can make small mailservers way more secure. Breaking into gmail is worth billions. Breaking into your personal mailserver is not worth the time of any skilled attacker unless you have very valuable secrets.
• leephillips 5y ago
  The article makes a string of assertions without evidence. For example, that an “artisinal” email server will not “measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers.” One reason that I continue to run my own email server after more than a decade of trouble-free operation (thanks Postfix and Dovecot) is that it performs better than my Gmail account, which I maintain as a 3rd-level backup and for some email lists. Delivery and receipt from my personal email is so fast that I can use it for real-time conversations with anyone else on a good-performing server, almost like chatting on WhatApp. This doesn’t work with Gmail, because it takes so long for a message to leave their servers. Plus on my own system I don’t get the spam false positives that plague Gmail. Those are only two ways that a personal server outperforms Gmail. I can do plenty of other things with it, because I control it, that are impossible with Gmail.
  • chmaynard 5y ago
    > The article makes a string of assertions without evidence. Agreed, but the same observation could be made about most blog posts. The author is expressing his opinions based on experience and judgment. This particular author has a good reputation so HN readers take his opinions seriously.
    • leephillips 5y ago
      Fair enough. But in this case his opinions are incorrect and arbitrary. The reason I and many others maintain our own email servers is not to be “cute” (a word used in the article) but because we want superior usability, features, and performance over what the major providers can offer. Otherwise, why would I bother? The only issue is that some people claim to experience delivery problems. Others, such as myself, say that delivery is at least as good as from major providers. And receipt is far better than when using a big provider. Unlike the unfortunate users of hotmail, I actually get all my email. EDIT: And not only does (for example) Gmail run a poorly performing email service, but their web client for interacting with email is broken: https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/ https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
• yc-kraln 5y ago
  I am very happy with my artisanal choice. I have been doing so for several decades, now. Usually only trouble when I have to move to a new IP range (changing colo provider), as it means re-establishing reputation and so forth. Not a huge issue, and worth it for me.
• bullen 5y ago
  This is completely wrong, SMTP is decentralized. Own your future, self host your mail, it's not hard. I predict that eventually all messaging apps will use SMTP under the hood! Xo
• rob_c 5y ago
  Frankly no. Both Google and Microsoft office have taken a massive step back by implementing "smart" functionality into their mail search which makes accessing critical information (and therefore my job) impossible... I'll be self hosting until these companies return basic working functionality
• andix 5y ago
  It’s not so bad to run your own email server. Im doing it, because email is very sensitive data, and I don’t want to share it with Google or Microsoft or any other cloud provider. The worst part is, that you can’t use any fancy email clients, because they all use proprietary protocols and once again cloud services. But imap and activesync works well enough too. The most important thing is, to get a clean IP address. Don’t ever try to host your Mailserver on digital ocean for example, their IPs have such a bad reputation that some providers even block them on network level. Their whole subnets can’t connect to them, no possibility to get unblocked at all. Once you found a legitimate hoster, check that your IP is not bkacklisted at any major provider. If it is, try to get other IPs, until you get a clean one. Don’t try to go through unblock-processes, that often won’t work. And then you need to set up your server well. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, …
  • arichard123 5y ago
    I've had real trouble with digital ocean as they just don't want to get involved in helping email providers at all. They don't want to do anything with managing IP reputation.
    • andix 5y ago
      I know. I think there is a study, that showed digital ocean is the provider that sends the most spam emails, and just doesn’t care. As self defense, some providers just block their ips because of that. And if you try to unblock such an ip, they require you to do a lot of erfrort. You can skip it, if you get an IP from a provider with good reputation. AWS for example doesn’t kid around if you send spam. You need a special permission in the first place to even be able to use port 25 outgoing.
  • nulbyte 5y ago
    > The worst part is, that you can’t use any fancy email clients, because they all use proprietary protocols and once again cloud services. What fancy email clients did you have in mind that don't support IMAP?
    • 5y ago
• teekert 5y ago
  I was doing well with my own email server until I got on some blacklist from Microsoft, all my outlook.com contacts didn't receive my email anymore, not even in their spam folder. I pushed hard on support, eventually they told me they don't control the process ?? I gave up. In retrospect I should have used another smtp gateway (perhaps from my provider), but back then the thought never occurred to me. For a time it was nice, (basically) unlimited storage, unlimited aliasses, being able to send 200 mb (only to my wife admittedly) easily. I did really learn a lot, which it what I tell people now: Try and do it to learn, but it's really unpractical. I now pay for email.
• xchip 5y ago
  Having your own computer with Linux should also be considered an artisanal choice and quite an unpractical one.
• jrm4 5y ago
  Much more needs to be said about the extreme advantages of paying someone vs. using a free service. I've said this for over two decades: If you have a business, or even just a lot of important stuff going on in email (which is like everybody); it strikes me as insanity to not pay for the peace of mind that comes with "a human you can call up and say 'hey, why can't I get into my email' or 'hey, fix this please" Versus what SO MANY PEOPLE use, which is "It's possible that your email will be removed from you entirely and you will have recourse because no one has a contract with you to fix it."
  • kortilla 5y ago
    > not pay for the peace of mind that comes with "a human you can call up and say 'hey, why can't I get into my email' or 'hey, fix this please" That stance would make sense if that were an option with google hosted email.
    • jrm4 5y ago
      I don't understand your comment? The stance makes sense now because it is an option with smaller hosting services. I use one myself.
• sbayeta 5y ago
  I run mail-in-a-box on a $5 Linode. Very usable, never had an issue.
• feanaro 5y ago
  I advise everyone to take a look at the EU Digital Markets Act. This may be a unique opportunity to force large corporations into behaving nicely with others on the interoperability front and kill off their malicious monopolies at the root. https://interoperability.news/2021/12/eu-parliament-upgrades-dma-to-open-gatekeepers-gates/ https://interoperability.news/2021/12/eu-parliament-upgrades...
• est 5y ago
  The fate of the Web will follow. For example, Chrome & Firefox together will remove FTP protocol support because "stats suggests very few % people use it"
  • LinuxBender 5y ago
    FTP/SFTP are still very much in use today. Removing support from the browser actually makes sense to me as the majority of browser users are not using it for FTP. There are a myriad of FTP/SFTP clients that are vastly more powerful and have more security options than any browser implementation of the FTP client ever had.
• dirwiz 5y ago
  I suppose I fall into the artisanal category (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,roundcube etc). In our case everyone runs mobile/desktop IMAP clients, web mail at least seems to be a "when all else fails" backup plan for quick emails. I do have a specific beef with all the consolidated email providers. If one of them determines your SMTP server to be spam (false-positive), ALL of their clients now reject your email with little recourse for the admin. Just had this happen with a solution that rhymes with 365. Even their clients were clueless as to how to resolve it.
  • edoceo 5y ago
    The best part is that everyone will blame the sender. The ignorant always blame the informed - and it keeps working cause the informed can actually address the issue.
• j3th9n 5y ago
  Things to get right and you're good to go: - Reverse DNS - SPF record - DKIM record - DMARC record - limit outbound number of emails to catch possible spamscripts
• znpy 5y ago
  I run my own mailserver and I've been doing that for the last ~10 years. I have a static ipv4 at home, and my biggest problems are the following: - residential providers won't delegate a reverse dns zone or set a reverse ptr record for you -- or at least my ISP (Fastweb) will not do it for a residential contract - spam lists (spamhaus etc) will blacklist residential ipv4 pools by default applying what effectively is a prejudice (and defamation). Some considerations: Major providers will effectively do as much as they can to prevent other organizations (let alone individuals) deliver their own mail. Google is particularly shitty in this regard: it regularly delivers my mail to spam despite having both SPF, DKIM and DMARC in order. My gmail inbox however is full of SPAM because google decided that I really have to look at those promotional email. Microsoft is surprisingly good instead: upon rejecting mail initally they're going to direct you to an automated procedure to de-list your domain from their spam services, and it works. Kudos to microsoft. SPAM, surprisingly, isn't really a problem: if you have sufficient checks for incoming mail (does SPF for the domain allows this ip to send email? do DKIM signatures check out? are they using SSL/TLS for their connection? et similiar) you basically won't receive spam. Most OS vendors (Red Hat / Debian / Ubuntu) deliver postfix with poor cryptographical default settings, meaning that the default settings will connect to plaintext SMTP to deliver outgoing email and will not setup submission (tls) by default, not even with a self-signed certificate. In the time of letsencrypt being available, this is a dumb choice. Running low-volume mailserver is surprisingly light on resources. A raspberry pi is likely overpowered for the task. You can use pretty much anything and it's going to work, as long as it powers on and doesn't lose data. Running a mailserver is also surprisingly versatile. The possibilities are pretty much endless. You want to alter outgoing emails? No problem, look at PCRE maps and postfix's header_checks (or similar). Want to have mail aliases? no problem. Want a catch-all address? easy. Want to hook a service into mail delivery chain? look at the milter protocols.
• ziml77 5y ago
  Running your own email is impractical because it's the only way for many people and services to get in contact with you. You really don't want it to fail. And it's entirely on you to ensure that you have monitoring to notify you when it does fail (through some non-email mechanism). And you better be prepared to solve the issue for yourself in a timely manner.
• nix23 5y ago
  >This is not directly about the big providers making it harder and harder to send them email, although that doesn't help. It's because a quality modern email environment is big, complex, and takes a lot of work to create and keep running. Gosh...when people forget how to be a admin... >takes a lot of work to create True >and keep running. Not true
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Been running my own mail server out of my house for about a decade. It has been glorious. I have always paid for 3rd party spam filtering, both inbound and outbound. Inbound and outbound through a 3rd party helps reduce the attack surface at my house. My users do not need webmail and I do not offer it. Calendars are done in local clients and shared through invites. I went with DC powered equipment, with battery backup on the input. My internet and email can stand at least a 24 hour power outage. Its also all solid state and no fans, no moving parts. Its been very reliable, though I do replace the batteries every couple of years. I'm probably over due for hardware updates at this point.
• boplicity 5y ago
  I don't know. Cpanel makes it almost effortless. There are rare problems, and they don't tend to be difficult to fix. If we were using a provider such as Mailchimp, for our marketing email, we'd probably be spending $30k to $50k a year on email. It's well worth the very minor effort required to host our own email.
• moonbug 5y ago
  Is tending to your own email server really what you want to do with your once and precious life.
• jms703 5y ago
  This. Also, your email isn’t secure just because you host your own server. Once you’ve sent or received email, you longer have control over that data.
• lightlyused 5y ago
  One of the big email providers that starts with a g has a really bad outgoing spam problem through their cloud api. Hard to block because you can't block them or you will miss real emails from them.
• yyyk 5y ago
  A lot of the comments are talking about people running their own personal email server. However, the post is more about arguing that organizations running their email infrastructure will become rare, and I'm not sure I agree with the author's thesis. The challenges there are rather different. Spam is less of a problem: in B2B the correspondent is well-known and will be whitelisted quickly, while one can pay for extra spam filtering if needed. User experience isn't a biggie because frankly the biggest users aren't the ones paying. The real issue is TCO vs data independence - and in my limited experience I still see plenty of organization which still run Exchange (or equivalent) on their own domains.
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  Last year I was forced to migrate my 90 year old neighbour to webmail. We initially chose Gmail but ended up with outlook.office.com due to horrible IT policies at the University where she is emeritus. Walk through a computer interface with a 90 year old sometime. It is eye opening. Both webmail systems were utter design hell. The list of stuff that tripped my friend up is long. Two examples: Gmail has pencils everywhere and at least two different styles to compose a message (chat style, big screen compose, reply style too I think.) Microsoft’s product has a typeahead for the To: field that ignores your contacts list and instead uses the institutional one, so typing “Anne” pulls up every Anne you’ve never heard of @youruni.com and not your friend Anne @gmail.com. Gmail is also punitively fussy about receiving IPv6 mail but only on of its mail exchangers, so one in N mails get rejected. Great. Microsoft outlook requires you to scroll down each thread when opening it to see if “new message” meant the one at the top, or “new messages” plural further down. You and I have become inured to this crap because we are comfortable solving problems with computers. For others, these products are very hard to use. The one consistently brilliant client I use is the iOS mail app, via imap, to my personal mail host.
  • Tepix 5y ago
    Don't use webmail. It's a bad user experience.
• strzibny 5y ago
  General email server? No, I would be worried too. But I think you can set up an email server for your own tasks, like sending yourself some notifications. It's also nice to know how this works in theory. These are the reasons I included some basic e-mail setup in my book (Deployment from Scratch), although also advising to depend on some reputable IP addresses.
• tootie 5y ago
  I think you can extend this a whole host of other domains. A lot of the bread and butter of 2000s era IT departments are being replaced with a highly competitive SaaS market. Building brochure sites, email, CRM, CMS, e-commerce, directory services, accounting and ERP. Twenty years ago you'd do a months-long procurement process for enterprise licenses, set SLAs, size the hardware, buy servers, hire integrators and you'd get your software up an running in 8 months if you're lucky. Now you type your credit card into a website and get unlimited capacity and 99.9% uptime instantly.
• joshdata 5y ago
  The comments all seem to be from people who think making an artisanal choice is a bad thing. There should be more art, experimentation, and expression in computing. If we've outgrown running our own mail servers as a practical choice, because there are now more good options, and we can enjoy running a mail server as a more humanly choice, that's a good thing. Not much has actually changed about the complexity of running a mail server in the last 20 years --- if anything it's gotten easier. What's changed is there are other, polished, turn-key options now. Great. (Those options tend to have spam policies that aren't friendly to the independent servers, but that's life.) Choose to be artisanal. (I'm the primary maintainer of https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/.)
  • wpietri 5y ago
    I don't think artisanal is necessarily "bad", but we should all acknowledge that it will be more work for a result that's maybe better but probably worse for most people. I ran my own mail server for 20+ years, finally giving up a couple years ago. I strongly disagree that it has gotten easier. As the article makes clear, it's a much more complicated world. Things that have happened in the last 20 years include SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the rise of providers like GMail. And if you really care about owning your bits, in some ways colocating hardware has gotten harder now that VMs are hugely dominant. The new requirements to be a good mail server are significant work to understand and implement. The feedback loops are also poor: it's hard to know whether you really have them right. But the real killer for me was opaque major providers like Google. Occasionally, they decided they didn't like my little mail server. I and a number of other sysadmins couldn't find anything wrong with my setup. But mail wouldn't arrive. I even had SRE friends inside Google and they couldn't find out anything; apparently the GMail folks are very secretive. There are only so many missed business opportunities and disrupted personal relationships I was willing to put up with for my personal taste for running my own servers. Eventually I hit that limit and switched everything over to Fastmail. For me personally, it was a great decision. It's cheaper and more reliable, and never again will I have to get up in the middle of the night to go to a colo. In contrast to my spending a few hours here and there, they have a whole full-time staff sweating deliverability. It's great! If people think running a mail server is fun, I say go for it. But even there I'd strongly urge them to consider whether "this looks fun" is the right spirit to bring to anything important to their lives, and whether it will stay fun when it breaks at the least convenient time. So maybe keep it fun by using it only for things that don't really matter to you.
• johnklos 5y ago
  It's amazing how quickly people with strong feelings about email come out when any mention of self hosting is made. They can't prove a negative, but they valiantly try, often using the very points that are excellent reasons to self-host as reasons we should all just give up. "It doesn't work for me, so it won't work for you" is rather weak when the reasons aren't articulated, when generalizations are made without detail, when hardly any attempt at all was made to find the root of the problem. Your failure is not the same as my quarter century of success. They also tries to make everything all or nothing, which plainly lacks any imagination. I wouldn't want an admin on my staff who tries something, then gives up at the littlest of hurdles. There are plenty of issues, but there are also plenty of solutions. You're having issues sending because your netblock sucks and you don't have money for something better? Pay a few dollars to smarthost, for instance. With Google and Outlook, you get no determinism, no accessible logging, no clear view about their filtering rules, no assurance that your outgoing email won't get blocked, anyway, because of the tremendous amounts of spam these monopolies allow... We should encourage MORE people to self-host email, not less. We should never just assume the monopolies are the best we can do.
  • mcguire 5y ago
    "Pay a few dollars to smarthost, for instance." Do you mean pay a few dollars to use someone else's email infrastructure? Or do you mean pay a few dollars more to set up a dedicated mail host in a better neighborhood?
  • gnopgnip 5y ago
    You get access to logging etc. with an outlook business account
    • jabroni_salad 5y ago
      Yup, between the message trace and just reading the headers I have not been wanting for visibility... and as the Exchange Online admin I've found that 99% of deliverability issues end up resting with the outside party failing to read their own infra's NDRs anyways.
    • 5y ago
• betaby 5y ago
  I like my email artisanal just like my bread.
• ChuckMcM 5y ago
  It feels weirdly like people saying "this is all too complicated, only experts can handle it" which is giving up a lot of agency. Almost like "Big Tech" is shadow writing pieces to discourage you from trying to escape their grasp :-). Running your own email server and domain, for people who like systems, is fun. Just like people who do their own oil changes and car maintenance, or people who build their own furniture, etc. Interestingly enough, this suggests there are some startup opportunities for folks who want to make this stuff a bit easier. Three things I think would be interesting side projects would be 'spam killing' (Barracuda does this as a service for Enterprise, I bet you could do it in clever ways for individuals), "post office" which is a known good relay server with mail agents that you can forward your mail through (think Lets Encrypt but for mail delivery), and a remote access client for phones. Alternatively an AWS offering of a packaged mail server (think WPEngine but for mail) has possibilities as well.
• tomkat0789 5y ago
  I just did a ctrl+f for Yunohost and only got one hit! Have more people tried it? What was your experience like? Hosting my own email will be a 2022 project of mine. My current plan is to get like a linode/personal server (my first test for myself is to host my own html website :) yes I'm new) to avoid customizing my home router too much.
• KeybInterrupt 5y ago
  I personally don't host my own Mail Infrastructure, If I where forced to do so, I would probably run a Mailcow. Especially the "dockerized" Mailcow is reasonably easy to setup. You will still have to setup SPF, DKIM and the other DNS records. But Mailcow is a solid package!
• jiggunjer 5y ago
  I think nowadays given a choice between running my own email vs running my own matrix I'd try the latter.
• awinter-py 5y ago
  email is totally broken. this article is right but the answer isn't let goog read your messages, it's invest in new communication protocols tons of serious players don't trust email at all today some, like my health insurance + bank, are dinosaurs who are all but licking the molten shockwave of a meteor. But still -- they have real reasons they email me that my 'secure message inbox' has a new message. Oscar uses 'secure email powered by virtru' to tell me they're not going to reply to my reply to their email, wtf, huge indictment of oscar, but also indictment of email. but it's not just dinosaurs -- amazon, who has had a tough month but is generally savvy, doesn't trust email. they won't send me itemized receipts because they don't want google to read them. I half believe we're about to see a renaissance in self hosting for individuals + businesses. this article is calling the bottom.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  As far as spam filters go, too many good emails end up in spam folder nowadays. It has become a common place - "check you spam folder". I find it's easier to have a few manual filters and just delete all the remaining spam manually as it arrives, because the alternative is to check two folders every time - Inbox and Spam folder, with all the spam still there of course.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• danlugo92 5y ago
  Zoho has a 1 dollar a year plan.
  • vladoski 5y ago
    Where have you seen that?
• zh3 5y ago
  It's less artisanal than also doing it for the common good. We do not want an email monoculture (consisting of 2 megacorps ostensibly in competition). We want a free, fair, and open internet.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  Last time I hosted was ~2004. I had a very tight qmail implementation, but even then I seem to be getting black-holed or marked as spam. Maybe it was because I was self hosting on my local home ISP and using dyndns to get around potential changes to my ip address from my ISP. Maybe spam filters didn't like inconsistent IP addresses? I don't know. But asking people to whitelist me was a hassle. At the time I was a heavy Mac user though so I ended up switching to mac.com email, and then Gmail when Apple EOL'ed Mac.com. Today though there's probably an easy turnkey VM or docker image well-configured to work without too many false positive spam flags... I hope?
• bruiseralmighty 5y ago
  Not to accuse any one person specifically of anything nefarious, but I do find the historical timing of these articles bemoaning self-hosting of email rather odd. Currently, there are only a handful of large technology companies in control of most of the world's inbox. Google is the first that comes to mind. At the same time we've just had some of our most highly publicized hearings involving these tech companies (facebook and google) as well as our first hearing on cryptocurrency and the larger web3 infrastructure. There is a rising public awareness and therefore political will to regulate these technologies and companies. This would formally fold google and the like into the USG despite their long standing less formal arrangements with the intelligence agencies. The one way to make this regulation and upcoming legislation moot? Decentralization by any other name. Self-hosting of email servers, or distributed computing and storage with web3. Perhaps its is only my latent paranoia, but I can't help but shake the feeling that the glut of the 'don't bother hosting your own email server' sentiment is, at least in part, artificially amplified in order for the coming formal regulations to have more of an impact. It wouldn't surprise me at all if google themselves was helping to facilitate this in order to steer conversation towards stalling any potential competitors as a part of the new regulatory framework. It is for instance a lot easier to argue that outlawing self-hosting of email servers (or requiring a license to do so) makes a lot more sense if you can point to a 'general public sentiment' that hosting your own email server is 'too complicated' and 'less useful' and 'less secure' and therefore would only be done by antisocial actors such as 'criminal elements' and 'terrorists'. Seeing as we are at the cusp of a new distributed infrastructure movement, all this feels like preemptive damage control to me.
• kw-maller 5y ago
  Is the article sponsored by Google or Microsoft? We're not in 1995 still, and I would say that it has become practically more doable for each year, given the affordable (sometimes even free) and easy access to software, hardware, and internet connectivity required to put up an e-mail server.
• walrus01 5y ago
  I just did a ctrl-f here for "IP space reputation" not mentioned yet? One of the very important things is choosing what ISP to host your self-hosted email at. And the spam blacklist (or opaque/impossible-to-know) likely blacklist status of your IP at things like office365, gmail, etc. Assuming for a moment that you are a person who is perfectly capable of setting up your own postfix and dovecot server. No matter how perfect your rDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC setup is, and how flawless your theoretical postfix or other smtp daemon configuration is... If it's not hosted in the right place, outbound mail deliverability is the main problem you'll run into. For the persons who are not ready to host their own SMTP and mail storage, I'm going to second the other suggestions made in this same thread that say a good first step is to control the authoritative DNS for your own domain, so that you can choose where to point the MX records at, and make an educated/informed choice of third party mail service provider.
• kureikain 5y ago
  I ran an email forwarding service https://mailwip.com https://mailwip.com (former hanami.run) that also support SMTP and IMAP. IMHO, gmail is the best company out there that can accept your emails. The most common issue with gmail is email land in spam but they learn quickly and very rare just outrage reject IP. as in, gmail won't relying solely on reputation of IP but based o sender domain or so. Compare with hotmail or icloud or some random email hosting service, they will reject your IP just outright. I would say it's definetely tough and stressful to run an email services for everyone, but if you run it for yourself only(so you know you're good and won't send out random spam), I will say it ins't that bad.
• javajosh 5y ago
  Still waiting for Fabrice Bellard to write a bullet proof stand alone imap smtp server in 5k lines of c. When that happens I'll self host!
• senko 5y ago
  I ran my email server (several domains, a dozen or so accounts) for over a decade. This year I caved in and switched to hosted (gmail and fastmail). For most of the time it's been smooth running, but I did have to do maintenance on the server every year or so, just in time to forget the intricacies and having to relearn them again. Yeah, a few hours a year on that is not much. But there are many such small "auxiliary" things/chores and it adds. There's so much things I would and could want do myself, and nowhere near enough time to do them. I have to pick my battles. And figuring out how to fix sender rewrite to enable mail forwarding with SPF without accidentally allowing spam is not very high on my list of important things in life.
• daitangio 5y ago
  I am happy with this docker-based solution: https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/ https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/ I am running it and require very little mantenance. The documentation is very well done and I was able to setup all the stuff needed in a short time. Also paid hosting solution tend to be very pricely if you need more than 3-4 accounts. My solution instead required only some setup effort, less than one day.
• authed 5y ago
  Personally, I use email less and less, thanks to Matrix. I wish websites would stop requiring an email address for signing up though (and phone numbers for that matter).
• mcguire 5y ago
  The latest edition of Nemeth, et al., Unix/Linux System Administration says basically the same thing. Spam filtering, for example, is a whole horrible thing that will be essentially a full-time job for anyone running a mail host. Hell, about two years ago I gave up on self-hosting. Unwanted email got to be the vast majority of what I was receiving and spam filter software ate more memory than my itty-bitty host had, meaning I would have had to get a bigger, specific mail host. (As it was, the IMAP server was the biggest process running on my host.)
• fareesh 5y ago
  If I have business outcomes that are dependent on people receiving my emails, it's difficult for me to be in a situation where the other person may need to, at some point, be told that they aren't getting my emails because I'm on some kind of "hipster email system" which they are no doubt going to perceive it to be. They're probably going to wonder why they are wasting their time with me when I can't even get something "as simple as email" right. For personal email I'd probably consider it.
  • tommek4077 5y ago
    Hipster mail system. Also known as "mail like we've done it the last 4 decades". Strange!
    • nexuist 5y ago
      Also known as "God damn it Bob just make a gmail account we're trying to run a business here."
    • Underphil 5y ago
      I think the commenter was trying to prove that point. It's not a hipster email system, but non-technical folks will perceive it as such.
      • fareesh 5y ago
        Correct
  • feanaro 5y ago
    Well that's just because you're presenting it completely incorrectly. It's their system that is misclassifying their email, not you being on a "hipster" email system, whatever that means. At no point is it your system's fault so don't even begin to start phrasing it as such.
    • fareesh 5y ago
      Non-technical folks will just tell you that they don't have this problem with anyone else, and will likely get more annoyed when you present it that way. Since it's 2021, depending on which part of the world you are in, you may even be accused of "gaslighting".
• indymike 5y ago
  Email is honestly not that hard to get right, but you do have to get a lot of stuff configured correctly for everything to work well. I've never had a lot of problems with blacklisting and at one point, was running about 48,000 messages per day sending marketing emails (ecommerce sites, to subscribed users) and transactional emails. Deliverability issues were few and far between, and most often were caused by MS Exchange admins at distributors (where we would send orders via email) who just didn't understand how the internet worked (like blocking all domains that weren't .com, .net or .edu). My favorite was one who blocked .io because he personally only got spam from that TLD. On the whole, just use a service makes sense in that the time you spend on email probably could be spent on things that make money. If you have an app that sends a lot of emails, understanding how it all works can be a very useful skill, too. So is learning to work with admins at big service providers.
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  The fact that google and Microsoft have together killed email hosting stone dead is no accident.
• atum47 5y ago
  I'm a well versed software engineer and even I had trouble setting up my email. After a while I realized it was not worthed, so I keep using Gmail, hoping I don't violate any of their policies or get tangled in the algorithm. As I see here, it's a hard thing to recover once this go wrong with big tech.
  • tommek4077 5y ago
    So you are just not that well versed as you thought you are.
    • atum47 5y ago
      That's fair
• epaulson 5y ago
  My email is still the free/legacy version of Gsuite, from before it was called Gsuite and it was just a way to have your own domain but serviced by Gmail. It's kind of a pain, because it's both not really a Google account, but also not a real Gsuite setup, and Google keeps quietly removing features from the legacy version of Gsuite. (You used to be able to use an external SMTP server to send as a different domain, but Google removed the UI to configure that in the free version) I've been really hesitant to upgrade to modern Gsuite, because I'm worried about upgrading and having something go wrong in the process - Google support doesn't have the greatest reputation.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  I use a mail.com email. I can’t count the number of times I carefully spelled my email on the phone “M-A-I-L”.com only for them to still try to email me (unsuccessfully) at gmail.com. I mean I get it but it’s not good for the internet for people to equate all email with gmail.
• StreamBright 5y ago
  I am old enough to remember when the internet was about open standards and everybody could run any service including email servers without much hassle.
• normaler 5y ago
  Maybe I want to perceive myself that way. It is my profession after all.
• blacklight 5y ago
  I strongly agree on the point that running your own email service in 2021 is a pain in the a*s. I strongly disagree on the motivations given by the article (the service you provide will never be on par with Google/Microsoft). This is plain false. There's plenty of webmail clients that look as modern as a Google/Microsoft UI. I even find the Outlook UI to be more primitive and spartan than many open-source UIs. If running a mail server in 2021 is painful, that's because cloud giants have built a small mafia that, using the excuse of spam protection, excludes anything that doesn't come from a handful of mail services, period. I used to have my own @mydomain.com mail server back in the golden age of the Internet, with mydomain.com pointing to my sitting in my closet. At some point, around a decade ago, mails sent from there started being refused - Spamhaus really doesn't like SMTP servers with dynamic IPs. Fair enough. Back then I migrated my home server to a Linode instance. It worked for a while, but then even those emails started being sent back by some providers. Fair enough - I thought. In theory anybody could still rent a Linode instance, buy a domain name, set up their mail server, and spam the world. So I moved @mydomain.com under my managed (paid) ProtonMail account, installed a ProtonMail bridge on my server, and forwarded emails this way. This should be alright, isn't it? I'm paying for a Linode instance connected to my name and surname. I'm paying for a domain name connected to my name and surname. I'm paying for a ProtonMail account linked to my name and surname. What prevents me from sending emails from my own server, using my own domain, my own logic and my own rules? There are so many ways to get back to me as a person in case of abuse, so the risk of spam should be low, right? Unfortunately, filthy Microsoft thinks differently. Any email sent to @live.com, @outlook.com, @hotmail.com etc. gets sent back, blocked by Microsoft's spam filters. Even if it's sent through a legitimate paid domain name, from a legitimately purchased cloud service, through an account connected to a legitimate and paid ProtonMail account. So eventually I've resorted to Mailgun to deliver my notifications. Do you see the sad irony of this situation? Owning a domain, a cloud server and linking your account to a legitimate mail provider is no longer sufficient for you to deliver emails. If you don't want to use a Google/Microsoft/Apple account, then you have to pay extra bucks for a service like Mailgun, whose sole purpose is to do what SMTP servers have been able to do (for free) for the past 5 decades. So, in a nutshell, running a mail service in 2021 is not difficult because it's hard to set up or it can't compete with the major players. It's difficult because a small mafia of cloud providers have done their best to make it difficult and force you either to use their services, or spend money for doing something that people have been doing for free for decades. Email was supposed to be an open protocol, and barriers to set up your server used to be low. That's no longer the case. With the excuse of greater security and less spam, a small bunch of companies has built a criminal organization that has turned email into a closed standard, with Google and Microsoft alone running more than half of the traffic in US and Europe. Shame on us all for giving up such an inalienable right of the Internet without even attempting a fight!
• gscott 5y ago
  The best way I have found to run an email server is to use it to receive emails only and to get your own emails out send them directly through a provider like Amazon SES. Now you can create all of the email accounts with as much space as you want but still get your emails delivered. It is not ideal but the only practical way to run a small email system.
• gerdesj 5y ago
  Minimum requirements: Static IP(s) DNS - A and PTR DNS - MX DNS - SPF Nice to have: DKIM DMARC Get all that in line and it should work fine here. I run quite a lot of email systems. I run them in the UK and not Canada or anywhere else so can't comment broadly. I've been doing this for 25 years now, so I think I have a fair handle on how email works. You can stuff your artisans up your arse. Email is email - do it right or fuck off. [EDIT: I give up, I can't remember how to format a list on HN and I can't be arsed anymore - I created two lists above - they should be fairly obvious and each one has a heading followed by a colon]
  • mekster 5y ago
    It's only probably your domains already have enough reputations. I don't think you understand the complexity of having your emails marked as spams on newer domains. I've also been running my domain email for 15 years or so and configurations are easy but I still rely on external delivery services just so I get less chance of being flagged as spam.
    • gerdesj 5y ago
      "I don't think you understand the complexity of having your emails marked as spams on newer domains." I've been doing email for 25 years (not 15), I have a few ideas about how it works.
      • mekster 5y ago
        Since you think setting a few DNS entries would solve the problem, I doubt that. Have you configured a new domain for emails and got them work fine against Gmail etc?
• mrobot 5y ago
  simple-nixos-mailserver is a really nice way to get up and running. Postfix/dovecot/rspamd/autocerts+renew/clamav/dkim/managesieve Super easy to set up and nothing in the article will be a problem. Your system will not be "artisanal". 400 people wasting time commenting on this guys dumb article. https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver https://gitlab.com/simple-nixos-mailserver/nixos-mailserver
• cutler 5y ago
  One thing running your own SMTP/IMAP protects you from is faceless lockouts. My partner was locked out of her Hotmail account and no matter how much evidence she provided Microsoft's shame-faced automated system refused to give her access. No court of appeal, nothing. Turns out she has an important email regarding her Indefinite Leave to Remain in the account containing a UAN she now needs access to in order to apply for a Biometric Residence Card to ensure she can continue to work in the UK. Fuck big email providers, I say. Legislation needs to be passed to make them accountable when locking-out users from their accounts.
  • scoot 5y ago
    Since from your comment she appears to be in the UK, GDPR right of access still applies. She can get a copy of the data, even if not access to the account.
    • hda2 5y ago
      Your comment raises an interesting point: If I, a non-EU citizen who doesn't live in the EU, get locked out of my gmail account, would traveling to the EU and invoking GDPR be a viable way for me to force google to hand over my emails? If yes, then I sense business potential. I for one would be willing to pay a lot of money to access my inbox.
      • tvararu 5y ago
        I recall reading that it's 6 days of living in the EU until it "kicks in." I don't have a source or that and can't seem to find one, so take it with a pinch of salt.
• zaphirplane 5y ago
  This reminded me of SHAMELESS “If you want to impress him, use the word ‘artisanal’ a lot. It’s how fancy people say ‘good.’ Artisanal cheese, artisanal soap…” “Wow, where did you learn all this?” “Artisanal private school.”
• janandonly 5y ago
  I also have my own domain name and whenever I sign up for anything (if I really have to give them an email address) I will make it: companyxy.net@mydomainname.me and indeed, whenever I receive a spam email I know what company sold (or leaked) my email address, because it is right there.....
• hericium 5y ago
  People trusted that e-mail offering by Google would be compatible with an existing e-mail ecosystem. Google deals in information control with e-mail hosting being one of tools. They are also very efficient at presenting themselves as being right. So folks and companies having trouble sending messages to GMail, moved to GMail over time since it seemed doing good job, in opposition to their sending offering which seemed at fault. Google seems to be incapable of not fucking up anything that disrupts their ability to spy. I believe that as soon as they figure out a better way to creep on people's finances and purchases on a global scale, they'll move on to killing e-mail globally. Microsoft, in contrast, seems to be incompetent when it comes to e-mail. From my perspective this was a true statement since they touched e-mail. 'member Outlook Express? Dealt with Office365? Same shit 25 years apart.
• Schnurpel 5y ago
  Note that the original post is from a purveyor of commercial email, he probably feels the heat from those artisanal servers. You can run your own email servers(s) as long as you know what you are doing. Setting up your own is not for the faint of heart. However, cPanel will do the initial setup work. CSF will see to it that your mail server is moderately secure, and that the bots trying to kick down its doors are get banned. Setup of DMARC, SPF, etc increasingly gets automated. Mxtoolbox makes sure that all aspects of DNS and mailservers are correct. Finally, you can send mail to something like analyze.email, and they will score your server. If you score an 8 or better, your email will definitely go through (analyze.email will hand out demerits for NOT having a link in your email, for from and reply being the same, or for a lack of a list-unsubscribe.) If you run your own business, an own website and email address is important for branding. Gmail sent “on behalf of” does not install a lot of trust. Here are the downsides to outsourcing your email: - Who will read your mail sitting on their server? - Who will give your mail sitting on their server to anyone waving some legal papers? - Who can kick you off their server without recourse, killing many years of investment into your email identity? Here are the downsides to rolling your own email server: - If an evil hacker invades your badly protected server, and uses it for gadzillions of spam, a nicer provider will turn off your outgoing email, a nastier one will null-route you no questions asked. That’s why you should start your career as an artisanal mailhoster on a VPS -- you can always rent another one. It gets nastier when a homelabber decides to do it from home. Hacker invades, Internet provider cancels your account for violation of TOS. You usually don’t have much choice when it comes to a new hardline provider, and it will take a while. - A big danger are the countless blacklists. It is very hard not to be on any. Some will blacklist whole net blocks if one IP in the block misbehaves. Some are plainly extortionist; they want money for removal. Frankly, they should be taken to court.
• derekzhouzhen 5y ago
  As someone who run my own email server, I obviously disagree. Three things come to my mind: First, SPAM filter is way overrated. I have next to zero SPAM filter, and am doing just fine. Yes, I got lots of SPAMs, but the volume of real SPAMs is dwarfed by the volume of ads that would pass through SPAM filters anyway, so why bother. Second, yes, open source webmail is lacking, that's why I wrote mine: https://github.com/derek-zhou/liv https://github.com/derek-zhou/liv Lastly, the biggest pain I have is sending email to big providers such as gmail. I have everything setup correctly, DMARC, SPF, you name it. And my server is not on any block list that I can find, and yet they put my emails in the SPAM folder from time to time. In the name of fighting SPAM, they are sabotaging the original internet experience for everyone.
• lazyweb 5y ago
  Late to the party, but in my experience [1] running a private mail server is still very much doable, and a good learning experience. [1] https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-server-for-six-years-easy-peasy/ https://jschumacher.info/2021/05/running-a-private-mail-serv...
• reph2097 5y ago
  Author is unable to run decent email service that scales, and somehow thinks nobody is. Okay.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  Feels like being able to send mail from an IPv6 address would mean no one shares a sender IP again, and everyone's sender reputation gets a fair shake.