8 ms·

It's not the initial setup. It's the maintenance over the years that really makes you question the universe, life and the decision to host your own mail. When y

by avian 5y ago

It's not the initial setup. It's the maintenance over the years that really makes you question the universe, life and the decision to host your own mail. When you can't send that important mail because $big_provider is blocking you. When someone decides to run a persistent brute force attack from a botnet, eating up 100% of your CPU and you have no meaningful ways to block it. When you need to explain to people why they can't send you that 100 MB video attachment which they sent to other people just fine but only your address is bouncing and why don't you fix your email already. When you need to research, understand and implement standard X pushed by $big_provider because otherwise things will stop working and you have a ton of better things to do. When you get a random alert that email volume is too large and you panic because someone hacked your server and is probably sending spam but realize it was just triggered by a huge kernel patch series sent by someone on a mailing list. When a zero-day CVE for your mail software just hit the top of the HN and the fix is not in your distro yet and you scramble to find a workaround. When a bunch of weird log lines appear in your mail logs and you don't understand where they are coming from and they seem benign but can't lose the feeling that someone is trying something malicious. When you constantly fear that you'll lose that good IP and domain reputation and one day wake up with half of the internet blocking you.

emptybottle 5y ago
These concerns are common across virtually any internet facing service. Yes, if you choose to run a service it will need to be maintained, and occasional issues will come up.
- harikb 5y ago
  No, email is an especially brutal service. I had taken this path for 10+ years. If my custom media server or private photo site setup fails, it is not a big deal. But if I can’t login to a shopping site or my family can’t checkin to a flight because the two-factor auth email disappeared in to thin air, I am the “horrible IT person” who spoiled Christmas - end of story.
  - yokoprime 5y ago
    This 100%, e-mail is too critical and is not core to what my skills are, so I outsource it, even if I think it would be fun setting up initially.
  - everforward 5y ago
    What makes it particularly brutal, to me, is that the failures are typically silent. If GMail starts spamboxing my emails, I don't get feedback about that. If I'm not getting emails, I don't get feedback about that. You can script checking those, but you'll have to re-implement it for each provider. And there are some that you can't; if I'm applying for a job, they're not going to give me an email account to test whether my stuff is deliverable. HTTP services are absurdly easy to monitor in comparison.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      I’ve tried testing gmail and it’s very difficult to even get consistent results
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    In my experience, the brutality grows rapidly with the number of users. If it's just for you, and you have at least one alternative account, then it's not brutal at all. A mailserver administrator is a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin is on the face of it unrewarding - nobody pats you on the back when everything is working normally. They only call you when there's a problem (and it's usually urgent, and sometimes critical, and they'd like to know who to blame). So if you run a mailserver with users, it starts to become a people job, and things begin to matter. People certainly rely on email to a greater extent than other services - even mobile. I can order goods online without surrendering my mobile number, but I always have to provide an email address before I can complete the order. But I've still enjoyed administering mailservers. Perhaps I liked the slight paranoia induced by trying to reconcile the boss's demands for functionality with his demands for security.
acallaghan 5y ago
Just stick with Gmail then @avian, it’s not for everyone. I think that you might be constantly think of worst cases, where as most of the time it’ll just be fine? And even I it isn’t, then I’m learning more about the web and email. When did people stop doing something because it was challenging?
agrippanux 5y ago
As mentioned last week here in a previous “run your own email” story, your setup can also get rejected for not sending enough email, meaning your volume can’t establish good reputation.
- berkes 5y ago
  ...or for choosing the wrong VPS provider. Op talks about Digital Ocean. But, just like Linode or EC2, their IP blocks are inevitably on some undisclosed blocklist that livemail, yahoo, gmail randomly use.
  - mattl 5y ago
    Digital Ocean sends so much bad traffic in the form of bots trying to run cars numbers we’ve had their entire AS blocked for several years.
    - InvaderFizz 5y ago
      > bots trying to run cars numbers I'm having trouble parsing this. Are you talking about VINs?
      - tylersmith 5y ago
        My best guess is it was a typo for (credit/debit) card numbers.
        mattl 5y ago
        Yep sorry. Autocorrect.
  - filmgirlcw 5y ago
    I was going to say, IP blocks for DO make it one of the last places I would use for serving mail I actually wanted to be deliverable.
- jlkuester7 5y ago
txdv 5y ago
i get sweaty hands from reading this
tuldia 5y ago
Less FUD, please, don't discourage people just because you couldn't do it :-) EDIT: > When someone decides to run a persistent brute force attack from a botnet, eating up 100% of your CPU and you have no meaningful ways to block it. postscreen? http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html BTW, there is soo much FUD in your comment, check http://www.postfix.org/ http://www.postfix.org/ before claiming "someone will hack your email" """ First of all, thank you for your interest in the Postfix project. What is Postfix? It is Wietse Venema's mail server that started life at IBM research as an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Now at Google, Wietse continues to support Postfix. Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure. """
- charcircuit 5y ago
  All of these don't seem that out the ordinary
  - tuldia 5y ago
    If that was the case, we wouldn't even plug anything on the internet, ffs.
- endymi0n 5y ago
  It sounds less like FUD than a change in perspective. When I was in my twenties, I would have empathized with your point. I used to host my own web servers, but back then, my main priorities were curiosity, privacy and independence. Not just that, I opened accounts for friends and family. A decade later, I made all my hosting someone elses‘ problem, because I had different priorities. There‘s nothing like the sound of a friend shouting in your ear because he trusted you with his mail address and he‘s running into weird errors. Or trying to get an important email delivered after a 10h crunch shift when you just want to bring your kids to bed instead. I‘m thankful for all those learnings, but nowadays, I‘m old enough to just want mail to frickin work, that‘s why Google does it for me on a custom domain.
  - organsnyder 5y ago
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I the webmail client experience better? I was thinking of stopping to use gmail and hotmail, and run my own webmail client on a droplet. I don't like the idea of all my documents being tracked. Is there anything that competes with them that I could deploy.
- dqv 5y ago
  Not really. Gmail is still one of the best webmail experiences IMO, so you have to prefer clients like Thunderbird if you want to go the self-hosted route. Some people really like RoundCube, but I only use it when it’s absolutely necessary. I did get some novelty out of using Squirrelmail as a teenager.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Roundcube has a built-in editor for Sieve scripts. Sieve is pretty cool; it runs user-defined scripts server-side, on delivery to addressee's mailbox. The scripts are in the Sieve language, which is just for mail filtering. But it's a bit abstruse - it may be rudimentary, but most users don't want to tangle with a language at all. Anyhow, the Roundcube UI includes natively a Sieve script editor made up of drop-downs, which makes it much clearer what filter-steps you're asking for. I'm rather minimalist; I prefeer Squirrelmail, if I have to use webmail. But this feature of Roundcube is really good.
    - dqv 5y ago
      Interesting. I did not know it was (mail) server side! I assumed that, like many PHP applications, those filters were just ran using a cron job that calls a PHP script periodically.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        It runs server-side, on the delivery server. And the scripts are stored on the delivery server too. This means that you don't have to synchronize your filters between mobile client A, laptop client B, webmail client C. Thy're all on the delivery server (which is usually the same as your IMAP server). The filtering happens before you log in to email, and before your client knows there is an email. Sieve is a specification, not a product (and not some specific PHP script). It's part of the Dovecot package in the Debian distro. It's client-server, only because there is a protocol for a client to upload/update scripts. So there's a wire protocol for management. But it has nothing to do with retrieving mail. Sieve on the server only affects what happens on delivery. I think Sieve is totally the sanest way to do per-user mail fitering.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
OK I run several mail servers and I do have problems but of another kind that you describe. But this one is a bit ridiculous: > When you need to explain to people why they can't send you that 100 MB video attachment which they sent to other people just fine but only your address is bouncing and why don't you fix your email already. The maximum attachment size for Gmail is still conservative 25 MB and they basically dictate what is currently to be expected in terms of attachments going through.
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  https://support.google.com/a/answer/9050120 https://support.google.com/a/answer/9050120 According to this page the incoming limit "depends on several factors" and can be as high as 150MB.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    OK, so I tried to test it in practice, starting from 120 MB down to 25 MB. The largest that went through had 35 MB; the larger ones bounced with: > Remote Server returned '552-5.2.3 Your message exceeded Google's message size limits. Please visit 552-5.2.3 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=MaxSizeError https://support.google.com/mail/?p=MaxSizeError to view our size 552 5.2.3 guidelines.
    - TimWolla 5y ago
      That makes sense, because the attachment is going to be base64 encoded within the email and thus the size is inflated by 33%. This results in the size being roughly 47 MB in size.
  - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
    You can easily search around that the Gmail limit for personal users is 50MiB, recently enlarged from 25 MiB. As the other poster says, even between Gmail accounts I still have trouble sending files larger than 30MiB.
    - deleted 5y ago
johnklos 5y ago
Seriously? If other email providers are blocking you, smarthost through an email provider. If you're getting brute forced, learn how to set up and run blocklistd or fail2ban. Not getting 100 meg attachments is an issue that other email providers have, not people who run their own servers. If your server doesn't have any free disk space, that's on you. If it does, then set confMAX_MESSAGE_SIZE to whatever you want. If by "standard X" you're talking about SPF or DKIM, there are lots of tutorials. If your email software is vulnerable because of issues with your distro, you're doing things wrong. The point is if you can't, don't. If you don't want to think about issues like these, then you shouldn't be running servers, anyway, so you're definitely not the target audience. If you can, then these things aren't issues.
- yokoprime 5y ago
  I get it, if you're genuinely interested in hosting email, it's fairly easy... but those who aren't will lose interest after a couple of major setbacks and that's that. E-mail is, whether you like it or not, pretty critical, so it's not the best place for hobbyists to start.
- shmoogy 5y ago
  Isn't the big/only issue regarding getting into inbox? I would imagine if warming / domain warming would be ridiculously difficult in modern times.
- rasengan 5y ago
  That's true, but to do it securely isn't as simple as one would like to believe. Setting up "DKIM/SPF/etc." simply provides auth/verify security on send, but I'm more specifically referring to the receiver side security. If you're really properly securing your mail server, it would likely be isolated behind a firewall and only have a LAN ip of some kind and utilize UUCP for transport to another LAN machine that does not have WAN access, and then, only allow POP3/IMAP access to machines in the LAN or connected to the LAN via VPN tunnel. Finally, you would want to setup a backup system of some kind for this machine to periodically backup via rsync when the inotify/fswatch file modification triggers. Next, you'd have a separate SMTP machine. For things like critical deliverability, you can't rely on SMTP to 'retry' albeit it's how they are supposed to act, so it would make sense to have multiple SMTP machines across multiple different backbones in different physical locations with backup power and the like with different MX priorities set. The initial configuration and running a mail server are incredibly easy. It's running it securely that increases the difficulty on order of magnitude (because you essentially have to setup a proper security protocol across multiple machines (a network) - defense in depth). That said, it's easily doable if you're already running complex infrastructure. Hopefully, you're getting paid for your time and costs for doing so. If not, then I hope you need to rely upon the protection of needing a home-invasion warrant vs a simple-subpoena since a machine at your home can't really just be 'subpoenad' while a machine at some datacenter business can. This of course assumes you're even running the machine at home because if you're doing all this on some VM the value of doing so diminishes ever so quickly. EDIT: Just to be clear, you can't simply rely on fail2ban and some other on-machine script / snort / daemon / kernel feature to protect you. There are bugs in software/systems and 0days are very real (as well as the market places for them).
john61 5y ago
Well, then I must do something wrong. I run my personal email server based on Debian stable on my own SBC hardware in a colo for a couple of years now . Manual maintenance is just upgrade to the next stable Debian version every 3 years or so. I had zero of the problems you describe.
- sildur 5y ago
  Yeah, me too. My life was basically set up and forget. Except for that time I upgraded my instance and the upgrade came with an unexpected and unwanted IP change. Unfortunately it seemed like the new IP has been used for spam and I had to spend some time clearing my IP status. But eventually everyone understood and my IP is clear and shiny now.
mgarfias 5y ago
100% this. I did it for years. I think I’d rather stab myself than do it again.
zigzag312 5y ago
Unfortunate side effect of avoiding self-hosted email is that email is becoming centralized service.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  if you’ve ever tried running your own email service you’d realize it might as well be already
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
True user-controlled e-mail, the kind without third parties, contemplated in the original e-mail RFCs, is a "two-sided equation". Both sides need to run their own SMTP.^1 1. I have tested both sides running their own SMTP on small, i.e., less than 100, peer-to-peer overlay network and it works. "OTT email". Interesting question for the reader is how does spam enter this system. If the spammer is not a peer on the network, then they cannot send mail to the other peers. If only one sides runs their own SMTP, that only solves one side of the equation. Almost every HN discussion of user-controlled e-mail focuses only on users controlling one side, while ignoring the other and leaving it to third parties. That can still have benefits such as not storing mail with a third party, but obviously only focusing on one side, e.g., the receiving side, will fall short of true "user-controlled e-mail". User-controlled e-mail is a solvable problem for most users, i.e., those whose contacts in a given context, e.g., personal, school, or work, are under 100. User-controlled e-mail is an unsolvable problem for people who want to send e-mail to 100s of people, e.g., people they do not know, or people who want to recieve e-mail from any random person/organisation, treating their address like a phone number on a bathroom wall. Maybe, for most users, that is actually a good thing. (Given the attitudes toward "spam", it appears most users generally do not appreciate unsolicited mail.) There could be separate systems for unsolicited mail. We already have such systems in place.
jjav 5y ago
> It's not the initial setup. It's the maintenance over the years that really makes you question the universe, Initial setup of my mail server and related bits took a few days. Ongoing maintenance over the years? None, basically.

by avian 5y ago

emptybottle 5y ago

These concerns are common across virtually any internet facing service. Yes, if you choose to run a service it will need to be maintained, and occasional issues will come up.

harikb 5y ago
No, email is an especially brutal service. I had taken this path for 10+ years. If my custom media server or private photo site setup fails, it is not a big deal. But if I can’t login to a shopping site or my family can’t checkin to a flight because the two-factor auth email disappeared in to thin air, I am the “horrible IT person” who spoiled Christmas - end of story.
- yokoprime 5y ago
  This 100%, e-mail is too critical and is not core to what my skills are, so I outsource it, even if I think it would be fun setting up initially.
- everforward 5y ago
  What makes it particularly brutal, to me, is that the failures are typically silent. If GMail starts spamboxing my emails, I don't get feedback about that. If I'm not getting emails, I don't get feedback about that. You can script checking those, but you'll have to re-implement it for each provider. And there are some that you can't; if I'm applying for a job, they're not going to give me an email account to test whether my stuff is deliverable. HTTP services are absurdly easy to monitor in comparison.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    I’ve tried testing gmail and it’s very difficult to even get consistent results
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  In my experience, the brutality grows rapidly with the number of users. If it's just for you, and you have at least one alternative account, then it's not brutal at all. A mailserver administrator is a sysadmin. Being a sysadmin is on the face of it unrewarding - nobody pats you on the back when everything is working normally. They only call you when there's a problem (and it's usually urgent, and sometimes critical, and they'd like to know who to blame). So if you run a mailserver with users, it starts to become a people job, and things begin to matter. People certainly rely on email to a greater extent than other services - even mobile. I can order goods online without surrendering my mobile number, but I always have to provide an email address before I can complete the order. But I've still enjoyed administering mailservers. Perhaps I liked the slight paranoia induced by trying to reconcile the boss's demands for functionality with his demands for security.

acallaghan 5y ago

Just stick with Gmail then @avian, it’s not for everyone. I think that you might be constantly think of worst cases, where as most of the time it’ll just be fine? And even I it isn’t, then I’m learning more about the web and email. When did people stop doing something because it was challenging?

agrippanux 5y ago

As mentioned last week here in a previous “run your own email” story, your setup can also get rejected for not sending enough email, meaning your volume can’t establish good reputation.

berkes 5y ago
...or for choosing the wrong VPS provider. Op talks about Digital Ocean. But, just like Linode or EC2, their IP blocks are inevitably on some undisclosed blocklist that livemail, yahoo, gmail randomly use.
- mattl 5y ago
  Digital Ocean sends so much bad traffic in the form of bots trying to run cars numbers we’ve had their entire AS blocked for several years.
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    > bots trying to run cars numbers I'm having trouble parsing this. Are you talking about VINs?
    - tylersmith 5y ago
      My best guess is it was a typo for (credit/debit) card numbers.
      - mattl 5y ago
        Yep sorry. Autocorrect.
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  I was going to say, IP blocks for DO make it one of the last places I would use for serving mail I actually wanted to be deliverable.
jlkuester7 5y ago

txdv 5y ago

i get sweaty hands from reading this

tuldia 5y ago

Less FUD, please, don't discourage people just because you couldn't do it :-) EDIT: > When someone decides to run a persistent brute force attack from a botnet, eating up 100% of your CPU and you have no meaningful ways to block it. postscreen? http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html http://www.postfix.org/POSTSCREEN_README.html BTW, there is soo much FUD in your comment, check http://www.postfix.org/ http://www.postfix.org/ before claiming "someone will hack your email" """ First of all, thank you for your interest in the Postfix project. What is Postfix? It is Wietse Venema's mail server that started life at IBM research as an alternative to the widely-used Sendmail program. Now at Google, Wietse continues to support Postfix. Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure. """

charcircuit 5y ago
All of these don't seem that out the ordinary
- tuldia 5y ago
  If that was the case, we wouldn't even plug anything on the internet, ffs.
endymi0n 5y ago
It sounds less like FUD than a change in perspective. When I was in my twenties, I would have empathized with your point. I used to host my own web servers, but back then, my main priorities were curiosity, privacy and independence. Not just that, I opened accounts for friends and family. A decade later, I made all my hosting someone elses‘ problem, because I had different priorities. There‘s nothing like the sound of a friend shouting in your ear because he trusted you with his mail address and he‘s running into weird errors. Or trying to get an important email delivered after a 10h crunch shift when you just want to bring your kids to bed instead. I‘m thankful for all those learnings, but nowadays, I‘m old enough to just want mail to frickin work, that‘s why Google does it for me on a custom domain.
- organsnyder 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I the webmail client experience better? I was thinking of stopping to use gmail and hotmail, and run my own webmail client on a droplet. I don't like the idea of all my documents being tracked. Is there anything that competes with them that I could deploy.

dqv 5y ago
Not really. Gmail is still one of the best webmail experiences IMO, so you have to prefer clients like Thunderbird if you want to go the self-hosted route. Some people really like RoundCube, but I only use it when it’s absolutely necessary. I did get some novelty out of using Squirrelmail as a teenager.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Roundcube has a built-in editor for Sieve scripts. Sieve is pretty cool; it runs user-defined scripts server-side, on delivery to addressee's mailbox. The scripts are in the Sieve language, which is just for mail filtering. But it's a bit abstruse - it may be rudimentary, but most users don't want to tangle with a language at all. Anyhow, the Roundcube UI includes natively a Sieve script editor made up of drop-downs, which makes it much clearer what filter-steps you're asking for. I'm rather minimalist; I prefeer Squirrelmail, if I have to use webmail. But this feature of Roundcube is really good.
  - dqv 5y ago
    Interesting. I did not know it was (mail) server side! I assumed that, like many PHP applications, those filters were just ran using a cron job that calls a PHP script periodically.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      It runs server-side, on the delivery server. And the scripts are stored on the delivery server too. This means that you don't have to synchronize your filters between mobile client A, laptop client B, webmail client C. Thy're all on the delivery server (which is usually the same as your IMAP server). The filtering happens before you log in to email, and before your client knows there is an email. Sieve is a specification, not a product (and not some specific PHP script). It's part of the Dovecot package in the Debian distro. It's client-server, only because there is a protocol for a client to upload/update scripts. So there's a wire protocol for management. But it has nothing to do with retrieving mail. Sieve on the server only affects what happens on delivery. I think Sieve is totally the sanest way to do per-user mail fitering.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

OK I run several mail servers and I do have problems but of another kind that you describe. But this one is a bit ridiculous: > When you need to explain to people why they can't send you that 100 MB video attachment which they sent to other people just fine but only your address is bouncing and why don't you fix your email already. The maximum attachment size for Gmail is still conservative 25 MB and they basically dictate what is currently to be expected in terms of attachments going through.

cmeacham98 5y ago
https://support.google.com/a/answer/9050120 https://support.google.com/a/answer/9050120 According to this page the incoming limit "depends on several factors" and can be as high as 150MB.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  OK, so I tried to test it in practice, starting from 120 MB down to 25 MB. The largest that went through had 35 MB; the larger ones bounced with: > Remote Server returned '552-5.2.3 Your message exceeded Google's message size limits. Please visit 552-5.2.3 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=MaxSizeError https://support.google.com/mail/?p=MaxSizeError to view our size 552 5.2.3 guidelines.
  - TimWolla 5y ago
    That makes sense, because the attachment is going to be base64 encoded within the email and thus the size is inflated by 33%. This results in the size being roughly 47 MB in size.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  You can easily search around that the Gmail limit for personal users is 50MiB, recently enlarged from 25 MiB. As the other poster says, even between Gmail accounts I still have trouble sending files larger than 30MiB.
  - deleted 5y ago

johnklos 5y ago

Seriously? If other email providers are blocking you, smarthost through an email provider. If you're getting brute forced, learn how to set up and run blocklistd or fail2ban. Not getting 100 meg attachments is an issue that other email providers have, not people who run their own servers. If your server doesn't have any free disk space, that's on you. If it does, then set confMAX_MESSAGE_SIZE to whatever you want. If by "standard X" you're talking about SPF or DKIM, there are lots of tutorials. If your email software is vulnerable because of issues with your distro, you're doing things wrong. The point is if you can't, don't. If you don't want to think about issues like these, then you shouldn't be running servers, anyway, so you're definitely not the target audience. If you can, then these things aren't issues.

yokoprime 5y ago
I get it, if you're genuinely interested in hosting email, it's fairly easy... but those who aren't will lose interest after a couple of major setbacks and that's that. E-mail is, whether you like it or not, pretty critical, so it's not the best place for hobbyists to start.
shmoogy 5y ago
Isn't the big/only issue regarding getting into inbox? I would imagine if warming / domain warming would be ridiculously difficult in modern times.
rasengan 5y ago
That's true, but to do it securely isn't as simple as one would like to believe. Setting up "DKIM/SPF/etc." simply provides auth/verify security on send, but I'm more specifically referring to the receiver side security. If you're really properly securing your mail server, it would likely be isolated behind a firewall and only have a LAN ip of some kind and utilize UUCP for transport to another LAN machine that does not have WAN access, and then, only allow POP3/IMAP access to machines in the LAN or connected to the LAN via VPN tunnel. Finally, you would want to setup a backup system of some kind for this machine to periodically backup via rsync when the inotify/fswatch file modification triggers. Next, you'd have a separate SMTP machine. For things like critical deliverability, you can't rely on SMTP to 'retry' albeit it's how they are supposed to act, so it would make sense to have multiple SMTP machines across multiple different backbones in different physical locations with backup power and the like with different MX priorities set. The initial configuration and running a mail server are incredibly easy. It's running it securely that increases the difficulty on order of magnitude (because you essentially have to setup a proper security protocol across multiple machines (a network) - defense in depth). That said, it's easily doable if you're already running complex infrastructure. Hopefully, you're getting paid for your time and costs for doing so. If not, then I hope you need to rely upon the protection of needing a home-invasion warrant vs a simple-subpoena since a machine at your home can't really just be 'subpoenad' while a machine at some datacenter business can. This of course assumes you're even running the machine at home because if you're doing all this on some VM the value of doing so diminishes ever so quickly. EDIT: Just to be clear, you can't simply rely on fail2ban and some other on-machine script / snort / daemon / kernel feature to protect you. There are bugs in software/systems and 0days are very real (as well as the market places for them).

john61 5y ago

Well, then I must do something wrong. I run my personal email server based on Debian stable on my own SBC hardware in a colo for a couple of years now . Manual maintenance is just upgrade to the next stable Debian version every 3 years or so. I had zero of the problems you describe.

sildur 5y ago
Yeah, me too. My life was basically set up and forget. Except for that time I upgraded my instance and the upgrade came with an unexpected and unwanted IP change. Unfortunately it seemed like the new IP has been used for spam and I had to spend some time clearing my IP status. But eventually everyone understood and my IP is clear and shiny now.

mgarfias 5y ago

100% this. I did it for years. I think I’d rather stab myself than do it again.

zigzag312 5y ago

Unfortunate side effect of avoiding self-hosted email is that email is becoming centralized service.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
if you’ve ever tried running your own email service you’d realize it might as well be already

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

True user-controlled e-mail, the kind without third parties, contemplated in the original e-mail RFCs, is a "two-sided equation". Both sides need to run their own SMTP.^1 1. I have tested both sides running their own SMTP on small, i.e., less than 100, peer-to-peer overlay network and it works. "OTT email". Interesting question for the reader is how does spam enter this system. If the spammer is not a peer on the network, then they cannot send mail to the other peers. If only one sides runs their own SMTP, that only solves one side of the equation. Almost every HN discussion of user-controlled e-mail focuses only on users controlling one side, while ignoring the other and leaving it to third parties. That can still have benefits such as not storing mail with a third party, but obviously only focusing on one side, e.g., the receiving side, will fall short of true "user-controlled e-mail". User-controlled e-mail is a solvable problem for most users, i.e., those whose contacts in a given context, e.g., personal, school, or work, are under 100. User-controlled e-mail is an unsolvable problem for people who want to send e-mail to 100s of people, e.g., people they do not know, or people who want to recieve e-mail from any random person/organisation, treating their address like a phone number on a bathroom wall. Maybe, for most users, that is actually a good thing. (Given the attitudes toward "spam", it appears most users generally do not appreciate unsolicited mail.) There could be separate systems for unsolicited mail. We already have such systems in place.

jjav 5y ago

> It's not the initial setup. It's the maintenance over the years that really makes you question the universe, Initial setup of my mail server and related bits took a few days. Ongoing maintenance over the years? None, basically.