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Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't recommend it casually to everyone, but if someone says "hey, I want to learn to host my own mail, but everyone tells me I shouldn't",

by jhugo 5y ago

Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't recommend it casually to everyone, but if someone says "hey, I want to learn to host my own mail, but everyone tells me I shouldn't", I'm totally going to recommend they do it. If they have the desire to learn, it's likely (not certain! but likely) that they'll succeed. I do think that most of the effort/risk is at the beginning. Making sure you're on a reputable provider, checking the history of your IP, setting your mail server & the security features up correctly, monitoring deliverability etc. After everything is working well, if you got that part right, the ongoing effort should basically just be keeping software up-to-date. You could always get unlucky and e.g. someone starts sending spam on a nearby IP and you have to waste some time dealing with that, but hopefully if you picked your provider well that won't happen. It's yet to happen to me, but my provider only offers dedicated servers, which are probably not so popular with spammers.

loup-vaillant 5y ago
> Making sure you're on a reputable provider Oh, that tiny little detail where it has become impossible for almost anyone to actually send email from home, either because residential IPs are all marked as spam, or because your provider is giving you an incomplete internet connection that blocks outgoing SMTP. > You could always get unlucky and e.g. someone starts sending spam on a nearby IP Can someone tell me why providers ever thought it was a good idea to block entire IP ranges?
- jhugo 5y ago
  > Oh, that tiny little detail where it has become impossible for almost anyone to actually send email from home, either because residential IPs are all marked as spam, or because your provider is giving you an incomplete internet connection that blocks outgoing SMTP. Well, by "provider" I was referring to the hosting provider. I wouldn't typically recommend hosting from home [0]. Apart from the issues you identified, over the course of 20 years I've moved house multiple times so would have had email downtime and likely had to change IP address, likely leading to reputation starting again from zero (at best) or picking up an IP with bad history (much worse). > Can someone tell me why providers ever thought it was a good idea to block entire IP ranges? If you repeatedly receive spam from multiple IPs within a given ASN, and the abuse contact is non-functional or doesn't actually resolve the problem, it is fairly reasonable to consider that the ASN is friendly to spammers. Blocking by prefix rather than entire ASN is a bit less of a sledgehammer, but follows the same logic. [0] If you own your house, have no plans to move any time soon, and can get a connection from a provider who is willing to give you a stable static IP that isn't categorised as 'residential/dynamic' by the major lists, hosting from home should be fine. But that's quite a few 'if's.

by jhugo 5y ago

loup-vaillant 5y ago

> Making sure you're on a reputable provider Oh, that tiny little detail where it has become impossible for almost anyone to actually send email from home, either because residential IPs are all marked as spam, or because your provider is giving you an incomplete internet connection that blocks outgoing SMTP. > You could always get unlucky and e.g. someone starts sending spam on a nearby IP Can someone tell me why providers ever thought it was a good idea to block entire IP ranges?

jhugo 5y ago
> Oh, that tiny little detail where it has become impossible for almost anyone to actually send email from home, either because residential IPs are all marked as spam, or because your provider is giving you an incomplete internet connection that blocks outgoing SMTP. Well, by "provider" I was referring to the hosting provider. I wouldn't typically recommend hosting from home [0]. Apart from the issues you identified, over the course of 20 years I've moved house multiple times so would have had email downtime and likely had to change IP address, likely leading to reputation starting again from zero (at best) or picking up an IP with bad history (much worse). > Can someone tell me why providers ever thought it was a good idea to block entire IP ranges? If you repeatedly receive spam from multiple IPs within a given ASN, and the abuse contact is non-functional or doesn't actually resolve the problem, it is fairly reasonable to consider that the ASN is friendly to spammers. Blocking by prefix rather than entire ASN is a bit less of a sledgehammer, but follows the same logic. [0] If you own your house, have no plans to move any time soon, and can get a connection from a provider who is willing to give you a stable static IP that isn't categorised as 'residential/dynamic' by the major lists, hosting from home should be fine. But that's quite a few 'if's.