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This article reinforces my feelings towards moving away from email which is not hosted by myself. Maybe to host your own email on your own machine is just a wei

This article reinforces my feelings towards moving away from email which is not hosted by myself. Maybe to host your own email on your own machine is just a weird way of applying security by obscurity (since I host on VPS so I don't fully control the hardware I run my email on), but having hosted my own email for more than a decade now I am feeling it's the right thing to do.. For some time I was wondering if publishing my docker images for postfix, opendkim, dovecot and openvpn would help anyone, maybe I'll put some time into polishing them..

jethro_tell 4y ago
To be fair, with very few exceptions, every email you have is also on another server somewhere. The large majority of them are likely on servers owned by one of the big boys. On the bright side, if you own it, at least an AI can't shut you down and ruin your day.
- ramtatatam 4y ago
  I remember, maybe in 2008 (I might be off by few years and it's too late at night to check my sources) yahoo had a breach which resulted in emails going into hackers hands. This made me thinking AI scanning your email is certainly not a good thing, but to have somebody to take a loan in your name because you happened to have a scan of your ID in one of your emails might end up with much much worse consequences (I was one of those dummies who had scan of their ID stored in inbox, once I learned about breach I was running to invalidate it). This was a lesson I needed to make me stop using google/yahoo/similar. I'm too small (and unknown) to be attacked (however who knows..?), but yahoo was big enough and probably harvest was worth it.
outworlder 4y ago
It takes a lot of time and skill to successfully (and securely!) host email – and if someone thinks that's not true, they are probably skipping steps. Even a barebones email host is out of reach of most people.
- ramtatatam 4y ago
  Yeah, I host it since 2011. Of course, not everyone is interested to learn this, but it's certainly not beyond your reach. Especially now, there are so many online resources helping you to grade quality of emails you send, check if your server is miss-configured etc.

jethro_tell 4y ago

To be fair, with very few exceptions, every email you have is also on another server somewhere. The large majority of them are likely on servers owned by one of the big boys. On the bright side, if you own it, at least an AI can't shut you down and ruin your day.

ramtatatam 4y ago
I remember, maybe in 2008 (I might be off by few years and it's too late at night to check my sources) yahoo had a breach which resulted in emails going into hackers hands. This made me thinking AI scanning your email is certainly not a good thing, but to have somebody to take a loan in your name because you happened to have a scan of your ID in one of your emails might end up with much much worse consequences (I was one of those dummies who had scan of their ID stored in inbox, once I learned about breach I was running to invalidate it). This was a lesson I needed to make me stop using google/yahoo/similar. I'm too small (and unknown) to be attacked (however who knows..?), but yahoo was big enough and probably harvest was worth it.

outworlder 4y ago

It takes a lot of time and skill to successfully (and securely!) host email – and if someone thinks that's not true, they are probably skipping steps. Even a barebones email host is out of reach of most people.

ramtatatam 4y ago
Yeah, I host it since 2011. Of course, not everyone is interested to learn this, but it's certainly not beyond your reach. Especially now, there are so many online resources helping you to grade quality of emails you send, check if your server is miss-configured etc.