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The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record

by jasode 4y ago

The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. Same philosophy for exposing a your personal blog of html files or content like mp4 videos. The sweet spot is to focus on buying a domain name you control. Then let Amazon S3, or Cloudflare, Hezner etc, host your html or mp4 files. I quit self-hosting email at home over 15 years ago. It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on. As long as I control the MX record on my own domain, that's really all that's necessary.

ilovecaching 4y ago
This is what I do. The downside is that a lot of email providers make it really difficult to set up 3rd party clients outside of their own clients. I've struggled to get mutt to work with a lot of email providers because they use their own auth mechanisms.
- colordrops 4y ago
  I'm pretty happy using protonmail bridge with local clients. It does take some effort to setup though.
colordrops 4y ago
I agree with this assessment, and it's what I do. There is still the single point of failure of losing your domain due to a hostile registrar or mismanagement e.g. allowing registration to lapse. Ideally there would be some a decentralized permanent domain registry keyed on certs (I know these exist but have not been adopted), or at least a fallback domain you could configure somehow in case you lost control of your main domain.
redeeman 4y ago
> It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on Dont know about you, but I have setup my mailserver years ago, and outside of regular OS updates, havent had to touch it.
- miketery 4y ago
  Where is it hosted? Isn’t the primary issue being blocked by the major providers due to spam filters?
  - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
    I have used Mailinabox on a Hetzner server for about an year. My email delivers to all the major providers. However, small providers will occasionally block my email. So I continue to use my Gmail address for now. With small amounts of evidence, I think if my contacts on those providers email me first, and I reply to those emails, then my domain is not blocked.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    server4you. there is one blocklist im aware of that simply categorically blocks all their IPs, but thankfully none of the "big tech" players use it, so its really of no consequence to me
- theturtletalks 4y ago
  How do you make sure your emails don't end up in spam?
  - redeeman 4y ago
    i just have spf+dkim, nothing fancy
  - megous 4y ago
    That's a recipient's problem.
    - account42 4y ago
      That's my current approach with Outlook's IP block blacklists.
- Joeboy 4y ago
  For me, the issue wasn't that I had to fix it frequently, but that when I did it was urgent, stressful and disruptive. Eventually the VDS I was renting had a fatal HD crash and I gave up.
eikenberry 4y ago
There is also a happy medium. Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. You have complete control over the incoming mail but dodge the filters by using the established business for sending mail.
- conradev 4y ago
  You can also use an MX backup service which will accept mail when your server is offline (and it will resend it when the server comes online) You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - RunningDroid 4y ago
    > You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all Do you have more information about this? I've been looking to do something similar so that I can have my mail sorted into folders without setting up the same rules on multiple clients. (Gmail's sorting doesn't seem to support some of the sorting I'm currently doing in Thunderbird)
    - iam-TJ 4y ago
      I've been hosting and operating my own MTA MX with Postfix since 2005. I have Postfix set to use "MailDir" format storage (one file per email) and then use Procmail filters to direct emails into per-sender or per-topic specific folders when they arrive on the server - nothing needed to be done in the email client. Dovecot provides the IMAP4 client interface. Thunderbird connects via IMAP4. Each domain has its own user home directory so for each there is a /home/${domain_name}/Maildir/ directory as the base for storing emails, and each IMAP4 folder has an associated directory. Snippet: $ ls -1da Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux* Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.LinuxContainers Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.drbd Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.kernel Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.dev Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-i2c Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-input Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-pci Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-usb Here's an extended snippet example from $HOME/.procmailrc that directs deliveries into the correct directory (IMAP4 folder): :0H * ^List-id: .*linux-usb\.vger\.kernel\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-usb/ :0H * ^List-id: .*linux-wireless\.vger\.kernel\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-wireless/ :0H * ^List-id: .*yaffs\.lists\.aleph1\.co\.uk $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.yaffs/ :0H * ^List-id: .*util-linux\.vger\.kernel\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.util-linux/ ### LinuxContainers :0H * ^List-id: .*lxc-devel\.lists\.linuxcontainers\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.LinuxContainers/ ### Linaro :0H * ^List-id:.*linaro-dev\.lists\.linaro\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.dev/ :0H * ^List-id:.*linaro-kernel\.lists\.linaro\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.kernel/
usefulcat 4y ago
Yeah, I've been doing exactly this for over 20 years. The only problem I can recall is related to the fact that the hosting provider uses a single SSL cert for the machine that hosts my domain (and many others, presumably), so of course the cert doesn't match my domain name. It's pretty easy to work around, and I only have to deal with it every few years when they do a hardware upgrade, which sometimes means moving my domain to a different machine.
- kro 4y ago
  The MX servers cert in my experience does not need to include your email domain name .
  - usefulcat 4y ago
    I believe you're correct. I should clarify that the SSL cert problems I have are only related to my client connecting to the server to send or receive messages.
- pretext-1 4y ago
  Certs for MX servers are supposed to have the MX as subject or SAN, not your email domain. It's important when the sender enforces encryption with a valid cert (e.g. MTA-STS, or config in the mail server, or many hosted solutions like Google Workspace also support enforcing this for selected or all domains). Example: example.com. MX aspmx.l.google.com. Cert should have aspmx.l.google.com as subject or SAN.
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
"The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name" You would think. The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life(at least). Otherwise, as soon as you lose your domain you lose ownership of your email. Any one that has control of the domain has control of your e-mail. This dawned on me after a place I worked at reactivated the email I used for work when I worked there. It has my name but I have 0 control over it. Lucky for me I never used the email for things other than work so it's not a big deal. It is still bothersome that they can do that and I have no say so on its use.
- lisper 4y ago
  > The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life But that's true for any delivery endpoint in any medium, including physical mail and phone numbers. It's pretty easy to set up auto-pay for domain names so that all you really need to do is keep the billing info up to date. After that it all runs on autopilot.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Unless your registry messes up and forgets to renew your domain. It’s happened to me before (don’t use them anymore though).
    - westernpopular 4y ago
      name and shame? that's a pretty drastic mistake in terms of the consequences it must have had for you.
- vereis 4y ago
  You can always use a different email address to manage the domain if that's the issue?
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
lisper 4y ago
> point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want You can even have a hybrid solution where incoming mail goes directly to your self-hosted server and (some) outgoing mail is relayed through a third party.
- mmsnberbar66 4y ago
  What would be the advantage?
  - Snild 4y ago
    Benefiting from the large provider's reputation in regards to spam blocklists etc.
  - lisper 4y ago
    There are many benefits to running your own server. The three biggies for me are: 1. Control. A third party can change anything about the service any time they want, and if you don't like the change they made you're screwed. 2. Expectation of privacy. Because I am not contracting with a third party, the government cannot argue that I have waived my right to privacy. (As a practical matter of course this matters not at all. If the government -- or anyone with the right technical skill and access -- wants to read your email they will. But if push ever comes to shove in a court of law it could matter.) 3. Spam filtering. I think the whole industry is doing it wrong. The Right Way to filter spam is to use your outgoing mail as ground truth for what is not spam. I have a custom spam filter that I wrote based on this idea and it works like a charm. No Bayesian analysis needed. I don't even look at content at all. Just the headers are enough to achieve >99% accuracy.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      > The Right Way to filter spam is to use your outgoing mail as ground truth for what is not spam Could you elaborate? Does this mean that email from people/domains you haven't corresponded with before is spam?
WretchedEarl 4y ago
> simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want That's not necessarily a sure cure, depending on the hosting provider. RoadRunner (Spectrum / Charter) in the US and Shaw in Canada won't deliver emails from my domain hosted at Runbox.com (or sent directly from the runbox.com domain.) Spectrum's bounce message references an error code that translates to "Spectrum limits the number of concurrent connections from a sender, as well as the total number of connections allowed. Limits vary based on the reputation of the IP address. Reduce your number of connections and try again later."
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  Some of us use Wireguard or OpenVPN to host where we want and use a static cheap or free (like Cloudflare) public point of presence IP.
skywal_l 4y ago
I am ashamed to admit that I have no idea how email works. Is there a dumb down explanation of what are the moving parts and how you can achieve that sweet spot?
- nvahalik 4y ago
  You send your email through a client. That client then sends (transfers / SMTPs) that email through an MTA either bundled with it or provided by your mail server. The MTA parses the message, figures out who it needs to go to (To, CC, BCC headers), figures out what servers receives mail for those recipients, and then transfers (SMTPs) it to the server. What OP is referring to is that the MTA essentially does a DNS lookup for the recipients domain for a record of type MX (Mail eXchanger). If you own the domain you have complete control over where that mail goes: you own the MX record.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    There is no such thing as a BCC header. That's the entire point of the BCC. What you've described might be correct in some cases but is not universal. The mainstream way that messages are sent is your "email client" or MUA speaks the ESTMP protocol to a mail transfer or submission agent (MTA or MSA). The client directly specifies the envelope recipients, which are not, generally speaking, parsed out of the formatted message. That is why it is possible for me to send a message to myself but the message is subsequently delivered to hundreds of unnamed recipients.
  - megous 4y ago
    > The MTA parses the message... That may happen, but not for the purpose you stated. MTA just uses addresses you told it to use in the SMTP dialog. It doesn't use addresses from the message. In fact the addresses in the message may be totally different.
- delecti 4y ago
  Typically, if you sign up for an email account, you get an email address like skywal@gmail.com or skywal@yahoo.com. Alternatively, if you own/host skywal.com, you can have an email address like skywal@skywal.com served from a computer in your home. The "sweet spot" is combining the two, where you own skywal.com, and have your email send/receive through Google or whoever. Then, if Google decides to ban you, you just register skywal.com with another company who provides that same service, and you keep your same email address. That's the broad strokes anyway.
mordae 4y ago
You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.
- dhosek 4y ago
  Indeed. I host my domains with dreamhost and it turns out that outgoing mail from their servers will get marked as spam by Google. The exact same mail sent through a gmail address (whether under gmail.com or a custom domain) will be delivered no problem (although after the sudden closing of legacy free email, I found that emails that I had been sending via gmail with my own domain that had been getting blocked by spam filters were being delivered when they came from a gmail.com address).
  - grepfru_it 4y ago
    The problem is your outbound mail server does not have a good reputation. You also probably do not have a large enough swath of IP space to prevent bad neighbors from becoming your problem. Lots of tricks to getting your email sent reliably to most mail servers. What got me out of hosting mail was trying to send an email to a potential lead I met at a local meetup. His email was hosted at some very small and relatively unknown university, but my email was flat out rejected. Something about that moment just clicked that it's not worth my time to chase down the admins and resolve the problem. I'll just start shunting my email through O365. I still selfhost everything else I can, but I offload mail management to a provider
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I'm guessing dreamhost has a decent chunk of IP space...
      - bigiain 4y ago
nullc 4y ago
> The sweet spot for having no forth amendment protection for your email because its stored by a third party.
- MichaelVangard 4y ago
  Most emails are still going through servers owned by Microsoft or Google, so what does self-hosting email accomplish in reality? Some government entity likely has warrant-less access to most of your emails regardless. I like email as a way to communicate, but speaking pragmatically, it’s just not a secure means of communication in 2022.
  - Johnny555 4y ago
    what does self-hosting email accomplish in reality Well, for one thing it prevents Google from building a profile of my online shopping behavior based on my email receipts. Also avoids them knowing every time I go on a trip based on booking confirmation emails. Like most people, I'm not trying to hide from the government.
    - MichaelVangard 4y ago
      Using a 3rd party email host that isn't Google has the same effect with a lot less effort. I switched to FastMail for this reason, even if Google claims not to scan paid Gmail accounts for marketing purposes.
  - RockingGoodNite 4y ago
    My server uses encrypted connections and my own certificate. If I send an email to a family member on my server, no one on the Internet can read its contents. If I add a recipient and FAANG or Microsoft then yes it wouldn't matter. If that is truly important, we can learn to encrypt emails locally first. What does self-hosting accomplish? I'd say it's important in the way that having HAM radio operators is important.
mechanical_bear 4y ago
It isn’t about what’s convenient for you. It’s an individual cost benefit analysis. Your needs are different than mine.
gonehome 4y ago
This is what I do, though I do think helm is also pretty cool: https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2?variant=39250026790981 https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2?variant... I like the idea of having a node I can just plug into my network. I run my Urbit on a Mac mini with tailscale (which works great). The core of what he writes about is correct though, email failed to be truly peer to peer (as imo all non-urbit-like federated systems will) because of the incentives that lead to centralization (spam, difficulty of running nodes, etc.) We’re suffering the consequences of the local max we’re trapped in currently because of this. The promise of the 90s internet was a bunch of people using decentralized services they controlled - instead we're primarily thin clients connecting to a small handful of powerful ad companies. We're mostly serfs [0] allowed access if we give up our data for ad targeting, follow EULAs nobody reads, and don't say anything the company earls disagrees with. [0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
erdos4d 4y ago
How does this get me unlimited accounts for my shady biz? Every provider I know of wants money to make new ones, those bastards.
cma 4y ago
> The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. So, mandatory third-party doctrine/warrantless surveillance.
shirro 4y ago
Controlling your domain/mx is the most valuable thing. Email reception has not been a problem for me so I enjoy having my mx pointing to my own mail server. It gives me more control and it requires very little maintenance. If I was going to outsource anything the first choice would be outbound. My email system does everything right for reputation protection. All senders are authenticated on secure connections and the senders are people I trust. Nothing bad gets sent and my static IP is on a reputable server host and is not on any public black lists. I maintain SPF, DKIM etc. If someone decides to block my IP for no reason by accident or on purpose there is very little I can do or care to do anymore. I have an alternate path for emails setup via a server I host elsewhere ready to go. If I run into a widespread delivery issue due to massive indiscriminate ip blacklisting of my provider I can enable it. That has happened once in 20 years. If delivery gets too hard I will change that policy to send all outgoing emails through a commercial smtp delivery service and let them deal with the problems.
defaultcompany 4y ago
It’s a misnomer to say you can “own” a domain name. You cannot. The better word would be “rent”. Because of that you should think about what could happen if your domain name registration lapses and someone else registers it.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  I think everyone knows this who owns a domain. Probably people say this because (like I do too) they have all the control over the name. If I rent an apartment, I do have to consult the owner to make major changes.
  - defaultcompany 4y ago
    I think people who get their email on their own domain generally consider it as their permanent home and don’t think about what will happen when the domain no longer is registered to them. Using the apartment rental analogy works up to a point. With an apartment you can get the postal service to forward your mail to a new address. With a domain name there is no way to get this to happen. Whoever holds the registration controls the MX record and can do whatever they want.
    - tiborsaas 4y ago
      In case of death it's indeed an issue if someone isn't planning ahead. With grace periods of the domain expiry process it's quite safe. People have plenty of time to recover it. It's also hard not to notice if your mail stops arriving.

by jasode 4y ago

ilovecaching 4y ago

This is what I do. The downside is that a lot of email providers make it really difficult to set up 3rd party clients outside of their own clients. I've struggled to get mutt to work with a lot of email providers because they use their own auth mechanisms.

colordrops 4y ago
I'm pretty happy using protonmail bridge with local clients. It does take some effort to setup though.

colordrops 4y ago

I agree with this assessment, and it's what I do. There is still the single point of failure of losing your domain due to a hostile registrar or mismanagement e.g. allowing registration to lapse. Ideally there would be some a decentralized permanent domain registry keyed on certs (I know these exist but have not been adopted), or at least a fallback domain you could configure somehow in case you lost control of your main domain.

redeeman 4y ago

> It's just not something I want to babysit anymore because I have other things to focus on Dont know about you, but I have setup my mailserver years ago, and outside of regular OS updates, havent had to touch it.

miketery 4y ago
Where is it hosted? Isn’t the primary issue being blocked by the major providers due to spam filters?
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  I have used Mailinabox on a Hetzner server for about an year. My email delivers to all the major providers. However, small providers will occasionally block my email. So I continue to use my Gmail address for now. With small amounts of evidence, I think if my contacts on those providers email me first, and I reply to those emails, then my domain is not blocked.
- redeeman 4y ago
  server4you. there is one blocklist im aware of that simply categorically blocks all their IPs, but thankfully none of the "big tech" players use it, so its really of no consequence to me
theturtletalks 4y ago
How do you make sure your emails don't end up in spam?
- redeeman 4y ago
  i just have spf+dkim, nothing fancy
- megous 4y ago
  That's a recipient's problem.
  - account42 4y ago
    That's my current approach with Outlook's IP block blacklists.
Joeboy 4y ago
For me, the issue wasn't that I had to fix it frequently, but that when I did it was urgent, stressful and disruptive. Eventually the VDS I was renting had a fatal HD crash and I gave up.

eikenberry 4y ago

There is also a happy medium. Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. You have complete control over the incoming mail but dodge the filters by using the established business for sending mail.

conradev 4y ago
You can also use an MX backup service which will accept mail when your server is offline (and it will resend it when the server comes online) You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RunningDroid 4y ago
  > You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all Do you have more information about this? I've been looking to do something similar so that I can have my mail sorted into folders without setting up the same rules on multiple clients. (Gmail's sorting doesn't seem to support some of the sorting I'm currently doing in Thunderbird)
  - iam-TJ 4y ago
    I've been hosting and operating my own MTA MX with Postfix since 2005. I have Postfix set to use "MailDir" format storage (one file per email) and then use Procmail filters to direct emails into per-sender or per-topic specific folders when they arrive on the server - nothing needed to be done in the email client. Dovecot provides the IMAP4 client interface. Thunderbird connects via IMAP4. Each domain has its own user home directory so for each there is a /home/${domain_name}/Maildir/ directory as the base for storing emails, and each IMAP4 folder has an associated directory. Snippet: $ ls -1da Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux* Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.LinuxContainers Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.drbd Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.kernel Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.dev Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-i2c Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-input Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-pci Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-usb Here's an extended snippet example from $HOME/.procmailrc that directs deliveries into the correct directory (IMAP4 folder): :0H * ^List-id: .*linux-usb\.vger\.kernel\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-usb/ :0H * ^List-id: .*linux-wireless\.vger\.kernel\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-wireless/ :0H * ^List-id: .*yaffs\.lists\.aleph1\.co\.uk $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.yaffs/ :0H * ^List-id: .*util-linux\.vger\.kernel\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.util-linux/ ### LinuxContainers :0H * ^List-id: .*lxc-devel\.lists\.linuxcontainers\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.LinuxContainers/ ### Linaro :0H * ^List-id:.*linaro-dev\.lists\.linaro\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.dev/ :0H * ^List-id:.*linaro-kernel\.lists\.linaro\.org $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.kernel/

usefulcat 4y ago

Yeah, I've been doing exactly this for over 20 years. The only problem I can recall is related to the fact that the hosting provider uses a single SSL cert for the machine that hosts my domain (and many others, presumably), so of course the cert doesn't match my domain name. It's pretty easy to work around, and I only have to deal with it every few years when they do a hardware upgrade, which sometimes means moving my domain to a different machine.

kro 4y ago
The MX servers cert in my experience does not need to include your email domain name .
- usefulcat 4y ago
  I believe you're correct. I should clarify that the SSL cert problems I have are only related to my client connecting to the server to send or receive messages.
pretext-1 4y ago
Certs for MX servers are supposed to have the MX as subject or SAN, not your email domain. It's important when the sender enforces encryption with a valid cert (e.g. MTA-STS, or config in the mail server, or many hosted solutions like Google Workspace also support enforcing this for selected or all domains). Example: example.com. MX aspmx.l.google.com. Cert should have aspmx.l.google.com as subject or SAN.

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

"The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name" You would think. The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life(at least). Otherwise, as soon as you lose your domain you lose ownership of your email. Any one that has control of the domain has control of your e-mail. This dawned on me after a place I worked at reactivated the email I used for work when I worked there. It has my name but I have 0 control over it. Lucky for me I never used the email for things other than work so it's not a big deal. It is still bothersome that they can do that and I have no say so on its use.

lisper 4y ago
> The issue no one seems to think about is that you need to make sure to pay for the domain for the duration of your life But that's true for any delivery endpoint in any medium, including physical mail and phone numbers. It's pretty easy to set up auto-pay for domain names so that all you really need to do is keep the billing info up to date. After that it all runs on autopilot.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Unless your registry messes up and forgets to renew your domain. It’s happened to me before (don’t use them anymore though).
  - westernpopular 4y ago
    name and shame? that's a pretty drastic mistake in terms of the consequences it must have had for you.
vereis 4y ago
You can always use a different email address to manage the domain if that's the issue?
- tsimionescu 4y ago

lisper 4y ago

> point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want You can even have a hybrid solution where incoming mail goes directly to your self-hosted server and (some) outgoing mail is relayed through a third party.

mmsnberbar66 4y ago
What would be the advantage?
- Snild 4y ago
  Benefiting from the large provider's reputation in regards to spam blocklists etc.
- lisper 4y ago
  There are many benefits to running your own server. The three biggies for me are: 1. Control. A third party can change anything about the service any time they want, and if you don't like the change they made you're screwed. 2. Expectation of privacy. Because I am not contracting with a third party, the government cannot argue that I have waived my right to privacy. (As a practical matter of course this matters not at all. If the government -- or anyone with the right technical skill and access -- wants to read your email they will. But if push ever comes to shove in a court of law it could matter.) 3. Spam filtering. I think the whole industry is doing it wrong. The Right Way to filter spam is to use your outgoing mail as ground truth for what is not spam. I have a custom spam filter that I wrote based on this idea and it works like a charm. No Bayesian analysis needed. I don't even look at content at all. Just the headers are enough to achieve >99% accuracy.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    > The Right Way to filter spam is to use your outgoing mail as ground truth for what is not spam Could you elaborate? Does this mean that email from people/domains you haven't corresponded with before is spam?

WretchedEarl 4y ago

> simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want That's not necessarily a sure cure, depending on the hosting provider. RoadRunner (Spectrum / Charter) in the US and Shaw in Canada won't deliver emails from my domain hosted at Runbox.com (or sent directly from the runbox.com domain.) Spectrum's bounce message references an error code that translates to "Spectrum limits the number of concurrent connections from a sender, as well as the total number of connections allowed. Limits vary based on the reputation of the IP address. Reduce your number of connections and try again later."

RockingGoodNite 4y ago
Some of us use Wireguard or OpenVPN to host where we want and use a static cheap or free (like Cloudflare) public point of presence IP.

skywal_l 4y ago

I am ashamed to admit that I have no idea how email works. Is there a dumb down explanation of what are the moving parts and how you can achieve that sweet spot?

nvahalik 4y ago
You send your email through a client. That client then sends (transfers / SMTPs) that email through an MTA either bundled with it or provided by your mail server. The MTA parses the message, figures out who it needs to go to (To, CC, BCC headers), figures out what servers receives mail for those recipients, and then transfers (SMTPs) it to the server. What OP is referring to is that the MTA essentially does a DNS lookup for the recipients domain for a record of type MX (Mail eXchanger). If you own the domain you have complete control over where that mail goes: you own the MX record.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  There is no such thing as a BCC header. That's the entire point of the BCC. What you've described might be correct in some cases but is not universal. The mainstream way that messages are sent is your "email client" or MUA speaks the ESTMP protocol to a mail transfer or submission agent (MTA or MSA). The client directly specifies the envelope recipients, which are not, generally speaking, parsed out of the formatted message. That is why it is possible for me to send a message to myself but the message is subsequently delivered to hundreds of unnamed recipients.
- megous 4y ago
  > The MTA parses the message... That may happen, but not for the purpose you stated. MTA just uses addresses you told it to use in the SMTP dialog. It doesn't use addresses from the message. In fact the addresses in the message may be totally different.
delecti 4y ago
Typically, if you sign up for an email account, you get an email address like skywal@gmail.com or skywal@yahoo.com. Alternatively, if you own/host skywal.com, you can have an email address like skywal@skywal.com served from a computer in your home. The "sweet spot" is combining the two, where you own skywal.com, and have your email send/receive through Google or whoever. Then, if Google decides to ban you, you just register skywal.com with another company who provides that same service, and you keep your same email address. That's the broad strokes anyway.

mordae 4y ago

You are totally missing the simple fact that the number of blessed email providers to choose from is slowly going down. I've seen ISPs with thousands of clients to give up and move the mailboxes to large players simply because their clients' email was ending up in the spam so often that running the support has gotten too expensive. It's definitely an anticompetitive practice.

dhosek 4y ago
Indeed. I host my domains with dreamhost and it turns out that outgoing mail from their servers will get marked as spam by Google. The exact same mail sent through a gmail address (whether under gmail.com or a custom domain) will be delivered no problem (although after the sudden closing of legacy free email, I found that emails that I had been sending via gmail with my own domain that had been getting blocked by spam filters were being delivered when they came from a gmail.com address).
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  The problem is your outbound mail server does not have a good reputation. You also probably do not have a large enough swath of IP space to prevent bad neighbors from becoming your problem. Lots of tricks to getting your email sent reliably to most mail servers. What got me out of hosting mail was trying to send an email to a potential lead I met at a local meetup. His email was hosted at some very small and relatively unknown university, but my email was flat out rejected. Something about that moment just clicked that it's not worth my time to chase down the admins and resolve the problem. I'll just start shunting my email through O365. I still selfhost everything else I can, but I offload mail management to a provider
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I'm guessing dreamhost has a decent chunk of IP space...
    - bigiain 4y ago

nullc 4y ago

> The sweet spot for having no forth amendment protection for your email because its stored by a third party.

MichaelVangard 4y ago
Most emails are still going through servers owned by Microsoft or Google, so what does self-hosting email accomplish in reality? Some government entity likely has warrant-less access to most of your emails regardless. I like email as a way to communicate, but speaking pragmatically, it’s just not a secure means of communication in 2022.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  what does self-hosting email accomplish in reality Well, for one thing it prevents Google from building a profile of my online shopping behavior based on my email receipts. Also avoids them knowing every time I go on a trip based on booking confirmation emails. Like most people, I'm not trying to hide from the government.
  - MichaelVangard 4y ago
    Using a 3rd party email host that isn't Google has the same effect with a lot less effort. I switched to FastMail for this reason, even if Google claims not to scan paid Gmail accounts for marketing purposes.
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  My server uses encrypted connections and my own certificate. If I send an email to a family member on my server, no one on the Internet can read its contents. If I add a recipient and FAANG or Microsoft then yes it wouldn't matter. If that is truly important, we can learn to encrypt emails locally first. What does self-hosting accomplish? I'd say it's important in the way that having HAM radio operators is important.

mechanical_bear 4y ago

It isn’t about what’s convenient for you. It’s an individual cost benefit analysis. Your needs are different than mine.

gonehome 4y ago

This is what I do, though I do think helm is also pretty cool: https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2?variant=39250026790981 https://thehelm.com/products/helm-personal-server-v2?variant... I like the idea of having a node I can just plug into my network. I run my Urbit on a Mac mini with tailscale (which works great). The core of what he writes about is correct though, email failed to be truly peer to peer (as imo all non-urbit-like federated systems will) because of the incentives that lead to centralization (spam, difficulty of running nodes, etc.) We’re suffering the consequences of the local max we’re trapped in currently because of this. The promise of the 90s internet was a bunch of people using decentralized services they controlled - instead we're primarily thin clients connecting to a small handful of powerful ad companies. We're mostly serfs [0] allowed access if we give up our data for ad targeting, follow EULAs nobody reads, and don't say anything the company earls disagrees with. [0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...

erdos4d 4y ago

How does this get me unlimited accounts for my shady biz? Every provider I know of wants money to make new ones, those bastards.

cma 4y ago

> The sweet spot for having control over your email while simultaneously minimizing unforseen headaches is to simply own your domain name and point the MX record to whatever hosting provider you want instead of self-hosting a server at home. So, mandatory third-party doctrine/warrantless surveillance.

shirro 4y ago

Controlling your domain/mx is the most valuable thing. Email reception has not been a problem for me so I enjoy having my mx pointing to my own mail server. It gives me more control and it requires very little maintenance. If I was going to outsource anything the first choice would be outbound. My email system does everything right for reputation protection. All senders are authenticated on secure connections and the senders are people I trust. Nothing bad gets sent and my static IP is on a reputable server host and is not on any public black lists. I maintain SPF, DKIM etc. If someone decides to block my IP for no reason by accident or on purpose there is very little I can do or care to do anymore. I have an alternate path for emails setup via a server I host elsewhere ready to go. If I run into a widespread delivery issue due to massive indiscriminate ip blacklisting of my provider I can enable it. That has happened once in 20 years. If delivery gets too hard I will change that policy to send all outgoing emails through a commercial smtp delivery service and let them deal with the problems.

defaultcompany 4y ago

It’s a misnomer to say you can “own” a domain name. You cannot. The better word would be “rent”. Because of that you should think about what could happen if your domain name registration lapses and someone else registers it.

tiborsaas 4y ago
I think everyone knows this who owns a domain. Probably people say this because (like I do too) they have all the control over the name. If I rent an apartment, I do have to consult the owner to make major changes.
- defaultcompany 4y ago
  I think people who get their email on their own domain generally consider it as their permanent home and don’t think about what will happen when the domain no longer is registered to them. Using the apartment rental analogy works up to a point. With an apartment you can get the postal service to forward your mail to a new address. With a domain name there is no way to get this to happen. Whoever holds the registration controls the MX record and can do whatever they want.
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    In case of death it's indeed an issue if someone isn't planning ahead. With grace periods of the domain expiry process it's quite safe. People have plenty of time to recover it. It's also hard not to notice if your mail stops arriving.