6 ms·

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 filte

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/
LinuxBender 4y ago
Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy. [1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-howto-and-faq https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...
- m12k 4y ago
  I'm sorry to say, that's nowhere near a medium stance or ask.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    It could be we have different circles of acquaintances. I have managed to get non technical friends to GPG encrypt their emails. I also talked 2 lawyers into using this and the two lawyers are not only non technical but have nearly zero patience.
    - oynqr 4y ago
      I guess a lawyer might know a thing or two about confidential messages.
      - orev 4y ago
        I think you’d be very surprised at how much lawyers don’t know or care about any of that. They store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents).
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents) Or because they know the third-party doctrine doesn’t apply to attorney work product and privileged materials.
chx 4y ago
Whose SMTP service you'd recommend?
- butterknife 4y ago
  Sendgrid works well for small volumes
- eikenberry 4y ago
  I use zoho.com, $12 a year and I haven't had any issues with blacklists.
Animats 4y ago
> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I can switch to another provider if necessary. In 27 years, I've had to do that twice, because the hosting provider went out of business. This is easy to do, and I don't have to deal with Google. I don't even get much spam. All the spammers seem to be targeting the big services now. I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a scam - there's a fertilizer shortage, so that's a spam which might get replies.
- joecool1029 4y ago
  >I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a scam - there's a fertilizer shortage, so that's a spam which might get replies. I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them!
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them! https://web.archive.org/web/20030412191437/http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2001/20011231l.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20030412191437/http://www.penny-...
intelVISA 4y ago
Yep SMTP relay is the only sane choice nowadays sadly. Sending your own mail is a losing battle against the email blacklist cartel.
- RockingGoodNite 4y ago
  No...it isn't the only sane choice. If it works for you, great. Forunately for Internet freedom, there many of us small timers left who have no issues hosting our own email.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    I have no issue hosting, it's just tiresome keeping clear of Spamhaus etc. Using an SMTP relay was a suitable trade-off, for me, but I respect those who are able to endure the pains of sending non-flagged emails without it.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
This should be made a standard practice. Third party email providers, the so-called "established businesses", get a free pass as sending SMTP servers that are accepted by almost all receiving STMP servers. Everyone just assumes everything coming from those SMTPs is legit. Establishing this "legitimacy" and getting the "free pass" is difficult and some have suggested, the third parties may employ anticompetive tactics. However, IMHO the receiving SMTPs is a different issue. Why do we let these third parties receive and store our email. (Why do our homes have their own mailboxes. Why not use a "P.O. Boxes" instead.) Eventually we could move away from letting third parties control the receipt of our mail. Neither "POP3" nor "webmail" was part of the original concept of email. Today, it is easier than ever to set up overlay networks where we can assign our own IP addresses and run our own SMTP servers that can communicate directly with other SMTP servers on the overlay network. These networks are not open to the world, they may only be open to people we know. Much of our mail is between people who know each other, e.g., friends, family, colleagues. Or businesses that we contact first. We can separate different social and business networks on different overlay networks. Anyway, the sending and receiving of mail can be separated. We do not need to let a third party control both.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  Feel free to do this, nobody will join you so the spam will be virtually nonexistent!

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/

LinuxBender 4y ago

Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy. [1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-howto-and-faq https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...

m12k 4y ago
I'm sorry to say, that's nowhere near a medium stance or ask.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  It could be we have different circles of acquaintances. I have managed to get non technical friends to GPG encrypt their emails. I also talked 2 lawyers into using this and the two lawyers are not only non technical but have nearly zero patience.
  - oynqr 4y ago
    I guess a lawyer might know a thing or two about confidential messages.
    - orev 4y ago
      I think you’d be very surprised at how much lawyers don’t know or care about any of that. They store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents).
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents) Or because they know the third-party doctrine doesn’t apply to attorney work product and privileged materials.

chx 4y ago

Whose SMTP service you'd recommend?

butterknife 4y ago
Sendgrid works well for small volumes
eikenberry 4y ago
I use zoho.com, $12 a year and I haven't had any issues with blacklists.

Animats 4y ago

> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded. This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I can switch to another provider if necessary. In 27 years, I've had to do that twice, because the hosting provider went out of business. This is easy to do, and I don't have to deal with Google. I don't even get much spam. All the spammers seem to be targeting the big services now. I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a scam - there's a fertilizer shortage, so that's a spam which might get replies.

joecool1029 4y ago
>I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a scam - there's a fertilizer shortage, so that's a spam which might get replies. I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them!
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them! https://web.archive.org/web/20030412191437/http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2001/20011231l.gif https://web.archive.org/web/20030412191437/http://www.penny-...

intelVISA 4y ago

Yep SMTP relay is the only sane choice nowadays sadly. Sending your own mail is a losing battle against the email blacklist cartel.

RockingGoodNite 4y ago
No...it isn't the only sane choice. If it works for you, great. Forunately for Internet freedom, there many of us small timers left who have no issues hosting our own email.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- intelVISA 4y ago
  I have no issue hosting, it's just tiresome keeping clear of Spamhaus etc. Using an SMTP relay was a suitable trade-off, for me, but I respect those who are able to endure the pains of sending non-flagged emails without it.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

This should be made a standard practice. Third party email providers, the so-called "established businesses", get a free pass as sending SMTP servers that are accepted by almost all receiving STMP servers. Everyone just assumes everything coming from those SMTPs is legit. Establishing this "legitimacy" and getting the "free pass" is difficult and some have suggested, the third parties may employ anticompetive tactics. However, IMHO the receiving SMTPs is a different issue. Why do we let these third parties receive and store our email. (Why do our homes have their own mailboxes. Why not use a "P.O. Boxes" instead.) Eventually we could move away from letting third parties control the receipt of our mail. Neither "POP3" nor "webmail" was part of the original concept of email. Today, it is easier than ever to set up overlay networks where we can assign our own IP addresses and run our own SMTP servers that can communicate directly with other SMTP servers on the overlay network. These networks are not open to the world, they may only be open to people we know. Much of our mail is between people who know each other, e.g., friends, family, colleagues. Or businesses that we contact first. We can separate different social and business networks on different overlay networks. Anyway, the sending and receiving of mail can be separated. We do not need to let a third party control both.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
Feel free to do this, nobody will join you so the spam will be virtually nonexistent!