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E-mail is complicated, sure. But I’ve had it up to here with people who give up running their own server and then go on to vastly exaggerate how infeasible it
by teddyh 4y ago
E-mail is complicated, sure. But I’ve had it up to here with people who give up running their own server and then go on to vastly exaggerate how infeasible it is, in order to placate their own conscience. It’s not that they’ve gotten tired of doing it, oh no; (they say,) it’s entirely the fault of Google, Microsoft, etc. who’ve made it literally impossible to run your own e-mail server. Except it’s not impossible – lots of us do it, still. And now there’s one fewer of us, so the rest of us have to work that much harder when the next monopolizing standard comes along (BIMI, anyone?). Sure, you don’t owe us anything, but thanks for nothing when making these public rants; you are scaring away people who might still be inclined to help!
- Avamander 4y agoHow is BIMI "monopolizing"? It's a trivial DNS record.
- teddyh 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28196403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28196403
- Avamander 4y agoThere's the catch - VMCs are not a mandatory part of BIMI. Though if you want to establish trust, someone has to be willing to put their name on the line and verify everything required. If you have a better approach in mind, I'm sure a lot of people would love to know.
- teddyh 4y agoTrust (by way of VMC) is the whole point of BIMI; it’s what’s in all the marketing copy: The fact that nobody else can send mail with your logo. If you merely wanted to send e-mail with your icon on it, that already existed: the X-Face header has been around for decades.
- Avamander 4y agoAbsolutely not, BIMI is a way to provide brand identity for recognition/marketing purposes. Trust or security is not the standard's goal. Being able to trust the logo is an optional extra. Also nobody really uses X-Face, it's irrelevant.
- teddyh 4y agoYou’re talking nonsense. What is the improvement of BIMI (without VMC) over X-Face? The only things I can think of are: 1. BIMI logos are in color. oh yeah, and: 2. BIMI logos are inherently a tracking pixel so the sender can see when readers read the mail.
- Avamander 4y agoYou are free to read the BIMI standard's section 2.1 containing its high-level goals. The next section also literally says "This document does not cover the different verification and reputation mechanisms available, but BIMI relies upon them to be in deployed in order to control abuse." It's not a standard meant for establishing trust, it does not mandate requiring a VMC.
- teddyh 4y agoJust like with e-mail, it doesn’t matter what’s in the standard, what matters is what the big providers actually do. If Google (Gmail), Microsoft, etc. will simply show any BIMI logo without VMC verification (which will never happen), then I will concede that BIMI is not a monopolizing standard. It’ll just be a tracking pixel.
- Avamander 4y agoShowing any BIMI logo is an absolutely unreasonable thing to demand from a large-scale BIMI implementation. It does not make it "monopolizing", I don't think you even know what the word means.
- arriu 4y agoI’m genuinely interested. Where would you recommend a newcomer starts?
- zanny 4y agoI've been self hosting my own email on a Dell Poweredge for just over a year now, if you want my smtpd, dovecot, and rspamd confs I'll share them :x
- teddyh 4y agoI haven’t followed any such guide, so I wouldn’t know, but there are usually lots of links in all these threads to such things.
- waz0wski 4y agoThere's alot that goes into a mail server stack, but it's no more complicated than k8s or other stacks these days. My preferred setup is rspamd/postfix/dovecot/roundcube. The docs are good and the mailing lists are active & archived for easy searching For a pre-packaged mailserver environment, take a look at mailcow or mailinabox https://mailcow.email https://mailcow.email https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ There's a variety of ansible/chef/puppet up on github that can also be used to setup the invididual component
- josephcsible 4y ago> it's no more complicated than k8s That's not really saying much.
- BostonEnginerd 4y agoI've found that Mailinabox provides a pretty much turn-key setup. (https://www.mailinabox.email https://www.mailinabox.email)