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I feel like this solution is optimizing the wrong problem. The bulk of work with managing a mail server (these days) isn't software setup and admin. On the rec
by that_courtney 4y ago
I feel like this solution is optimizing the wrong problem.
The bulk of work with managing a mail server (these days) isn't software setup and admin. On the receiving side, it's all the work dealing with abuse and attacks. On the sending side -- and this is the tough one -- it's getting sites to accept your email. When I finally gave up managing my own mail server (about two years ago), I found that about every six months I was involved in some panic where some large mail provider (Microsoft and Google most frequently) decided they didn't want to accept email from my server. Solving these issues is neither easy nor quick.
These days I'm very happy to pay somebody else to run email services using my provided domains.
- andix 4y agoNo, that kind of software optimizes a very important problem. It’s quite cumbersome to set up all components of a mail server by yourself. At some point you start hosting a domain for a friend. Then then friend wants to create some mailboxes, forwardings and so on by themselves. So you just give them SSH and tell them to edit the postfix config? Having a web interface that does it all and doesn’t break things is very important.
- richwater 4y agoWho does this...?
- andix 4y agoGiving out free email addresses to friends and family? Me. Hey, we are starting this charity and need email for 15 people, what should we do? - order domain, create admin-account in the web interface, pass it on, done.
- stonogo 4y agoThis problem is solvable without a web interface: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man5/dot-qmail.5.html https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man5/dot-qmail.5...
- andix 4y agoHow many people understand that man page, and how many people understand a web interface? I think it’s a clear winner.
- stonogo 4y agoI hate to be an elitist jerk, but if you can't understand a man page describing a single file format then maybe running an email service is something best outsourced.
- andix 4y agoIt is usually not the same people who run it and who create users. You don’t want to bother the admin every time you add a new email address. But an admin UI is more than just for creating mailboxes. It can also manage quotas, the spam filter, provide setup instructions for the end users, …
- rerdavies 4y agoI hate to be an elitist jerk, but how am I going to teach my mum to get her email using THAT?!
- andix 4y ago<3
- anon291 4y agosimple-nixos-mailserver... One step deploy. Hasn't broken in years (it's never broken for me). Extremely stable. Can handle all your use cases. Declarative config, so no messy state.
- c0l0 4y agoHaving been a part-time postmaster for more than a decade by now, I fully agree, and would even go further: Ingress spam is pretty much a solved problem if you play your cards right. ChatGPT et al. might change that again - but the mechanisms you can deploy today are very effective against the current UBE landscape. The _real_ problem is reliably getting your 100% legit mail into your consenting recipients' inboxes.
- user3939382 4y ago> The _real_ problem is reliably getting your 100% legit mail into your consenting recipients' inboxes It's amazing that having someone in your address book isn't enough in many cases. Like, why?
- layer8 4y agoBecause the from address can be forged, probably.
- c0l0 4y agoNot really a problem in the age of DKIM, _if_ you want to solve it.
- stevenjgarner 4y agoEven with DKIM, all you need is the recipient of one email from one user on one domain (I have hundreds of domains) of your mail server to file a spam report, and WHAM you are blacklisted. So yes, it is a problem even with DKIM. If you have a solution, I would LOVE to hear about it.
- layer8 4y agoIf you’re blacklisted, the mail usually doesn’t even reach the spam folder.
- roywashere 4y agoI hosted my own mail for some time and got into trouble with the school of my kids because they did not receive my reply to their mail. I self hosted because I wanted to prefer not to be part of the huge o365/Gmail/iCloud monocultures. Last year I moved my mail to an old fashioned shared webhosting account at Hetzner. Very happy with it!
- ascar 4y ago> Last year I moved my mail to an old fashioned shared webhosting account at Hetzner. Very happy with it! How exactly is that solving the problem? If anyone does something remotely spammy from that ip, your mails are spam again too. And you probably got lucky that the ip you're sitting on was warm and trusted to begin with. You didn't really find a solution, the problem simply hasn't occurred yet for you or you are not aware of it yet. GP is right. Self hosting email sending (and by that I mean any solution where you control the mail server) doesn't work unless you accept that you will randomly end up in spam folders and sometimes not delivered at all.
- andix 4y agoFrom my experience shared web hosting accounts have the worst trust. You get the IP range of a public cloud provider, but you also share it with random people, that will send spam at some point. So either get a package at some of those smaller providers with a dedicated IP, or go to one of the big providers (Google, Microsoft) and use their highly trusted IPs, that everybody whitelists by default.
- fuzzy2 4y agoI think you misunderstand. You cannot have a mail service on shared webhosting. It’s like 1999: Upload PHP using FTP, the end. Instead, the hosting provider will operate a mail service for you, much like Microsoft 365, G Suite and the like. They will also take care of the IP reputation, SPF, DKIM and all.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoShared hosting does not typically run an external mail service. It's just Exim or whatever running on the same box as the shared Apache.
- armchairhacker 4y agoSome big mail carriers who are more FOSS-friendly should create a service where they will deliver your private mail-server mail to Google and Microsoft inboxes for you. So you can use your own mail server for every other mailbox with more reasonable filtering protocols, and when you have to send mail to a Microsoft inbox you just send it to them and they’ll forward it. They could also provide Cloudflare-like spam and DDoS protection for receiving mail
- leros 4y agoYou would still deal with the deliverability challenges of getting your private email server trusted by everyone. It will work 95% but there are a bunch of weird edge cases due to old IP blacklists, bad spam rules, etc that will cause you problems and basically require a greybeard email expert to diagnose and fix. Sadly, I think it's just too hard to run your own email server these days.
- foxylad 4y agoTHIS. Spam is a solved problem, thanks to SPF and DKIM. But despite doing all the right things, Microsoft and Google continuously block and rate-limit delivery. Case in point: we deliver 20,000 booking confirmation emails every day, all requested by users and not spam. We have perfect Postmaster Tools metrics: absolutely zero reported spam, 100% IP reputation, high domain reputation, zero feedback loop spam, 100% encryption. But Gmail still rate-limits us daily, so their customers get their booking confirmations several hours late. It's getting to the point where running an independent mail server is impossible. Yet another part of the open internet bites the dust.
- brightball 4y agoHow many servers do you have? Just curious if the rate limit is per IP address?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoWe have a Microsoft email subscription (all our mail is hosted with them), and their smtp server rate limits how much mail we send to our customers. We can’t even send 30 emails at once. We had to implement retry logic with back off.
- exclusiv 4y agoWhy not just use Sendgrid or similar for SMTP emails to customers, get a dedicated IP with them and have way less concern. I always prefer to isolate those things from the main corporate email and reputation anyway. You don't want your main domain getting hacked and affecting customer emails or vice versa.
- ryanjshaw 4y agoHave you spoken to an account manager there? I send way more than that on a regular basis. I do it sequentially for simplicity, I wonder if that makes a difference.
- KyeRussell 4y ago
- pbreit 4y agoWhy are the email providers so bad about this? When I check my "spam" filder in Gmail, around half the email is not spam. Is it because humans are so bad at classifying spam?
- ponytech 4y agoMay I ask, why are you still using Gmail then? This is an honest question, in my opinion the only way to make Google more friendly with self-hosted mail servers is their users complaining about or leaving Gmail.
- pbreit 4y agoI can't even think of another provider. And Gmail is otherwise quite amazing.
- humpydumpy 4y agogoogle has one of the worst spam filters. It can be done much better, and google could do it much better. But I suppose they are just big enough now. Can't reach your contacts that use google? Well, just sign up to google as well, then you can reach them. People like you are the reason google can behave like that.
- amtamt 4y agoCounter point... Make email hosting as easy and abuse free that many more people can host their servers( for themselves or for community) breaking the big tech monopoly.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y agoI refer to this as ‘the mail cartel problem’.
- CodeWriter23 4y agoApropos
- tux2bsd 4y ago[dead]
- 3r8riacz 4y agoWe use Mailgun as outbound relay for self-hosted email stack, and no more problem with delivery. As a home user you can even stay within the free tier and never pay a dollar for it.
- Jansemon 4y agoI am always reading and never experiencing this (knockonwood). I'm self hosting email servers for multiple domains for now nearly 25 years. When moving to a new hoster with new IP addresses (especially Hetzner, as it is cheaper and seems to attract more malicious people), I have to contact Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and one or two other big providers to clear my IP address range. This has to be done only once and usually is resolved within hours (faster for automated sites). The bigger ones have a web page to do this, others can be reached via email and are always replying quite quickly. So after a day, everything works and once it works, this never changes and mail gets accepted. These servers are being used by multiple users and businesses and none have reported any problems. For decades. I am only using dedicated servers though and using everything in the book: DNSSEC, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, proper DNS records, TLS with valid certs and a correctly behaving SMTP server...
- mjl- 4y agoNot my experience. I have run a personal mail server for about 15 years. My mail has almost always been delivered just fine. The network my mail server IP has been in a blocklist less than handful times, but this has always been temporary and resolved without my intervention (perhaps my hosting provider is on top of this). On the other hand, I'm also sending email for a client through AWS SES, and those emails are regularly blocked due to their IPs being on a blocklist. And indeed I also get spam delivered through AWS SES. I understand that it is a cat & mouse game for mail service providers to prevent spam being sent through their services. My point: switching to cloud providers doesn't magically solve your mail problems. Aonther issue with large mail account providers (gmail at least), is that they will accept & deliver your message, but just "deliver" it to the spam folder. It's so annoying if mail is accepted but you don't know if it is actually seen by the recipient. This erodes trust in email. I understand mail servers don't want to tell spammers whether their email is accepted/rejected, but I would prefer a few more spams in my inbox if I at least won't miss emails.
- 867-5309 4y ago>It's so annoying if mail is accepted but you don't know if it is actually seen by the recipient. that's what those embedded 1x1px images are for
- Donckele 4y agoSome users have embedded images disabled in email client by default.
- 867-5309 4y agosome users have javascript disabled, some have email clients disabled. it's not foolproof but works for the majority of users, i.e. >99%
- account42 4y agoAny any well designed website will work with javascript disabled unless it is absolutely needed for the task (i.e. we are talking about an actual app). There is also no guarantee that the image being loaded means that the user opened the mail and it wasn't just preemptively cached by the server/client. There is also no guarantee that the user opening the mail means they read it.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago> These days I'm very happy to pay somebody else to run email services using my provided domains. I was in a similar boat, though I bailed much longer ago than you. I think "Big Email" is happy to let enough spam flourish in the world so that it presents enough of an excuse to tighten the screws to make it effectively impossible to run your own server... just so that more and more mail goes through their servers to be mined for personal data. That's why I don't use Gmail any more, but it wouldn't shock me to find out that Apple is doing something with my email data too.