3 ms·

It's cool to see some new modern all-in-one email solutions. Stalwart is another good one. Would be even cooler to see this lead to a bit of a resurgence of sma

It's cool to see some new modern all-in-one email solutions. Stalwart is another good one. Would be even cooler to see this lead to a bit of a resurgence of small and self-hosted email providers.

ehnto 2y ago
I hope it does. We have to get through the challenging issue of convincing big tech companies that our small email servers are not spam however.
- durakot 2y ago
  I've self-hosted email on and off since the mid 2000s and my impression is that with the widespread adoption of DKIM/DMARC, the large providers have toned down the spam-by-default treatment of small/unknown email servers. Even Microsoft a bit, though you still have to get your IP whitelisted to send to outlook.com addresses usually.
  - ehnto 2y ago
    That's really great to hear, I haven't self hosted since maybe 2015. I must admit I assumed things would surely have gotten worse, not better.
    - durakot 2y ago
      Definitely got worse since 2015 before seeming to get better the last year or two. At least with Gmail. So many variables though, so this is more an impression based on my own experience.
  - VladVladikoff 2y ago
    Microsoft is absolutely hell to deal with. Especially if you are hosted on Linode. They frequently ban entire linode subnets. I’ve had to resort to routing all send mail via Amazon AWS SES just because of Microsoft’s IP range bans. It’s not what I’m doing, but my neighbours.
    - durakot 2y ago
      Yeah they are definitely the worst of the bunch. But that's unsurprising I guess.
    - velcrovan 2y ago
      It's funny because throughout Q1 2024 a huge range of Microsoft's own IP addresses were blacklisted by Spamcop and other blacklist providers spam/phishing attacks coming from outlook.com addresses. (Google "EX703958" (MS's issue#) for some fun reading.) They (and their enterprise customers) have been on the receiving end of the same thing they do to others.
    - devsda 2y ago
      Allegedly, Microsoft subscribes to random spam checklists like UCEProtect. uceprotect bans entire subnets & ASNs if just one IP is suspected of sending spam.Apparently, you can pay to get your IP whitelisted for some time but it will be back on the list again. Its probably a scam/shakedown operation. As these lists discourage self-hosting and benefit large email providers, they take their own time for fixing these issues.
  - goku12 2y ago
    That's perhaps because you have been self-hosting that long. One of the advises given to new self-hosters these days is to start sending mail to your your friends' email accounts that are hosted by the bigtech. Then you have to contact each one and ask them to mark it as not-spam, so that some day your mails will go to their inboxes, rather than the spam folder. Honestly, I don't think that DKIM/DMARC has made the situation any better. In fact, spamassassin and rspamd often seems to work better than their spam filters in identifying actual spam.
    - zimpenfish 2y ago
      > Then you have to contact each one and ask them to mark it as not-spam That presumes the email is accepted into the spam folder rather than being rejected outright at SMTP time.
      - goku12 2y ago
        You're right. I don't know the situation now, but Outlook used to behave exactly like this.
  - petee 2y ago
    I haven't tried sending to Outlook, but so far I'm getting through Google with just a strict SPF and a DNSSEC domain. Very low volume, to the point I assume reputation isn't being tracked. Just an observation
- jwr 2y ago
  This doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. What is a problem, though, is big tech companies spamming us incessantly and doing almost nothing to prevent that. I get 10-20 spam E-mails a day from AWS, Google and Microsoft. Forwarding spam to their abuse@ contacts doesn't seem to do anything. And I can't block them, like I would a smaller spammer.
  - VladVladikoff 2y ago
    Haha the best part is when the same Gmail or outlook address spams you again two weeks after reporting that very same address to abuse@gmail/outlook.
    - n_ary 2y ago
      Outlook is extra bad. It is apparently possible to put your email(to/recipient) in BCC, so if you have aliases, it is impossible to tell, which one was leaked and being abused, as to is marked as “undisclosed recipients”. There is no mass domain/pattern block rules, so if I block “spammer.1@hotmail.com”, then next day it arrives from “spammer.01@hotmail.com”, then blocking that, next day it arrives from “spammer.001@hotmail.com”. Outlook is actively hostile to blocking spams yet happy to quickly block small self-hosted operators.
    - jwr 2y ago
      With AWS I reported 3-4 spams from a certain company every day for 3 weeks. Nothing changed. They just ignore the reports.
Avamander 2y ago
Stalwart does seem much more modern and feature-complete however.
leptons 2y ago
Self-hosting email is a fool's errand. I used to do it. I'll never do it again. It requires way too much specific knowledge about how the entire email system works. You have to really want to learn everything about running an email server and everything about email to be successful, and even then your ISP could get in the way, as well as all kinds of spam blocker services that you have to deal with to get your special email server unblocked. It was a nightmare, and it's honestly worth paying a few bucks a month for someone else to deal with that. I have a ton of other way more important things to do with my time.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dwedge 2y ago
  Email hosting is absolutely the lowest maintenance of everything I host. For anyone else reading this, if you follow 'mox quickstart' it will help you set up your DNS correctly so you don't have the above experience.
  - leptons 2y ago
    Congratulations for not hosting anything interesting, I guess? My self-hosted VPN is the lowest maintenance thing ever - it just runs, and I never have to touch it. I host quite a bit of stuff, but email was daunting. Every week it was some new fresh hell. Spam blocking lists were the worst of it, and no I wasn't spamming anyone.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dyzdyz010 2y ago
Stalwart isn't really an all-in-one solution, it doesn't have webmail functionalities, just a backend.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  the FAQ claims it does have a web interface; is it not really functional, or something else? never used it myself https://stalw.art/docs/faq#does-it-have-a-web-interface https://stalw.art/docs/faq#does-it-have-a-web-interface
  - AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
    That's an admin interface, to configure the server. Webmail is something that one uses to read the mails.

It's cool to see some new modern all-in-one email solutions. Stalwart is another good one. Would be even cooler to see this lead to a bit of a resurgence of small and self-hosted email providers.

ehnto 2y ago

I hope it does. We have to get through the challenging issue of convincing big tech companies that our small email servers are not spam however.

durakot 2y ago
I've self-hosted email on and off since the mid 2000s and my impression is that with the widespread adoption of DKIM/DMARC, the large providers have toned down the spam-by-default treatment of small/unknown email servers. Even Microsoft a bit, though you still have to get your IP whitelisted to send to outlook.com addresses usually.
- ehnto 2y ago
  That's really great to hear, I haven't self hosted since maybe 2015. I must admit I assumed things would surely have gotten worse, not better.
  - durakot 2y ago
    Definitely got worse since 2015 before seeming to get better the last year or two. At least with Gmail. So many variables though, so this is more an impression based on my own experience.
- VladVladikoff 2y ago
  Microsoft is absolutely hell to deal with. Especially if you are hosted on Linode. They frequently ban entire linode subnets. I’ve had to resort to routing all send mail via Amazon AWS SES just because of Microsoft’s IP range bans. It’s not what I’m doing, but my neighbours.
  - durakot 2y ago
    Yeah they are definitely the worst of the bunch. But that's unsurprising I guess.
  - velcrovan 2y ago
    It's funny because throughout Q1 2024 a huge range of Microsoft's own IP addresses were blacklisted by Spamcop and other blacklist providers spam/phishing attacks coming from outlook.com addresses. (Google "EX703958" (MS's issue#) for some fun reading.) They (and their enterprise customers) have been on the receiving end of the same thing they do to others.
  - devsda 2y ago
    Allegedly, Microsoft subscribes to random spam checklists like UCEProtect. uceprotect bans entire subnets & ASNs if just one IP is suspected of sending spam.Apparently, you can pay to get your IP whitelisted for some time but it will be back on the list again. Its probably a scam/shakedown operation. As these lists discourage self-hosting and benefit large email providers, they take their own time for fixing these issues.
- goku12 2y ago
  That's perhaps because you have been self-hosting that long. One of the advises given to new self-hosters these days is to start sending mail to your your friends' email accounts that are hosted by the bigtech. Then you have to contact each one and ask them to mark it as not-spam, so that some day your mails will go to their inboxes, rather than the spam folder. Honestly, I don't think that DKIM/DMARC has made the situation any better. In fact, spamassassin and rspamd often seems to work better than their spam filters in identifying actual spam.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > Then you have to contact each one and ask them to mark it as not-spam That presumes the email is accepted into the spam folder rather than being rejected outright at SMTP time.
    - goku12 2y ago
      You're right. I don't know the situation now, but Outlook used to behave exactly like this.
- petee 2y ago
  I haven't tried sending to Outlook, but so far I'm getting through Google with just a strict SPF and a DNSSEC domain. Very low volume, to the point I assume reputation isn't being tracked. Just an observation
jwr 2y ago
This doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. What is a problem, though, is big tech companies spamming us incessantly and doing almost nothing to prevent that. I get 10-20 spam E-mails a day from AWS, Google and Microsoft. Forwarding spam to their abuse@ contacts doesn't seem to do anything. And I can't block them, like I would a smaller spammer.
- VladVladikoff 2y ago
  Haha the best part is when the same Gmail or outlook address spams you again two weeks after reporting that very same address to abuse@gmail/outlook.
  - n_ary 2y ago
    Outlook is extra bad. It is apparently possible to put your email(to/recipient) in BCC, so if you have aliases, it is impossible to tell, which one was leaked and being abused, as to is marked as “undisclosed recipients”. There is no mass domain/pattern block rules, so if I block “spammer.1@hotmail.com”, then next day it arrives from “spammer.01@hotmail.com”, then blocking that, next day it arrives from “spammer.001@hotmail.com”. Outlook is actively hostile to blocking spams yet happy to quickly block small self-hosted operators.
  - jwr 2y ago
    With AWS I reported 3-4 spams from a certain company every day for 3 weeks. Nothing changed. They just ignore the reports.

Avamander 2y ago

Stalwart does seem much more modern and feature-complete however.

leptons 2y ago

Self-hosting email is a fool's errand. I used to do it. I'll never do it again. It requires way too much specific knowledge about how the entire email system works. You have to really want to learn everything about running an email server and everything about email to be successful, and even then your ISP could get in the way, as well as all kinds of spam blocker services that you have to deal with to get your special email server unblocked. It was a nightmare, and it's honestly worth paying a few bucks a month for someone else to deal with that. I have a ton of other way more important things to do with my time.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dwedge 2y ago
Email hosting is absolutely the lowest maintenance of everything I host. For anyone else reading this, if you follow 'mox quickstart' it will help you set up your DNS correctly so you don't have the above experience.
- leptons 2y ago
  Congratulations for not hosting anything interesting, I guess? My self-hosted VPN is the lowest maintenance thing ever - it just runs, and I never have to touch it. I host quite a bit of stuff, but email was daunting. Every week it was some new fresh hell. Spam blocking lists were the worst of it, and no I wasn't spamming anyone.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dyzdyz010 2y ago

Stalwart isn't really an all-in-one solution, it doesn't have webmail functionalities, just a backend.

throawayonthe 2y ago
the FAQ claims it does have a web interface; is it not really functional, or something else? never used it myself https://stalw.art/docs/faq#does-it-have-a-web-interface https://stalw.art/docs/faq#does-it-have-a-web-interface
- AAAAaccountAAAA 2y ago
  That's an admin interface, to configure the server. Webmail is something that one uses to read the mails.