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So happy to see that. Hopefully more people will run their own E-mail instead of being slaves to the large adtech "free" e-mail providers. We need more balance

• kazinator 2y ago
  You can't run your own e-mail, or not entirely. It's practically impossible to send SMTP from your own IP address. For sending SMTP, you need to go through a smarthost that has reputation. If your ISP provides you with an e-mail setup that you can use with a conventional mail client where you enter IMAP4 and SMTP credentials, chances are you can use that for SMTP sending. I.e. from the perspective of sending mail, your ISP can't tell that you're a server; it thinks it's just Outlook or Thunderbird connecting to it. Receiving mail is no problem; your ISP just must not be blocking port 25. It's handy to give yourself mobile access. When I send mail from my phone, it connects to port 537 of my own mail server which provides authenticated SMTP over TLS. It forwards to the aforementioned ISP. (I can't connect directly to my home ISP's SMTP server from my phone because the phone is on a mobile network unrelated to that ISP; the ISP's SMTP forwarding servers are firewalled so only the subscriber addresses can talk to them.)
  • Avamander 2y ago
    Using an ISP's SMTP is an incredibly obsolete and problematic concept. Poorly authenticated with even worse deliverability. It was a bad idea even 10 years ago and it's just horrid right now. Use your email provider's SMTP, even if it's you yourself.
  • khimaros 2y ago
    hetzner allows outbound smtp by request. the process is relatively painless and quick.
    • jks 2y ago
      Yes, but the process of getting Gmail, Outlook etc to receive your emails and put them in recipients' inboxes is far from painless or quick. An IP address with a clean history and SPF/DKIM/DMARC are table stakes, but then you get to play the "my emails are randomly dropped today while everything looked fine yesterday" game.
      • Joel_Mckay 2y ago
        Anecdotally, we have hosted email servers for old games on Hetzner without issue, as the IP pool is generally not as popular with spammers given the time cost bringing up the server OS images. It is far from perfect, but generally performs well as reporting asshats on your local network block is easy. Almost all cloud providers with dynamic-load ephemeral IPs will show up on ban lists eventually due to vulnerability scanners, bad spiders, and spam/voip drops. However, it is far more common for Spamhaus free tiers to quietly go sideways when no one is looking. Gmail/Outlook have their own peer policies that serve their own business posture. Google does require administrators register in their clown system as a user to exchange email, but it is effective policy that adds nuisance cost to people spinning up 30 servers a day to spam people. Firewall Rate-limits are effective on small single-domain servers. A modern email server in Go that is isolated from each user space greatly simplifies the possible setups. =3
      • dizhn 2y ago
        At 15+ years of hosting my own email through multiple IP changes this has not been my experience at all. Hosting your own legit email works fine.
        • Biganon 2y ago
          OK, well it hasn't been MY experience at all, hosting your own legit email with a 100% score on mail-tester, SPF, DKIM and DMARC does NOT work fine because Microsoft still ends up marking all your emails as spam, so maybe you could consider your experience is not universal and just because it happens to work with your IP addresses doesn't mean that's the case for everyone else? Jeez...
          • therealpygon 2y ago
            No one is “right”.
          • jks 2y ago
            My experience is that Gmail accepted my emails fine... until one day it didn't. Then some time later it worked again. I registered for their Postmaster Tools, which says No data to display at this time. Please come back later. Postmaster Tools requires that your domain satisfies certain conditions before data is visible for this chart. Refer to the help page for more details. The help page has no useful information. I suspect that I sent too little mail for it to register in their systems at all. Outlook was even worse, and I just told my Outlook users to change providers. Eventually I capitulated and got Google Workspace, and now everything gets delivered perfectly.
  • durakot 2y ago
    This just isn't true, of course you can, you just need to use a hosting provider or ISP that allows it. Plenty do.
    • kazinator 2y ago
      It's not whether the hosting provider or ISP allows it, it's whether the address they give you has reputation so that mail servers all over the world allow connections from it.
      • tete 2y ago
        tl;dr: If you set up an email server. You just send a few emails to gmail, etc. and you'll know if they are accepted or not. If yes you are set, if not you investigate the problem, maybe really try another IP and eventually fix the issue. It's not like all of a sudden your email becomes undeliverable, unless you start sending spam. Imagine what it would mean for all the people using the email address of a small ISP, some university, etc. Sorry, but that's FUDish. The reality is if you do a proper email setup (DKIM, Reverse IP, etc.) you will be fine. If you happen to actually get an IP that somewhat recently happened to be an email server, that was also sent out spam, which isn't something that's likely at all then you'll notice very quickly (just send an email to to gmail, etc.) and what you'll do then is tell your hosting provider you'd like another IP address, because it's not fit for your purposes. I've been running, moving, switching IPs, providers, domains since 2005 and still am and there is just SO MUCH FUD. It's not hard. It's a one time thing. Personally I never ran into IP reputation issues ever. These are email addresses used in a professional capacity (B2B, communication with governments, etc.) as well as private use ones. Pretty much every ISP, every university, etc. runs their own email server. Many companies do. Many private people do. I have run them on the side for those 20 years now, partly as a hobby and so far the uptime was higher than Gmail's and since I use them for private, professional and sometimes for government communication I am dogfooding it and I would have very much noticed if anything bounced. I have gotten bounces when a setup was initially broken, like when I do something like sending a test email to Gmail and that was off. The reality is that IP and domain reputation aren't really great ways to filter spam anyways. Yes, it adds, but what makes you think that nobody sends emails from Gmail, a university or other stuff? What makes you think that spammers use static domains, etc. Heck, not even DKIM and SPF are any guarantee. People will spam you from servers with extremely good reputation. Looking at my spam box most of them are from situations where accounts obviously simply haven't been blocked yet. No serious spam filtering is done with IPs or domains being an "all or nothing" thing. Also it's a two-way street. If a user of some email provider doesn't get their email and it becomes known people will be wary of it. And nobody expects the email landscape to stay static. There are newsletter and transactional email services all over the place, lots of marketing platforms running their own email servers and so on. It's not like everyone does something magic, nor does everyone have connections, money or time to talk to all these companies. An email service not accepting emails won't exist for long. And something that's also important to realize: If you do start using a transactional email service they oftentimes will make you pay EXTRA for a custom IP so you DO NOT share it with others, so you get BETTER reputation than the cheap one. And you configure your own domain with it. So why wouldn't these emails get delivered? And many of those don't run their own data centers and not all of them have their own IP blocks (though some have). It's just if you couldn't even do regular private emailing, emails would not be the thing every website uses for login and communication.
  • ptman 2y ago
    https://www.mailreach.co/ https://www.mailreach.co/
  • dizhn 2y ago
    Re mail deliverability. My experience so different than what you are saying that I take comments like this as regurgitating FUD at this point. Please do not do it. Even google is mostly OK with just spf or dkim. It really isn't that hard to host your own email.
    • gbear605 2y ago
      I’m on an open source email list, where a lot of users self host their email. They have all the correct things done by the book. But gmail sends them all to my spam box, despite my continuing to mark them as not spam. Some even don’t appear in the spam box, despite other users on the list receiving the emails just fine.
      • therealpygon 2y ago
        Was your intention to prove the point about why it is important that more people host their own mail servers, or did you not realize you were?
        • gbear605 2y ago
          I wasn’t stating anything moral, just disagreeing with the claim that you can do “just spf or dkim” and not have any issues.
      • ValdikSS 2y ago
        If this email list does not rewrite "from" header, and modifies the email contents, that's the issue. Unfortunately, many still do. Such setup just won't work in the modern email world anymore.
    • WhyNotHugo 2y ago
      It’s mostly Microsoft that is a problem. I’ve heard of a couple of cases in the past years where recipients used Microsoft’s services and never received emails from small self-hosted servers (where SPF, DKIM, etc were all properly set up). If your client uses MS for email and doesn’t receive your invoices, it becomes a big deal.
  • devmor 2y ago
    I am sending and receiving emails on a small rack server in a datacenter for 40+ domains, and have had no real issues with deliverability. YMMV but I believe the reputation problem is heavily skewed against cloud providers such as VPS hosts more than anything.
    • AnonHP 2y ago
      I’m curious to know how you could know if any emails you send are getting silently dropped. Do you check with the recipient again and/or through other modes of communication?
      • ValdikSS 2y ago
        I, too, run 4 email servers serving 12 domains overall, for about 11 years. I don't remember any email-related issues in the last 5 years. One of the server sends and receives emails for the forum, sometimes up to 1000 messages a day. It was set up 5 years ago. Maybe this is a serious issue when you use popular VPS providers/IP ranges, but I use smaller providers, and just don't remember any email-related issues everybody are talking about. For me, email self-hosting as easy as installing mail-in-a-box (for sending+receiving) or just plain exim/postfix (for sending only), with proper configuration.
      • devmor 2y ago
        Almost all of the emails being sent from these services are transactional, so we would see noticeable abandoned user activities (i.e. confirmations, 2FA) or complaints from active users about not receiving emails. We also have receipt tracking, which isn't perfect, but shows a >93% open rate. We did have an issue delivering to a specific provider, but that was resolved by updating our DKIM with a more robust key length.
    • kazinator 2y ago
      What you have is really great. Hoeever, if I had a small rack server in a data center, I wouldn't be able to call it self-hosted with a straight face, unless I had an uncle who owns a 60% share of the data center or something.
  • mmooss 2y ago
    Mox's FAQ addresses this question: https://www.xmox.nl/faq/#hdr-won-t-the-big-email-providers-block-my-email https://www.xmox.nl/faq/#hdr-won-t-the-big-email-providers-b... Won't the big email providers block my email? It is a common misconception that it is impossible to run your own email server nowadays. The claim is that the handful big email providers will simply block your email. However, you can run your own email server just fine, and your email will be accepted, provided you are doing it right. If your email is rejected, it is often because your IP address has a bad email sending reputation. Email servers often use IP blocklists to reject email networks with a bad email sending reputation. These blocklists often work at the level of whole network ranges. So if you try to run an email server from a hosting provider with a bad reputation (which happens if they don't monitor their network or don't act on abuse/spam reports), your IP too will have a bad reputation and other mail servers (both large and small) may reject messages coming from you. During the quickstart, mox checks if your IPs are on a few often-used blocklists. It's typically not a good idea to host an email server on the cheapest or largest cloud providers: They often don't spend the resources necessary for a good reputation, or they simply block all outgoing SMTP traffic. It's better to look for a technically-focused local provider. They too may initially block outgoing SMTP connections on new machines to prevent spam from their networks. But they will either automatically open up outgoing SMTP traffic after a cool down period (e.g. 24 hours), or after you've contacted their support. After you get past the IP blocklist checks, email servers use many more signals to determine if your email message could be spam and should be rejected. Mox helps you set up a system that doesn't trigger most of the technical signals (e.g. with SPF/DKIM/DMARC). But there are more signals, for example: Sending to a mail server or address for the first time. Sending from a newly registered domain (especially if you're sending automated messages, and if you send more messages after previous messages were rejected), domains that existed for a few weeks to a month are treated more friendly. Sending messages with content that resembles known spam messages. Should your email be rejected, you will typically get an error message during the SMTP transaction that explains why. In the case of big email providers the error message often has instructions on how to prove to them you are a legitimate sender.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • 2y ago
  • sgt 2y ago
    Been running my own mail server since 1999 or so. No issues.
    • ggm 2y ago
      You're grandfathered in. Fresh starts face an uphill battle with taint and reputation.
      • dwedge 2y ago
        Been running a mailserver running Mox with a brand new domain on a brand new OVH IP for a year, no issues delivering to anyone.
    • zimpenfish 2y ago
      > Been running my own mail server since 1999 or so. Same. > No issues. Many issues.
  • dingaling 2y ago
    > It's practically impossible to > send SMTP from your own IP address. I haven't had any problem in that regard in over 20 years of running a mail server on an old PC, on residential ISP connections. SPF, DKIM and rDNS config seemed to keep all the big players happy. Which just made me realise I don't even have valid rDNS anymore, but it still works.
  • jwr 2y ago
    > You can't run your own e-mail, or not entirely. It's practically impossible to send SMTP from your own IP address. I beg to disagree, as I've been running my own E-mail and sending from my own IP address for [checks notes] the last 25 years or so.
• nmz 2y ago
  We won't have much choice, last year yahoo implemented a limit on COPY so you couldn't move or delete more than 10 mails at once. this broke claws-mail, I think its good now but I still moved on to another "free" service. Mixing email with the drive service in the account is actively hostile.
• fareesh 2y ago
  - Where does one get an affordable server that isn't on a blacklist somewhere? - What happens when one of the big cloud providers arbitrarily start putting your emails in spam? Are there solutions to this? It feels like the biggest value provided by "big email" are these two things
  • gostsamo 2y ago
    I self host on hetzner. ticket to support to open 25 and mailbox on a 5euro machine.
  • pmlnr 2y ago
    My ISP, Zen, in the UK, gives static IPs. That, combined with residential fiber and a thin client makes excellent mini server at home.
  • jmb99 2y ago
    For your first point, the key is an IP range that isn’t on a blocklist. Pick a very reputable hosting provider (not AWS/GCP/Azure), who has strict no-spam rules, and check out some spam reports from their ranges. Hetzner I’ve heard is good, digitalocean as well, but your mileage may vary. For your second point, you live with it. I haven’t found a solution, at least. I’ve never landed in spam for corporate offerings (cloud O365, google workspace or whatever they call it now) or (very rare these days) anyone self-hosting with rspamd or equivalent, just regular personal mail (hotmail, gmail, iCloud, etc). That’s usually pretty easy to detect and work around (“hey I sent you an email” “oh I didn’t get it” “did you check your junk?”) Irritating, but not the end of the world. I’m going to try hosting from my residential IP sometime this year, now that I have sufficient redundancy in terms of power and networking. I don’t know if I’ll have better or worse luck than with hosting providers’ IP ranges, though.
    • grepfru_it 2y ago
      Bro, I owned a /23 at a colo for over 10 years. Registered my ip space with ARIN, had abuse contacts, setup a mail server on a /27 on a /24 that remained mostly unused outside of dev and test servers (strictly controlled). The mail server was also strictly configured to never emit a single email that wasn’t sent by me. So no forwards, no bounces etc. Mail server still gets blocked by random domains. Nope. Done with hosting email. Everyone assumes you are spam and won’t accept your mail unless you pay them (to be your mail provider).
• razemio 2y ago
  I tried for several years. There where to many issues. Even a perfectly configured mail server landed in spam folders of smaller providers. Had to constantly whitelist my server manually with the big providers. For 1-8 dollars a month, it was simply not worth it for me. Switch to encrypted mails where privacy matters. It is not like my emails land on private servers anyway, so the privacy aspect is more of a symbolic gesture than a real thing.
• arp242 2y ago
  There are plenty of free non-adtech alternatives: Proton, Tuta, probably others. Even more options if you're willing to pay a few monetary units/month for it. You don't really need to run your own email server.