5 ms·
Very nice. Comes with Roundcube so you've got a webmail client available. - DKIM signing on outgoing messages (opendkim). - The machine acts as its own DNS
by morsch 13y ago
Very nice. Comes with Roundcube so you've got a webmail client available.
- DKIM signing on outgoing messages (opendkim).
- The machine acts as its own DNS server and is automatically configured for SPF and DKIM (nsd).
I remember many people running their own SMTP server used to have massive issues with their outgoing mail being silently or non-silently ignored or sent to the spam folder. Does this take care of this? "Mostly" really isn't good enough.
- rsync 13y agoI don't remember this ... can you elaborate ? Are you speaking of people who failed to disable relaying ?
- morsch 13y agoI lack the expertise to elaborate much, but the gist is that people running their own server were caught by measures that were put in place to combat spam. I recall some providers (AOL?) used to be infamous for silently discarding your mails, which is very aggravating for the involved parties. You had to jump through certain hoops to ensure that your mail arrived. DKIM/SPF are two such hoops (or related techs, anyway; both have detailed Wikipedia entries). Maybe it's not so much of an issue these days.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dhoe 13y agoI had heard of this too, and it was one of the reasons I was extremely cautious when starting to host my own email. To my surprise, I didn't run into a single problem like this.
- lazyant 13y agoThis happens as a matter of routine; the biggest problem with running your email server is you are not guaranteed that your messages will be delivered.
- r00fus 13y agoReliably delivering email in todays spam-filled environment isn't guaranteed. Players like MailGun, SendGrid and Postmark provide such features as part of a EaaS product.
- mbq 13y agoFrom my experience, Gmail will send to spam everything from a small server that has no SPF (even when DKIM is on and OK -- which is strange because it basically has SPF built-in) and when the sender is not in the address book -- this is pretty enough for massive issues.
- carsonreinke 13y agoDKIM has nothing to do with SPF
- mbq 13y agoWell sure, but DKIM can sign the sender so it can do the SPF work connected with an envelope spoofing filter. Still, my idea was that a spammer who can put a valid DKIM signature won't likely have any problems with SPF.
- chacham15 13y agoJeff Atwood talks about this: http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email.. http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email.... . And its unlikely that the code takes care of all these things. For example, how are you going to configure the reverse ptr in code?
- iSnow 13y agohttp://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-through-code/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email...
- josho 13y agoWith dkim/SPF the lack of a reverse ptr is less important. I've had one email bounce as a result, even then the bounce included instructions to resolve the issue with their server.
- mike-cardwell 13y agoEven if it can't set the PTR it's self, it could at least detect if your PTR is missing or wrong, and display that information to you with some advice on how to resolve it and how important it is.
- joshdata 13y agoThanks for the idea! I've added a test for PTR: https://github.com/JoshData/mailinabox/commit/ec11241a7a619a9d9cafb7696e96592b45dbf7b5 https://github.com/JoshData/mailinabox/commit/ec11241a7a619a...
- Niten 13y ago> I remember many people running their own SMTP server used to have massive issues with their outgoing mail being silently or non-silently ignored or sent to the spam folder. Does this take care of this? "Mostly" really isn't good enough. Frankly I've had mixed results over several years of hosting my own personal email server, even with a valid PTR, SPF, and DKIM. Most SMB and personal email systems I interact with are fine, as aside from Bayesian filtering those tend to rely heavily on blacklists which I am responsible enough to keep myself off of—easy given that I'm the server's only user. And I've never had an issue sending to Gmail users. Microsoft is the real f-up in this regard, originally with Hotmail and now with the updated Outlook.com. Even though I'm on no blacklists and pass both their SPF and DKIM checks: Authentication-Results: hotmail.com; spf=pass (sender IP is XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX) smtp.mailfrom=redacted@example.com; dkim=pass header.d=example.com; x-hmca=pass header.id=redacted@example.com X-SID-PRA: redacted@example.com X-AUTH-Result: PASS X-SID-Result: PASS my messages still end up in the Junk folder. If you visit their support page you're recommended to join their partner Return Path's Sender Score Certified Email program to stop junk filtering of your legitimate messages. That's great, if you're a medium-sized organization that doesn't mind paying their certification fee; but Return Path won't even allow an individual to register (I've tried). I'm familiar with Hanlon's razor, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", but this at least feels like a racket. Unfortunately I don't know what else to do, other than continue to advise everyone I know not to use Outlook.com and friends. And to finally answer your question, if this VM runs its own DNS then it probably takes care of SPF and DKIM adequately, but you'll likely have to contact your hosting provider for the PTR record, which is at least as important. But even following those best practices you can still have delivery issues such as I have described above, leading to the unfortunate reality that if you really need a message to be delivered you're probably better off sending it through Gmail.
- arbitrage 13y agohotmail used to actively blackhole e-mail from smaller servers, no bounce, no warning, nothing. just accept it and throw it away. i don't know if they still do that, but it was far easier to convince everyone i knew at the time that hotmail was garbage, rather than making any headway with their mail admins.