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> For those who want to take their lives into their own hands, hosting your own email is always an option. It’s difficult to set up, but it’s not that hard to m

by glogla 12y ago

> For those who want to take their lives into their own hands, hosting your own email is always an option. It’s difficult to set up, but it’s not that hard to maintain. Actually, sadly, my experience is the other way around. Setting up mail server is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work, and you always have to wonder whether this time the mail will arrive, or whether some server on the way is going to have a bad day and drop your email without telling anyone. And of course, since it's your mail, everyone assume you're the one at fault. At least, that's how it worked few years ago, but I don't think the situation got better. Some things only get worse.

lazyant 12y ago
exactly: easy to setup, a pain to maintain
stormbrew 12y ago
Yep. And one mistake can result in your server on blacklists it's not clear at all how to remove yourself for (sometimes the process is designed specifically for true bulk mailers and not small-fry "run your own email server" kinds of things). Eg., set up an alias that forwards to gmail and do your best to make sure spam doesn't get forwarded to gmail and put your entire server on their blacklist? Probably you didn't do good enough.
opendais 12y ago
Always https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html $20/year gets you decent email.
__david__ 12y ago
Meh, I don't find it difficult at all. I've run my own mailserver for years and years. I generally spend about 3(ish) man-days per year working on it. The only frustrating part is that I generally don't get to choose when those 3 days happen—most all time spent is putting out fires. But then again that's sysop life in general…
- VikingCoder 12y ago
  "3(ish) man-days per year working on it." Wow, that's way worse than I would have guessed. If your salary is $100,000 a year, and you work 40-hour weeks for roughly 50 weeks a year, that's the equivalent of $1,200. I can't imagine spending $1,200 a year just to run my own mail server. The costs vastly outweigh the benefits. Especially considering that I'm far more likely to screw up all the rest of the security involved.
  - __david__ 12y ago
    If you consider it work, then it's probably not a good investment for you. I like doing it. It's like telling Jay Leno that restoring an old car isn't worth the money since it costs less to get someone else to do it (especially at his Salary). Some things are their own reward. Running my own mail server is very much worth my time. Also, my quoted 3 man days is a huge guess. I don't keep track of that stuff. It's 15 minutes or an hour here and there...
x1798DE 12y ago
In addition to all the spam, uptime and backup features, Google has some of the best security infrastructure out there. I've really wanted to move away from using Gmail for a long time, preferably to my own personally-controlled e-mail server, but I know for a fact that I won't be able to lock down my server nearly as well as Google locks theirs down. Even if I were to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping up with all the security patches and configurations and such, Google is going to be notified ahead of time of critical new exploits, plus they seem to have their own people working on finding such exploits. In the end, you have to make the tough choice between whether you want to make a controlled, voluntary disclosure of your private information (e-mail text and metadata) to Google, or risk an uncontrolled, involuntary disclosure of that private information to potentially malicious actors. My hope is that we'll get some technological infrastructure solutions to this quandry through the next generation of privacy-preserving communications protocols that are currently being worked out (Tox, BitMessage, Flowingmail, etc - not endorsing any of these, just examples of the current crop). Even then, it'll be a while before we can securely protect both our data and metadata.
Joeboy 12y ago
> Setting up mail server is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work Not my experience. It took ages to get a satisfactory setup (based on Debian's default config), but I've rarely had to touch it since. Admittedly I'm not exactly zero tolerance on spam.
saidajigumi 12y ago
I think this anecdote hits right to the more general reason that the evolution of the Internet has shifted away from decentralized services. In 20/20 hindsight, the maintenance load was never going to scale to the increasingly broad segment of the online population. Even for a lot of technical folks, the maintenance is a hassle. My anecdata: almost all of the technically capable folks I know who could maintain their own email server choose to outsource it. For the average Internet user it's outright impossible. Even if it only took "3-person days a year" for maintenance, the mountain of experience required to be capable of the setup just isn't there. Not to mention the stress and hassle of dealing with attackers, software upgrades, outages of various sorts, etc. And that pain tends to be multiplied by the number of services maintained. In this light, perhaps tools like Docker are quite a bit more interesting. We might imagine a scenario where the maintenance itself is the product, not dissimilar to automatic updates on Apple's App Store. You buy a "cloud app", which is installed on your server (or cloud instances) in a container, receives auto-updates provided by the vendor. Purchase and configuration is handled by apps on mobile and/or web. There a ton of potential wrinkes in this idea, and certainly some services (e.g. web search) wouldn't adapt into to this model... but it would be pretty neat to see even a partial shift to services-as-apps.
idle_processor 12y ago
Sadly, even if you kept all of your email on your own server, many people you communicate with are on GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.. You can't escape by leaving on your own; you'd need to spur others to mass exodus.

by glogla 12y ago

lazyant 12y ago

exactly: easy to setup, a pain to maintain

stormbrew 12y ago

Yep. And one mistake can result in your server on blacklists it's not clear at all how to remove yourself for (sometimes the process is designed specifically for true bulk mailers and not small-fry "run your own email server" kinds of things). Eg., set up an alias that forwards to gmail and do your best to make sure spam doesn't get forwarded to gmail and put your entire server on their blacklist? Probably you didn't do good enough.

opendais 12y ago

Always https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/personal.html $20/year gets you decent email.

__david__ 12y ago

Meh, I don't find it difficult at all. I've run my own mailserver for years and years. I generally spend about 3(ish) man-days per year working on it. The only frustrating part is that I generally don't get to choose when those 3 days happen—most all time spent is putting out fires. But then again that's sysop life in general…

VikingCoder 12y ago
"3(ish) man-days per year working on it." Wow, that's way worse than I would have guessed. If your salary is $100,000 a year, and you work 40-hour weeks for roughly 50 weeks a year, that's the equivalent of $1,200. I can't imagine spending $1,200 a year just to run my own mail server. The costs vastly outweigh the benefits. Especially considering that I'm far more likely to screw up all the rest of the security involved.
- __david__ 12y ago
  If you consider it work, then it's probably not a good investment for you. I like doing it. It's like telling Jay Leno that restoring an old car isn't worth the money since it costs less to get someone else to do it (especially at his Salary). Some things are their own reward. Running my own mail server is very much worth my time. Also, my quoted 3 man days is a huge guess. I don't keep track of that stuff. It's 15 minutes or an hour here and there...

x1798DE 12y ago

In addition to all the spam, uptime and backup features, Google has some of the best security infrastructure out there. I've really wanted to move away from using Gmail for a long time, preferably to my own personally-controlled e-mail server, but I know for a fact that I won't be able to lock down my server nearly as well as Google locks theirs down. Even if I were to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping up with all the security patches and configurations and such, Google is going to be notified ahead of time of critical new exploits, plus they seem to have their own people working on finding such exploits. In the end, you have to make the tough choice between whether you want to make a controlled, voluntary disclosure of your private information (e-mail text and metadata) to Google, or risk an uncontrolled, involuntary disclosure of that private information to potentially malicious actors. My hope is that we'll get some technological infrastructure solutions to this quandry through the next generation of privacy-preserving communications protocols that are currently being worked out (Tox, BitMessage, Flowingmail, etc - not endorsing any of these, just examples of the current crop). Even then, it'll be a while before we can securely protect both our data and metadata.

Joeboy 12y ago

> Setting up mail server is easy, but taking care of spam and blacklist is never ending work Not my experience. It took ages to get a satisfactory setup (based on Debian's default config), but I've rarely had to touch it since. Admittedly I'm not exactly zero tolerance on spam.

saidajigumi 12y ago

I think this anecdote hits right to the more general reason that the evolution of the Internet has shifted away from decentralized services. In 20/20 hindsight, the maintenance load was never going to scale to the increasingly broad segment of the online population. Even for a lot of technical folks, the maintenance is a hassle. My anecdata: almost all of the technically capable folks I know who could maintain their own email server choose to outsource it. For the average Internet user it's outright impossible. Even if it only took "3-person days a year" for maintenance, the mountain of experience required to be capable of the setup just isn't there. Not to mention the stress and hassle of dealing with attackers, software upgrades, outages of various sorts, etc. And that pain tends to be multiplied by the number of services maintained. In this light, perhaps tools like Docker are quite a bit more interesting. We might imagine a scenario where the maintenance itself is the product, not dissimilar to automatic updates on Apple's App Store. You buy a "cloud app", which is installed on your server (or cloud instances) in a container, receives auto-updates provided by the vendor. Purchase and configuration is handled by apps on mobile and/or web. There a ton of potential wrinkes in this idea, and certainly some services (e.g. web search) wouldn't adapt into to this model... but it would be pretty neat to see even a partial shift to services-as-apps.

idle_processor 12y ago

Sadly, even if you kept all of your email on your own server, many people you communicate with are on GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.. You can't escape by leaving on your own; you'd need to spur others to mass exodus.