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Re: Email hosting

Authors: Ben <benulo@systemli.org>

Dated: 2020-10-05

gemini://gemlog.blue/users/insom/1600916608.gmi

Normally I reply to people on Gemini via e-mail, but I noticed that some users correspond publicly through their gemlogs, and I think that's cool. Also I couldn't find any contact information for "insom", so I'm just putting this out here. (Dia dhuit, by the way!)

I ran self-hosted services as a hobbyist since my college days, and I know very well the pain of e-mail, which for the reasons Insom stated doesn't really work. And yes, it is a shame that the protocol is borken even though it's "the original federated protocol".

When it comes to self-hosted communication, I've had the most pleasure with Jabber/XMPP, which is only something I started doing since late last year. Those who have read the content on my website know that I'm very happy with ejabberd.

For me, XMPP succeeded where e-mail failed as a self-run service. Small XMPP servers like mine are rather welcome in the ecosystem, where I've had no issues federating with other, even major/popular servers. The protocol is very robust and does neat things. Servers are reliably identified by SSL certs, and delivery has never been an issue for me.

XMPP does have spam as well, but it's not as significant of a problem as it is with e-mail, and larger servers probably do need spam filtering, but I have never needed it. I received some spam after publishing my JID on my website, but it's been un-published, and the spam seems (miraculously) to have gone away on its own. Maybe I'm just lucky, but servers that host spam accounts can probably be blacklisted easily at the federal level, or their admins notified of abuse so they can take care of it on their end.

Probably what makes XMPP work the way we all wish e-mail worked (easy to self-host and federate) is the fact that the network is smaller and less centralized. E-mail has that problem at the network level--too big, too centralized. I wish e-mail could be saved too, but I guess other protocols like XMPP and even Gemini are needed if we are to "take decentralized back".