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I got an email reply from someone who discovered my email 10 days after sending in his spam folder. I'm not sure why - maybe he hosts his domain at Outlook.com or Gmail and it's difficult to build up reputation for these A-holes. Or it may be because my VPS provider is on the UCEPROTECT-L3 blocklist (again).
But I really like plaintext email despite all of it's problems. So I think the smolnet/IndieWeb community members should run their own email servers to get independent from big tech. I'm running my own mail server for nearly 6 years now and if someone has an Outlook or Gmail address it's not my problem, although I *try* to send email to them without expecting an answer. Sometimes those people search through their spam folder, but we as a community should get rid of Outlook and Gmail.
So please, *please* consider running your own mail server. You can use Luke Smith' Email Wizard (which I never tested myself) or use the MailCow Email Suite for a more featurerich email (web) setup:
I know most people have given up on running their own email server and that's very sad. But the smolnet community should set up their own email servers, even if we have to ignore the evil corporate monopolists like Outlook or Google. Indieweb/Smolnet users should know better than using them.
We should take the email network back for ourselves.
Aug 28 · 4 months ago · 👍 hedgehog, Aptor-theHobbit, LucasMW, vu2tum
I ran my own mail server for a number of years, but was gradually worn down by the various issues. Reputation management through DKIM / SPF is easily solved, but you’ll be untrusted by some large providers because you send few emails. It’s a broken system, and relatively few people use email for anything more than a box for newsletters and receipts now, so I can’t see there being much will to fix it.
I can only see it getting more difficult, I’m afraid.
@james You tell nothing new, but I see email as a well grown gear, which has everything you need when set up right (with the right client) for longer, thoughtful coversations. I'm well aware of the trust problem with the big providers and I think I'm doing well in ignoring them. I know it's a problem if you're forced to use a big provider for work - so use one for work. For the smolnet: f***'em!
I fully support this opinion. SMTP is simple protocol and email server can be self-hosted. The main problem is hostility of “big providers” gatekeeping everybody from having their own server which makes email look bad.
The email is not a problem, the hostility and gatekeeping is the problem. We all need to ditch “big providers”.
I decided to have 2 email addresses: gmail one when I need to contact someone using “big provider”’s mail address and my own self-hosted address which I use as commit email in Git and as my true address for people not hold hostage by gmail and rest of cartel.
@Aelspire That's the right attitude in my opinion. At work do whatever is needed, but privately free as much people from evil corp as possible!
☕️ Aptor-theHobbit · Aug 28 at 20:30:
I have been delaying installing my own email server, its gonna be my project of the week now. Thanks for your post!
I’m not paying money to Google or Microsoft to get hosted email so my business correspondence doesn’t end up in junk.
I get customers complaining that I never answered them. I just assure them I did, show them the receipts, and tell them there is a problem with their email if they aren’t getting it.
@istvan I don't know the legal situation but my common sense would blame Gmail or Microsoft in a commercial case.
I'm not sure if there are any precedent cases, but it would be time to officially sue Microsoft or Google for that.
Why not use misfin (Gemini email) for smolnet tasks?
I haven't looked into misfin yet. I'll do so later - But I think I'll strongly prefer email.
I believe email is much more common than misfin (although I don't know about it) and should be or is in use by the the IndieWeb and all the related communities, too.
The only problem with email is as Aelspire pointed out the hostility and the gatekeeping of the big providers. Email itself is fully sufficient.
To lable Misfin as a email replacement seems of for me.
Because of the character limit it presents it's self as a slower paced SMS/Messenger/WhatsApp replacement.
@fab I don’t think I have the budget to sue Microsoft and Google. You don’t get to just sue the big boys - they will ninja you into paying for their legal team to throw out your complaint.
You’d need to have something class action with thousands of affected businesses.
@istvan That's obvious. But it would be a good idea to regulate this in some way. Although I don't have high hopes.
Also I don't know anything about american law. I'm not a lawyer and I'm European - But there should be some kind of regulation at least in the EU. I'm not sure if anybody in the European Parliament is interested in this.
I believe there has been a draft about the interoperability of different services in the EU, but I don't know if it will pass the next step. Big Tech is big in lobbying.
Sorry, they have bigger priorities than facilitating speech and commerce. Real problems like banning Lightning ports.
🕹️ skyjake [...] · Aug 30 at 11:32:
@MrSVCD Misfin is an alternative to email in the same way that Gemini is an alternative to HTTP; which is to say, they are not mutually exclusive. The user base of Misfin/Gemini is miniscule in comparison to email/web. It is a challenge to find people with Misfin addresses, whereas most people on the internet have at least one email account.
In the context of the small web, IMO it makes some sense to use Misfin as your messaging protocol, but only if others are using it, too. Self-hosting a Misfin server, or even writing one yourself, is much easier than dealing with the decades of cruft that's associated with email. I for one find it very appealing to write all my email messages in 'text/gemini' format. 🙂
Misfin(C) has a character limit of 16384 bytes, which seems quite sufficient for most correspondence. Misfin(B) on the other hand is only 2048 bytes, which is probably too small for many email-length messages. Lagrange will support both variants, though.
Legal Aspect: Suppression of communications is illegal in Germany (criminal law), no one yet bothered
Security Aspect: It is so much easier to monitor the 'Big E-Mail Systems', that is why there is no political interest in regulation IMHO (tags: terrorists, childporn, immigrants, ...)
Personal Aspect: I am running my own for years with different software (exim, postfix, opensmtpd) and with only SPF I can finally (after a decade or so) mail to google and hotmail. I would not give my IP Adresse/Hostname away lightly ..
Technical Aspect: Setting up E-Mail Server and POP/IMAP is done in a few hours; Spam filtering is a nightmare
rspam does a pretty fine job of spam filtering. Just grab a couple thousand dummy mails to train it on as SPAM, and then use your own personal email archive as HAM. I have very few true junk mails that escape the spam box.
I think it just depends on whether it’s something you feel you have the time to do. Running a mail server always felt like work to me - at least more work that anything else I run. I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Misfin does look interesting for folk in this world.
For me there's not much time required to spend on my mail server. Just update regularly and if some spam really comes through, I'll put it in the Junk folder with one keypress and rspamd will take care of it.
🦆 CitySlicker · Aug 31 at 17:06:
I ran a mail server for a bit, but as others have said, it becomes a real chore. Nowadays I just use migadu and I don't have to worry about my emails being rejected by Google and others.
I run my own mail server on a vps, and people with gmail or outlook addresses get my mails.
I even use delta chat to chat with someone on gmail.
🐝 Addison [mod] · Sep 01 at 20:11:
No thank you I already have a full-time job
I spend less than 5mn a year to maintain my mail servers.
It is only the initial setup that takes time (one month, postfix and dovecot).
I'm the only user of my mail servers, it gets more complicated when there are many users.
@Remy @Addison I update my mailserver once a month and that update is through in 5 min. So around 60 min spend on my mailserver in a year. And the setup was not that difficult and timeconsuming too.
I ran the same setup you are using in a business environment with 30 users.
My time spent managing the servers are about the same. The rest of the time was just annoying password resets or going down the hall to yell at someone for never deleting their junk/very old mail and their box being over 3GB:
🐝 Addison [mod] · Sep 02 at 15:34:
@Remy @fab Fair enough - like anything, once you understand all the pieces required I'm sure it's straightforward. I pay for a hosted service so that I don't have to remember what all the moving parts do - all I have to manage is the DNS stuff, which is complicated enough for me to not want to look any further.
🎵 alice-sur-le-nuage · Sep 05 at 20:43:
I've been running my own mail server for over a decade, and I don't have issues with my mail being marked as spam particularly often. DKIM and SPF is a pain to set up, but you only need to do it once. Postfix+Dovecot is a real pain to set-up, but again once it's done you never need to touch it. I do maybe a major upgrade every 5 years, that's two days of work and that's it. I think what would make it easy for more people to self host is a single, easy to configure software package that handles smtp, imap, multiple domains, guides you through dkim and spf, etc.
@alice-sur-le-nuage I use the "MailCow Email Suite" for my setup, which is easy to install and upgrade. It's a professional docker solution and well documented. The only problem is setting the DKIM, SPF and DMARC DNS entries, which you still have to do by hand. But The setup process shows you all the DNS recource records to be made.
I use Alpine Linux as my docker host system which can easily be kept up-to-date. I ran it on a 2 core 8 GB RAM VPS for 2 years and then moved to a 4 core 16GB RAM VPS with larger disk space to be sure. With my setup you can easily serve 20-30 users.
And it's licensed under the GPL-3.0 license so its free software and easy to selfhost.
It's easy to maintain, everything is automated. Around one update a month which is through in 5 minutes and everything is ok. So I spend a maximum of 3 hours on my mailserver in a year and I didn't have any problems whatsoever.
I *sometimes* have problems with mail being flagged as spam, although I'm not listed on any of the serious spam block lists. Netcup is sometimes on the UCEPROTECTL3 block list, which are mafiosi who want to extort mailserver admins. Everybody who uses their blocklists seems not to want to receive email at all. The other thing is Outlook and Gmail - but I don't care if someone has a Gmail adress, he doesn't want my mail.
I run my own email server for receiving, and use the ISP's server for sending. (Some software calls this "smart host" mode, such as when I set up my email server.) I use Heirloom-mailx as the user agent. (One feature of Heirloom-mailx that I like is that you can pipe attachments into other programs; you do not have to save them into a separate file first.)
I use a separate email address for each service/person I communicate with and set them up in the aliases file; if I receive unwanted messages then I can easily delete those aliases. This works well; I hardly receive any spam messages.
I think there are several problems with Misfin (I have written some criticisms on GitHub and elsewhere). One of them is that there does not seem to be the way to specify that the certificate is a Misfin certificate within the certificate itself; one way to fix this would be to define a X.509 extension for this purpose, but another way might be to add a Misfin URI into the Subject Alternate Name section. This seems more sensible than the existing way, to me.
🦀 AlbertLarsan68 · Sep 13 at 22:17:
I am also using Mailcow for my mail server, and I have no problem sending mails to Gmail and Office-hosted domains, although I took the time to set up everything correctly with SPF, DKIM, DMARK and around 20 DNS records.
I now have virtually unlimited email addresses, and with rspamd already setup for me, I just have to monitor it. I do have a slight problem of false positives, but that may be because I recieved a singluar piece of real spam sind I set it up (don't remember when, but less than a year ago), or that my definition of spam is really specific and does not cover many mails.
@AlbertLarsan68 I don't have a high mail throughput, so it's difficult for me to build up trust with Outlook or Gmail. Sometimes my mail gets through, sometimes not.
That doesn't change my strong opinion with them: Don't use Outlook, Gmail or any other proprietary email provider.
🦀 AlbertLarsan68 · Sep 14 at 19:40:
@fab
TBH I tested sending a mail day one of setting up, and despite sending it with a GPG signature and no HTML, it went straight to the inbox.
And I am the only one using my mail server, and the outbound volume is close to an email a month overall, not counting the DMARC automated emails.
Although I have an unhealthy amount of MS-hosted and Gmail accounts, I am slowly moving torwards another host, part of the CHATONS (a group of French service providers), unbon.cafe.
@AlbertLarsan68 I checked with an old gmail address years ago, and the mail went strait to the inbox too. I wanted to test today, but google wants my phonenumber and I'm not willing to give it to them.
Without some phone number I can't use my account anymore. Gmail becomes more and more audacious from day to day.
😺 kotovalexarian · Sep 19 at 19:18:
I run my own mail server for maybe two years. No ready-made solutions, just Postfix, Dovecot and OpenDKIM on DigitalOcean. I've configured RDNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC.
No problems with delivery to Gmail, but yes, Outlook bounces because of my IP range which is a stupid move from them and I'm not going to do anything with it. Who ever uses Outlook? The only spam database I'm in is UCEPROTECT level 3, but it's just a scam (why is it ever listed anywhere?)
I don't implement any anti-spam measures. Since the beginning I've had maybe 300 spam and scam messages that I've manually deleted, which is not that annoying (but I'm going to install Rspamd)
The main problem I see is the lack of guides with deep explanation of configuration. This is because not too many people deploy their own email servers. So let's increase demand! Don't be afraid of self-hosting email!
@kotovalexarian Yes, UCEPROTECT are mainly scammers who want to extort mail server admins. Those who use their lists don't *want* to receive email.
I use MailCow as my email solution, because it's easy to install, upgrade and maintain. A self setup of postfix, dovecot and all the necessaries scares me a little because it's easy to make mistakes in the configs which may compromise security (at least in my case).
But of course the main thing is to bring more people to selfhost their email servers, so: Good work!
Also read Solene's thoughts about this => gemini://perso.pw/blog/articles/email-selfhost-to-protonmail.gmi
@hedgehog yes, sad to see anotherone leave the email self-hosting space. At least they doesn't use google or outlook. All in all a VPS is only someone elses computer. I know that. But I need a functioning IMAP and don't have a problem with strong passwords. For security reasons I use MailCow, because it's well maintained and has sensible defaults.
i have been self hosting my email for over a decade. Honestly the setup and maintenance isn't an issue. My biggest problem is the cost of a VPS. If i ever get fiber I'll host from home but until then i have to shell out money for someone else to run a computer for me.
I would probably drop my email hosting and go paper correspondence for most things if it wasn't such a pain to switch the few things i still use email for to a new address.