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A comment on After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. Parent comment

Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by eikenberry on Sunday September 04, 2022 @02:27PM (#32716138)
There is also a happy medium. Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers. You have complete control over the incoming mail but dodge the filters by using the established business for sending mail.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by Animats on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:44PM (#32716956)
> Host your own MX servers but use someone else's SMTP servers.

Yes. My outgoing email goes out via Sonic's SMTP server, with the SPF records to allow it to have a source address of my own domain. Incoming email goes to my own domains and gets forwarded.

This seems to be trouble-free. The domain is on a cheap shared hosting account. I'm not running a server. I own the domain, and not though the hosting company, so I can switch to another provider if necessary. In 27 years, I've had to do that twice, because the hosting provider went out of business.

This is easy to do, and I don't have to deal with Google. I don't even get much spam. All the spammers seem to be targeting the big services now.

I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a scam - there's a fertilizer shortage, so that's a spam which might get replies.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by joecool1029 on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:53PM (#32717043)
>I just looked at my spam folder. I'm regularly being offered dental supplies, large hydraulic sheet metal bending presses, and ammonium sulfate fertilizer. It seems that having your own domain now means you get mostly business-to-business spam. I subscribe to Machine Design, which gets me some heavy industrial marketing, but I have no idea why I get dental supply ads. The fertilizer spams, from China, look like a scam - there's a fertilizer shortage, so that's a spam which might get replies.

I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by thaumasiotes on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:04PM (#32717155)
> I used to have a 'Shirley' email all the time from China about elevator parts. It was such a niche kind of spam that I eventually replied and requested pictures of a bunch of parts. They sent them!

https://web.archive.org/web/20030412191437/http://www.penny-...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by dhosek on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:10PM (#32717197)
I remember in grad school, one of my classmates being upset about getting a porn spam email in Chinese and saying, “but don’t they know that I’m a girl?” I pointed out to her that I got the same emails (but had no idea what they were saying) and explaining to her that they send them to everybody.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by pixl97 on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:10PM (#32717199)
It can very much depend on your domain. In the early 2000s I ran a domain for a firm and the domain had 'UT' in it. Well spammers thought it was related to university of Texas at some point and we went from around 10 messages a day to over quarter of a million. The immediate issue I has was poor back scatter protection so I had to configure that in a few days. That stopped 99.99% of the spam, but still caused massive issues with the mailboxes that did exist getting hundreds of messages per day even though we were blocking tens of thousands of mails per valid email addresses.

Spammers are miserable, I don't fault anyone for giving up.

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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by Fuzzeh on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:18PM (#32717268)
SPF and DKIM no longer have any real value. Just look at SA and the values it assigns by default to mail with those headers. Couple that will the fact that spam now has valid SPF and DKIM - just makes them pointless.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by sbuk on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:29PM (#32717383)
DKIM and SPF, along with DMARC are more about authentication - they let you know that the message has come from where it says it does. This makes spoofing harder, not necessarily spam. Greylisting deals with most of the "spray and prey" spammers, though it does have it's own issues.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by RockingGoodNite on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:48PM (#32720315)
Agreed.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by xanaxagoras on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:06PM (#32717167)
I do this too with a different provider whose whole business is relaying for self hosters. I have had exactly 0 problems since I started a couple of years ago. Its kind of perfect.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by tempestn on Sunday September 04, 2022 @09:38PM (#32719594)
Which provider is this? I'm thinking of switching to this middle ground option too.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on Sunday September 04, 2022 @05:21PM (#32717835)
This should be made a standard practice.

Third party email providers, the so-called "established businesses", get a free pass as sending SMTP servers that are accepted by almost all receiving STMP servers. Everyone just assumes everything coming from those SMTPs is legit. Establishing this "legitimacy" and getting the "free pass" is difficult and some have suggested, the third parties may employ anticompetive tactics.

However, IMHO the receiving SMTPs is a different issue. Why do we let these third parties receive and store our email. (Why do our homes have their own mailboxes. Why not use a "P.O. Boxes" instead.) Eventually we could move away from letting third parties control the receipt of our mail. Neither "POP3" nor "webmail" was part of the original concept of email.

Today, it is easier than ever to set up overlay networks where we can assign our own IP addresses and run our own SMTP servers that can communicate directly with other SMTP servers on the overlay network. These networks are not open to the world, they may only be open to people we know. Much of our mail is between people who know each other, e.g., friends, family, colleagues. Or businesses that we contact first. We can separate different social and business networks on different overlay networks.

Anyway, the sending and receiving of mail can be separated. We do not need to let a third party control both.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by Godel_unicode on Monday September 05, 2022 @01:45AM (#32720960)
Feel free to do this, nobody will join you so the spam will be virtually nonexistent!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by LinuxBender on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:04PM (#32716529)
Adding to the happy medium is to teach your friends and family to use Thunderbird so they can easily GPG encrypt [1] their emails keeping the nosey email providers off the email body. Also teach them to use the IMAPS (TLS) endpoint for their mail provider, usually port 993. There are probably simpler how-to's with pictures, I just do not have any of them handy.

[1] - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/openpgp-thunderbird-how...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by m12k on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:07PM (#32716580)
I'm sorry to say, that's nowhere near a medium stance or ask.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by LinuxBender on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:10PM (#32716607)
It could be we have different circles of acquaintances. I have managed to get non technical friends to GPG encrypt their emails. I also talked 2 lawyers into using this and the two lawyers are not only non technical but have nearly zero patience.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by oynqr on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:25PM (#32716745)
I guess a lawyer might know a thing or two about confidential messages.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by orev on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:35PM (#32716851)
I think you’d be very surprised at how much lawyers don’t know or care about any of that. They store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents).
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by JumpCrisscross on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:38PM (#32716889)
> store stuff in the cloud without ever having heard of the Third Party Doctrine (which allows the US government warrantless access to those documents)

Or because they know the third-party doctrine doesn’t apply to attorney work product and privileged materials.

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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by pixl97 on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:12PM (#32717219)
After doing work for lawyers for years, they really are the worst when it comes to understanding computers.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by Godel_unicode on Monday September 05, 2022 @01:47AM (#32720966)
It does no such thing, that’s absurd. See carpenter v. United States (among many, many others).
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by LinuxBender on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:37PM (#32716884)
They do. Most of them use proprietary https web interfaces that usually have "secure email" or "secure messaging" in the description but they are just fancy web portals. I despise those systems. The content is not encrypted at rest and can be leaked. With OpenGPG the emails are only decrypted on the recipients end points and can be deleted by request.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by squarefoot on Sunday September 04, 2022 @06:36PM (#32718413)
Not all of them. I keep seeing lawyers sending photos of sensitive documents using their cellphone and Whatsapp (before encryption), and most of them don't even care about all those documents still residing on their cellphone, at the mercy of whoever steals it since all the security they have in place is that swipe thing that anyone with good eyes spots in 2 seconds straight.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by deltree7 on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:24PM (#32716737)
ok, this is the text book definition of "out of touch"
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by NavinF on Sunday September 04, 2022 @07:19PM (#32718735)
Yep. On any other site I’d assume that comment was satire. Nothing’s changed in the last decade:

https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/08/13/whats-ma...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by stjohnswarts on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:40PM (#32720262)
even zimmeman says it's too complicated for the unwashed masses and was meant for the techy crowd of the time he came up with it.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by upofadown on Sunday September 04, 2022 @09:41PM (#32719613)
My canned response to the second article/rant:

* https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:wtmwp

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by sneak on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:30PM (#32716805)
Most of my friends and family don’t own computers, only phones and sometimes tablets.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by dredmorbius on Monday September 05, 2022 @06:14AM (#32722577)
K-9 Mail is an app available for Android which supports PGP (if clunkily).

<https://k9mail.app/>

I'm not going to remotely pretend that this would make PGP attractive or viable for the greater public. I do want to address your valid point that the general-purpose computer seems to be a dying breed, but that there are still options for mobile devices.

I've used K-9 Mail, though rarely do these days (it went poorly-maintained for a while).

There seem to be some options for iOS as well, such as iPG Mail, though I've no experience at all with it.

<https://www.openpgp.org/software/ipgmail/>

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by sneak on Monday September 05, 2022 @07:15AM (#32723044)
Most of my friends and family don't have Android devices.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by dredmorbius on Monday September 05, 2022 @07:48PM (#32730835)
Perhaps you might care to share with us what types of devices they do have, seeing as my mental telepathy transgizmatron happens to be in the shop presently.

Note that I also listed an iOS option, and mentioned that there are others.

Again: PGP-enabled email apps are available on many platforms, though, again, this addresses only a small part of the larger challenge at encouraging adoption.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by stjohnswarts on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:42PM (#32720281)
there is definitely software to help with pgp on ANY tablet, phone, or PC your friends and family have access to. The universal problem is no one cares to encrypt except a few computer nerds, spooks, and journalists.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by iggldiggl on Monday September 05, 2022 @06:25AM (#32722663)
It means you now have to worry about key management or else lose access to all your old mail, it possibly complicates logging in on new devices or via webmail, partially breaks server-side (spam) filtering, breaks server-side full-text search… so there are some definitive trade-offs there to be made.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by stjohnswarts on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:39PM (#32720254)
Not a single member of my friends or family is going to use GPG encryption, not even my mother who loves me dearly. I had a computer geek "penpal" for a while and we did monthly emails to each once a month to catch up via gpg, and even that died off lol
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by marvel_boy on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:37PM (#32716880)
Apple supports encryption on Mail:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mail/mlhlp1180/mac

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by stjohnswarts on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:43PM (#32720286)
protonmail also has nice tools for it if you use them. I suspect tutanota probably does as well.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by briandear on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:25PM (#32716752)
Apple mail support GPG easily. No need to use Thunderbird.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by Avamander on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:29PM (#32716796)
Can you please provide a few references to that claim?
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by zikduruqe on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:39PM (#32716902)
They might be talking about S/MIME.

I use https://github.com/Free-GPGMail/Free-GPGMail which is a plugin for GNUPG, without the "support" plan.

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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by sbuk on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:34PM (#32717427)
https://gpgtools.org

GPG Mail is a paid for add-on, but it works and it works well.

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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by zikduruqe on Sunday September 04, 2022 @08:00PM (#32718965)
It's not a paid add-on... GnuPG is open source. They are selling a support plan in case you need help with open source.

Here is the same thing, without the paid support. https://github.com/Free-GPGMail/Free-GPGMail

- GPG Suite was released under an Open Source license in the past. Is that stil the case?

You GPG Suite including GPG Mail is still going to be released under an Open Source license.

- Am I still allowed to compile my own version of GPG Mail / GPG Suite removing any code regarding the trial or activation?

You absolutely are, the GPL makes sure of that. You will find the source code on this website next to the download link for GPG Suite.

We would kindly like to ask you not to use our names or icons if you plan to publish a binary for others to use. Also please do not release any complete installers as that may suggest that they are official releases.

https://gpgtools.org/faq

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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by sbuk on Sunday September 04, 2022 @08:40PM (#32719238)
To be pedantic, the version I linked to is a paid addin. However, you are correct - there is/are unofficial unpaid and unsupported versions available that I was unaware of, per the FAQ and the repository that you linked, which has nothing to do with GPGTools GmbH; from the repo, “This does not constitute any endorsement or promotion of our releases by the respective copyright or trademark holders.” Thanks for sharing this.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by conradev on Sunday September 04, 2022 @02:39PM (#32716257)
You can also use an MX backup service which will accept mail when your server is offline (and it will resend it when the server comes online)

You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by RunningDroid on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:31PM (#32716818)
> You can also even keep Gmail as your MX server! Just move messages off of it as soon as they arrive. It's just a mailbox, after all

Do you have more information about this?

I've been looking to do something similar so that I can have my mail sorted into folders without setting up the same rules on multiple clients. (Gmail's sorting doesn't seem to support some of the sorting I'm currently doing in Thunderbird)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by iam-TJ on Sunday September 04, 2022 @06:14PM (#32718232)
I've been hosting and operating my own MTA MX with Postfix since 2005. I have Postfix set to use "MailDir" format storage (one file per email) and then use Procmail filters to direct emails into per-sender or per-topic specific folders when they arrive on the server - nothing needed to be done in the email client. Dovecot provides the IMAP4 client interface. Thunderbird connects via IMAP4.

Each domain has its own user home directory so for each there is a /home/${domain_name}/Maildir/ directory as the base for storing emails, and each IMAP4 folder has an associated directory. Snippet:

  $ ls -1da  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux*
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.LinuxContainers
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.drbd
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.kernel
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.dev
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-i2c
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-input
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-pci
  Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-usb
Here's an extended snippet example from $HOME/.procmailrc that directs deliveries into the correct directory (IMAP4 folder):

  :0H
  * ^List-id: .*linux-usb\.vger\.kernel\.org
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-usb/
  
  :0H
  * ^List-id: .*linux-wireless\.vger\.kernel\.org
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linux-wireless/
  
  :0H
  * ^List-id: .*yaffs\.lists\.aleph1\.co\.uk
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.yaffs/

  :0H
  * ^List-id: .*util-linux\.vger\.kernel\.org
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.util-linux/


  ### LinuxContainers
  :0H
  * ^List-id: .*lxc-devel\.lists\.linuxcontainers\.org
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.LinuxContainers/

  ### Linaro
  
  :0H
  * ^List-id:.*linaro-dev\.lists\.linaro\.org
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.dev/

  :0H
  * ^List-id:.*linaro-kernel\.lists\.linaro\.org
  $HOME/Maildir/.Technology.FOSS.Projects.Linux.linaro.kernel/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by chx on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:25PM (#32716757)
Whose SMTP service you'd recommend?
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by eikenberry on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:10PM (#32717201)
I use zoho.com, $12 a year and I haven't had any issues with blacklists.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by butterknife on Sunday September 04, 2022 @03:29PM (#32716797)
Sendgrid works well for small volumes
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by intelVISA on Sunday September 04, 2022 @04:20PM (#32717290)
Yep SMTP relay is the only sane choice nowadays sadly. Sending your own mail is a losing battle against the email blacklist cartel.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by RockingGoodNite on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:52PM (#32720333)
No...it isn't the only sane choice. If it works for you, great. Forunately for Internet freedom, there many of us small timers left who have no issues hosting our own email.
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Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by intelVISA on Monday September 05, 2022 @02:54PM (#32727833)
I have no issue hosting, it's just tiresome keeping clear of Spamhaus etc.

Using an SMTP relay was a suitable trade-off, for me, but I respect those who are able to endure the pains of sending non-flagged emails without it.

[ Parent | on HN ]