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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.

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!

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-...

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.
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.

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.
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.
Re:After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have... by RockingGoodNite on Sunday September 04, 2022 @11:48PM (#32720315)
Agreed.
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.
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.