Resend is also built on top of SES, and yet it's an extra layer of hosted services on top of it. So this is actually a self-hosted alternative to i.e. the functionality that Resend offers, even though there are still other underlying dependencies. Seems like a reasonable way to describe it IMO.

The last time I tried to use Sendy with SES I received a NNN from AWS after I stating I would be using it for email marketing (MailChimp alternative). It seems that my "self-hosting" idea was cancelled by a 3rd party.

What is an “NNN”? I can guess the general context, but I couldn’t find anything with an Internet search.

I'm sorry. That's a triple negative like "no, no, no", an absolute denial.

Most likely you did not answer the questions that are most important to them.

- How will you make sure that only subscribed recipients will get your emails - How will you handle bounces and complaints - How will you monitor your sending

Don't beat around the bush and you will be approved in less than 1 day.

Self-hosting the mail-composing, mail-merging and tracking functions while using third-party SMTP is well-trod territory. The former can be done on a pretty basic box and the latter, at scale, is a heavy lift.

My guess is Plunk is for people who need a Mailchimp-like offering at a lower-than-Mailchimp price point.

It’s misleading to call it an “email platform” you can self-host though.

It confused you. That doesn’t make it misleading.

It didn't confuse me, it mislead me.

being pedantic doesn't mean you were misled.

self-hosting does not have to mean that you host the whole stack yourself

That is literallly what it means.

This is self hosted. I think we'd all accept that a "self hosted Stripe" that obviously had to offload payment processing to a third party gateway could still be self hosted because the platform is, not every dependency. Volume email is not something you should be looking to 'self host' and would leave the product dead on arrival if it did.

It feels like pedantry to critique that aspect so heavily over spirit v letter.

Agreed. I've been self-hosting my email with Gmail for 15 years and it's perfect. /s

This is one thing to have a self hostable platform you can plug to any email infrastructure of you choice, another one to have it dependent on one specific vendor.

Where's the line, then? You're always going to have external dependencies, so in your usage it seems like an unattainable ideal more-so than a useful phrase anyone could use to convey ideas.

In my utility room I've got a box running TrueNAS with a pile of hard-drives serving data over SMB and NFS. I've got a bunch of tiny business desktop PCs all set up in a k3s cluster hosting a variety of services for myself, family, and friends. Is this self-hosting?

The entire thing's half-useless without a tiny VPS that provides ingress since I'm behind CGNAT. Speaking of, I've got no way to get bits to and from the internet without my ISPs. I also rely on external services for off-site backups and some other storage. While I run my own IMAP/webmail services, I rely on AWS SES for sending email because managing email deliverability (especially from a shared residential address) is something I just don't have the time and patience for.

I think it's generally more useful to take it to mean "taking more control over your dependencies, data and privacy" without drawing a hard line. If someone migrates their social group off of Facebook and on to their own mastadon/something instance running on a VPS somewhere, I don't see any reason to gatekeep the term "self hosting". Making the goal unattainable just discourages people from making positive steps.

> Where's the line, then? You're always going to have external dependencies

uh no. Only if you choose to.

You running a Tier 1 Network from your house?

Words have meaning. Insisting on proper usage is not gatekeeping. It’s like this with every new word; everybody wants to appropriate it to mean whatever they themselves are doing, in order to unfairly, and dishonestly, capitalize on the value the word signals. See also, for example, “ecological”, or “open source”. And they all complain about gatekeeping when they are called out, too.

The meaning of words is defined by the people that use them and how they're understood by others.

"Full control over the whole stack, full stop, no exceptions" is not how people generally use or understand the term "self hosting", and if we were to prescriptively define it as that it would make self hosting unattainable and useless as a term.

I proposed a useful way to draw the line. How would you propose we define it?

IMHO, unless you own the hardware, it’s not “self-hosting”.

IMHO, unless you have said hardware running in a location under your personal control (i.e. a room, building or house you either own or rent), it’s not “self-hosting”.

Both of these are not unattainable, or were not so in the relatively recent past.

But I will concede that it’s not always easy to distinguish in the gray zones. It’s like where you sleep. The differences are gradual from “owning”, “renting”, “apartment by the week”, “dorms”, “hotel room”, “airbnb”, “hostel”, “flophouse”, “tent”, “homeless”. Which of these constitutes a “home”? Opinions vary.

That said, however, resorting to “The meaning of words is defined by the people that use them” is also something which people arguing in bad faith almost always do.

You said self hosting means you own the entire stack yourself.

What makes "the hardware and the physical location" anything but arbitrary in terms of that? Why is that "the whole stack"? Why is the hardware and location more important than how I, or anyone else in the world, actually accesses it, when basically all of us are relying on some external party for internet access? What justifies a line that prevents me from deriding anything as "not self hosting" if someone hasn't set up their own tier 1 network?

Why does putting a server in my house, but relying on an ISP, an external box for access, and a bunch of other stuff count as "self hosting" but sticking an old rack mount server at a friend's place because they have symmetric gigabit fibre and my acreage has 5/0.3 DSL not self hosting?

Why would purchasing a server and colocating it at a data centre with a fully encrypted drive be less "self hosting" than putting a raspberry pi in my utility room behind tailscale to bypass the CGNAT? How is putting a server in a data centre different than putting it in a rented apartment?

If I run a MUD on my laptop that's online whenever I check in to a hostel and have internet, am I self-hosting the MUD? If I'm not, who would you say is hosting it?

Circling back to my original comment--what is the actual benefit to "your own hardware on property you own"? Is it "taking control over your dependencies, data, and privacy"? Because then anything that accomplishes that should probably be included on a spectrum of self hosting. Somebody hosting a matrix server on an Digital Ocean VPS as a social network for their friends is still closer to that goal than somebody setting up a Discord server. Somebody hosting a Kubernetes cluster in their closet on a residental ISP is closer. Somebody racking a bunch of gear at a DC is closer.

There's no reason to tell any of these people "you're doing it wrong".

On a separate note: I feel I've got a fair point here, one that you've practically admitted in your own comment. Going on to strongly imply I'm arguing in bad faith really came across as a dick move.

Trying to redefine “self-hosted” to suit your purposes does not benefit anybody but people trying to make “self-hosted” a feel-good meaningless marketing term.

> There's no reason to tell any of these people "you're doing it wrong".

I’m saying they’re not self-hosting. Everything else is you hearing things.

I would normally obey the rules of debate and answer your litany of questions, but I think that in this case it would not help anybody, as you already know the answers.

Even if, the core of emailing is sending emails.

Its like saying Opensource dosen't mean your code needs to readble for everyone . Doesn't make sense.

To most shops, using SES is considered "doing it ourselves" so I somewhat get the characterization. It's very common for self-hosters to use DO, Lightsail, Hetzner because the thing you're hosting is the software. With SES the line between it and SG can be huge if you're using all of SG's high-level features or razor thin if you use SG as SMTP over API.

I would say self-hosting is not equivalent to DIY. It's about owning the whole stack, not about bought-vs-made.

Furthermore, the thing that complicates the current discussion is with email services in particular, so much depends on reputation and avoiding getting on block-lists. There's also the header wizardry that has become a requirement for interoperating with a lot of large email servers that isn't required for using the protocol but is practically required to ensure delivery.

On the flip-side of that, there are those who want the extra amount of customization that can only truly come from owning the entire stack. Or perhaps they already have a high-reputation IP address they have been sending from for years, and a self-hosted solution is necessary to continue with that (barring some transfer of that IP address to the operation of another company). In that case, calling this self-hosted is being disingenuous.

In some ways I see the dependency on SES (or other third party provider) as being a benefit for email hosting, especially for a new venture/property. It's why there is some value in depending on other examples of managed services. But I would be clear about that and not call it self-hosted.

It's an open-source marketing platform not an email server.

where does it say it's an email server?

So if an application uses a 3rd party provider for authentication (Google, Github, etc) is this no longer considered "self-hosted", despite it running on user's hardware?

I'm curious to know where you draw your imaginary line.

SES is an email platform. So Plunk is a self-hosted email platform - which uses a cloud platform to actually send email. If it's not sending email by itself, it's not a self-hosted email platform.

Those apps using 3rd party auth providers almost universally have them as an optional plugin, allowing you to choose one of a dozen auth providers or your own self-hosted one. You're not tied to any specific 3rd party platform, and rarely tied to any 3rd party platform at all.

It depends if that 3rd party provider is mandatory or not or if you have the option of having local auth / your own keycloak server, whatever.

Once you have an external requirement and not option, it is no longer a self-hostable software.

if we look at the philosophy behind self-hosting - to be able to host it ourselves, aka not rely on an external party for hosting, that means that if an external party is down or otherwise unavailable, then that line becomes fairly apparent. If 3rd party auth is required, then it's not really self-hosting then is it, because if that third party is down and the software can't be used, then that philosophy is violated. if it's optional, then that's fine though.

For something to be considered self-hosted, If the bombs drop and civilization is over and me, and my home lab are the only survivors, can I still use that software? I'd probably have other concerns in that case, like how am I going to survive nuclear winter, but that's where the imaginary line is.

That certainly rules out all chat, email, and peer to peer software.

Other than that, what's your power supply like?

I think you are mistaking interoperability with a network with dependency with a propietary service from a specific vendor. These are different things.

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41179737

Comms software can't be used if there is nothing to Comm with.

how so? ircd will keep running just fine on my server, as well as exim and dovecot for email. external Name resolution would be an issue, but I can run internal DNS for the other survivors that join my network.

edit: prmoustache understood your comment better than i did.

If an IRC deamon runs on the only server left in the world .. what's the point? Who's going to log in?

the question was if it is self hosting or not, and eg slack and discord are not. so regardless of how many humans are still alive to use it, on the only server still running, the survivors could use something self hosting whereas they could not use one that required a system that was down.

The answer given was:

> If the bombs drop and civilization is over and me, and my home lab are the only survivors, can I still use that software?

which rules out any software used to connect to non existant other servers or people.

Sure, the software "works" .. it just doesn't do anything .. ie. it can't be "used".

Yes it does.

That ircd servers in the example above can still be used with a bot as an automation tool (at that point as the only survivor the security would be the least of your concerns), as a way to invent imaginary friends to pretend your life is less miserable, whatever.

Or say you have a mastodon or pixelfed instance. Sure no other instance will ever connect and no other user will ever be able to see your posts...but you. Which could include some fond memories you want to keep.

It's a pointless intermediary when you have the bots directly there on your last remaining server though.

These semantic games are obfuscating the real issue here; tying the definition of "self hosting" to the "If the bombs drop and civilization is over and me, and my home lab are the only survivors" scenario is less useful than a two handed pit saw to a sole survivor.

I appreciate your assist to what I consider to be fragmede's "foot in keyboard" moment of poor definition, I suspect we're all better served with a better definition.