The Battle for Power on the Internet

Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by CodeMage on Wednesday October 30, 2013 @02:45PM (#6642327)

Maybe it's trivially easy to host your own e-mail, but isn't it pretty hard to convince other servers to accept e-mail originating from your host? I haven't been following things closely, but I remember reading about stuff like DKIM and SPF and I seem to recall that you need a static IP for some of the stuff involved. All in all, sounds like a non-trivial hassle and non-trivial cost.

On that note, is there a down-to-earth guide to setting up your own e-mail host?

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by claudius on Wednesday October 30, 2013 @04:43PM (#6643240)

You need a static IP, yes, but any VPS will get you one, so that can hardly be an issue. In seven years of hosting my own email I never had issues with delivering mail to other providers.

Setting up an SMTP daemon and IMAP/POP3 server is rather easy, the most difficult decision being which SMTPd to choose (I like Postfix, but Exim is Debian’s default and hence supposedly good as well, others like Courier) and then reading the relevant manpages :)

If you search for, e.g., "Postfix tutorial", you'll find plenty of reasonably good guides.

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by alandarev on Thursday October 31, 2013 @06:49AM (#6646080)

Setting up an email server, which at least comes close to the gmail's quality is definitely not to be qualified as "easy" process. Going through this several times, I can assure you spending good several days and nights to investigate, choose, configure, debug, and enable useful features like greylisting.

Then again, you have to worry about redudancy. How would you feel missing an important email, due to your VPS/Dedicated server being currently ddos'ed or unreachable for other reasons.

In addition, do not forget about backing up.

So, that again is in no way "easy 1 hour" task, especially for those who are doing it first time.

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by e12e on Thursday October 31, 2013 @01:35AM (#6645433)

> You need a static IP, yes, but any VPS will get you one, so that can hardly be an issue.

At which point all your data is up for grabs by your VPS provider?

I host my own mail (for values of "my own" where mail server is hosted on a vps on a foreign server), but I think it's a stretch to say it's trivial to do so.

I think one of the most serious problems the Internet is facing is the growing split between "servers and hosts" and "consumers and clients" -- and the asymmetric bandwidth (both adsl and cable). It favours designs that are centralized, not because of sound architectural reasons -- but because of inferior infrastructure.

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by Theodores on Wednesday October 30, 2013 @07:16PM (#6644181)

I don't understand why email hosting has to be so difficult. You say it is easy, which it is if you know what you are doing, but it is not really that simple, is it? There is no out of the box solution that just works, even the microsoft effort called exchange is not that. You should be able to configure a mail server with the ease that you can configure a mail client.

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by devicenull on Wednesday October 30, 2013 @07:29PM (#6644260)

Spam is the reason. Mail servers are easy to set up, it's all the crap you need to do to actually get your mail accepted that's hard.

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by rsync on Wednesday October 30, 2013 @08:14PM (#6644474)

In 16 years of running my own mail server(s) I have never done anything to "get my mail accepted", other than make sure relaying is turned off, which I think it is by default in just about every implementation since 1998.

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Re:The Battle for Power on the Internet by zachlatta on Thursday October 31, 2013 @01:44AM (#6645457)

Consider yourself lucky. I made the mistake of not setting up my email with OpenDKIM and virtually all of my mail went to spam for a few months.

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