After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
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"The era of distributed, independent email servers is over." Nope.
Sounds like this guy works for Big Email. If anything, the era is still on. This sort of post seems to be popular these days - self-host this or that "has failed", "I've tried", "I give up"... let them. I've been selfhosting/home-hosting since 2002 or so, so I feel his pain about setting things up. But for some reason, this article is just way over the top. A few of his points even work against him - doctors, universities, banks, and businesses and politicians DO selfhost their email. Every time he rescues their emails from the spam folder, it helps everyone.
They haven't won; he gave up.
EDIT: edited for clarity.
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@necrevistonnezr said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@LoudLemur He refers to self-hosting without an outbound email gateway - yes, that’s a problem which cannot be easily fixes…
Could somebody please briefly explain what an email gateway is?
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@LoudLemur if I’m not mistaken, it’s the smtp provider like mailgun, etc. that handles all outgoing email. I think that’s the cause of his frustration since maintaining a clean sending IP is a PITA.
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@scooke but he has a valid point that big tech should not blacklist entire IP blocks. That’s the main issue for self hosting and big tech is holding the reigns.
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@humptydumpty Sure, that is a valid point. But which blocks? He can't ask before he buys a VPS about the IP he might get? As for hosting from home, that HAS actually always been a problem unless you pay up for a business acccount. Many of his points seem to be just his experience, and that's not enough to convince X number of others to not bother trying.
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@scooke most home IP’s are dynamic so that’s another issue to worry about. A dedicated IP costs more than a VPS (my residential ISP wants $15/mo). Self hosting at home doesn’t make sense financially. But for a VPS, even if I get a bad IP, I should be able to remove it from blacklists and build a clean reputation within a reasonable timeframe. But it is moot with how big tech is enforcing things. I’m using mailgun nowadays, but last week I had to unblacklist my server IP even when I’m not using it for any outgoing mail. The system IS broken/rigged.
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@humptydumpty Don't give up!
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@necrevistonnezr said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
email gateway
That's is actually the only good way to do it in scale, having to manage and monitor just 3 IP is easier and that's how we do it, even if every customer have a dedicated Cloudron the all share 3 outgoing ip, this allow us to keep them monitored and the karma value will ne restored faster because of the amount of email you send.
If 1 mail over 5 in a day is recognize as spam, you will get blacklisted or grey listed sooner then if 10 mail over 1000 mail get recognize as spam.
And you will recover sooner.What often happened is that we have contacted blacklist and some of them have automatic mail to notify us of an abuse before listing us, this because we have proof that we have an antispam check got out going mail.
Obviously the biggest issue we have is Gmail that don't work with anybody and don't publish anything about there antispam.
So you never know if you are blacklisted or not. -
@humptydumpty said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@scooke most home IP’s are dynamic so that’s another issue to worry about. A dedicated IP costs more than a VPS (my residential ISP wants $15/mo). Self hosting at home doesn’t make sense financially.
Well, I host Cloudron in my home office with dynamic IPs on a NUC. Outbound email gateway is my very privacy conscious mail provider mailbox.org. For a small family, that’s more than sufficient.
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@necrevistonnezr thanks for the recommendation. How are you liking that NUC? I've been hoarding tiny PC's lately. I posted about them once before and have bought multiple more since. Finally, I have a surplus and no actual use for any of them. The last one is my Nextcloud home server. Hopefully, I'll have some time to make a proper shelf/tower for them during the holiday break.
@scooke After the 100th non-deliverable work email, I had to go with Mailgun for reliability. I haven't given up on the idea of self-hosting though, far from it! Cloudron makes it way too easy and I have hardware in excess to fool around with.
As for email servers being over, I highly doubt email is going anywhere (self-hosted or otherwise). However, if open-source apps like Matrix/Element gain more popularity and if enough integrations are made for them, they could replace the need for email in certain use-cases.
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@humptydumpty
Running a fanless Beebox (see here https://forum.cloudron.io/post/29114) in an old mailbox for protection
, switch and router are somewhere else (we have network connections all over the flat)
I have a Dell Optiplex 7020 FF sitting somewhere for fiddling, but uses too much electricity compared to the NUC for running 24/7…
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@necrevistonnezr according to
, you're drawing about 16W under load (maybe a bit more because of the HDD). IIRC, the draw for an i5-6500T mini PC (which is what most of my mini's have) is around 35W IDLE! I thought the i5-6500T might be too old for a NextCloud home server but the highest I've hit is 5% CPU usage for the app itself and 12% for the entire server (app + CR). You got a great setup there
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@humptydumpty Thanks! The external HDD is for Cloudron Backup only (from there via restic to OneDrive), so it’s asleep most of the time
Edit:
Ah, right, there’s an internal HDD for Plex (runs local only), all Cloudron related stuff is on the SSD. -
@humptydumpty said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@scooke but he has a valid point that big tech should not blacklist entire IP blocks. That’s the main issue for self hosting and big tech is holding the reigns.
That sounds like collective punishment...
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@scooke said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@humptydumpty Sure, that is a valid point. But which blocks? He can't ask before he buys a VPS about the IP he might get? As for hosting from home, that HAS actually always been a problem unless you pay up for a business acccount. Many of his points seem to be just his experience, and that's not enough to convince X number of others to not bother trying.
This makes me think of an IP address you are given by a VPS being like a bad penny, which people want to pass off to somebody else.
There ought to be a way to "clean" a dirty IP address, so that what you are provided isn't cursed from the previous user.
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@MooCloud_Matt said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@necrevistonnezr said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
email gateway
That's is actually the only good way to do it in scale, having to manage and monitor just 3 IP is easier and that's how we do it, even if every customer have a dedicated Cloudron the all share 3 outgoing ip, this allow us to keep them monitored and the karma value will ne restored faster because of the amount of email you send.
If 1 mail over 5 in a day is recognize as spam, you will get blacklisted or grey listed sooner then if 10 mail over 1000 mail get recognize as spam.
And you will recover sooner.What often happened is that we have contacted blacklist and some of them have automatic mail to notify us of an abuse before listing us, this because we have proof that we have an antispam check got out going mail.
Obviously the biggest issue we have is Gmail that don't work with anybody and don't publish anything about there antispam.
So you never know if you are blacklisted or not.If you suspect your IP address might be blacklisted for spam, what would be a good way to check? What would be a good way to recover the situation?
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@necrevistonnezr said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@humptydumpty said in After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.:
@scooke most home IP’s are dynamic so that’s another issue to worry about. A dedicated IP costs more than a VPS (my residential ISP wants $15/mo). Self hosting at home doesn’t make sense financially.
Well, I host Cloudron in my home office with dynamic IPs on a NUC. Outbound email gateway is my very privacy conscious mail provider mailbox.org. For a small family, that’s more than sufficient.
This is the coolest way to run Cloudron, the way that, I think, could bring Cloudron to the masses.
If you ever have time and the inclination and could create some sort of "how-to" video explaining how to solve the tricky parts of accomplishing your setup, I think that could be massive for Cloudron. @girish @nebulon what do you think?
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@LoudLemur
We pay a good amount of money for a service that checks our IPs and helps us intervene in those cases.
But for gmail, we just have some backup IP to use for all the outbound mail that goes to google, we have invested some time to develop the ability to select the origin IP to use based on the destination mail server.That's the point I think, self-host is good for a private, or max a small SMB, but not for a customer that needs mail to work to make money.
The investment that MooCloud has to do, to be in line (I'm not even trying to say "better") with the standard is pretty big, and can only be sustainable if you have customer to payit. -
@LoudLemur https://mxtoolbox.com/ and https://www.warmupinbox.com/ can help.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@marcusquinn
Exactly you need to use external solution to solve those issues, and then is not self hosted 100%, MX toolbox is really simple, it doesn't manage abuse report to your IPs or dmarc.(update me if something changed lately on that).
