Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical?atomcommentsDWiki2022-02-09T20:54:22ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical.By Dave Lane on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:b4ae2a1d9b3b14f29e4f80b21ef951173af92d89Dave Lanehttps://tech.oeru.org<div class="wikitext"><p>The more we give up on hosting our own email (those of us ready and willing to do it, at least) the more we cost everyone else the ability to do so. I've been running my own email services for a few decades. I'm not willing to be flotsam and jetsam within a global monopolists' systems - I want to control my own email destiny and demonstrate that it's possible for others, too. </p>
<p>After years of building my own systems from cobbled-together components, I've been running something far better (and yeah, it's also component-based and entirely Free and Open Source Software, but far more comprehensive and well considered than anything I've previously deployed): (Docker-based) <a href="https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs/">MailCow instances</a> for myself and my work and organisations I'm involved in. </p>
<p>Been using MailCow for several years, through multiple upgrade cycles. It takes an hour or so to set up on a $20/month cloud VPS. It offers all those things you suggest are hard/impossible for individuals to provide, e.g. calendaring, really nice webmail, solid distributed anti-spam (and, for the benefit of Windows users, anti-virus), searchability, and more. The only thing it doesn't offer is diverse outgoing server identities, so it is occasionally subject to being put on overzealous blocklists (e.g. of Cloud provider IP ranges)... but it just shows how capricious and generally 'too big to care' the 'big tech' providers are, and how they run roughshod over the whole idea of email. That makes me all the more adamant that we need to ensure that individually hosted email is possible, and we do that by encouraging those who are able to host their own to do so.</p>
</div>2022-02-09T20:54:22ZBy David Matthews on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:d2ec045f4ba1153575fbea62436ad5e1f6218138David Matthews<div class="wikitext"><p>You do need a VM or some machine with a non-domestic always on connection, but otherwise I couldn't agree less. Any technically experienced person can set this up and maintenance is negligible apart from an annual dist upgrade.</p>
<p>If you're hosting you own web site, why wouldn't you also host your own email?</p>
<p><a href="https://dmatthews.org/perfect_email.html">https://dmatthews.org/perfect_email.html</a></p>
</div>2022-01-14T15:22:31ZBy Nils on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:f7c46b6f9ec1c803057e0a012c3b8c16fe4cab74Nils<div class="wikitext"><p>I have to agree with Arnaud, it doesn't seem like the big providers like Google or Microsoft have better spam filter, they are just filtering far more aggressively. If you run your artisinal mail server you'll often see your legitimate mail filtered by the bigger providers (due to "reputation") while at the same time receiving heaps of Spam from them. </p>
<p>The main drawback for using someone else's computer to run my e-Mail infrastructure is that they then also have access to the contents of my e-Mails (provided the sender doesn't encrypt). That's serious enough for me to continue running my own infrastructure for now. As long as there is a sufficient number of third party services I'm assuming/hoping I can continue to run my small setup. </p>
<p>Otherwise I have to agree, I wouldn't host friends on my infrastructure, at least not those used to using proprietary Webmail.</p>
</div>2022-01-06T10:28:11ZBy QL on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:b073531a4d42bc79fc09b0c47720bed8aaa9bc39QL<div class="wikitext"><p>I do hope your article is mostly trying to generate discussion rather than being fully your experience, because that would mean that the internet is a cause lost to gatekeepers.
But I do think that there is one reality about - lets' call it what it is - outsourced email that does ring true in a corporate context, and that is that issues that would be considered critical with services that are run locally are shrugged off with an "oh well, what can one expect?" when something similar happens to big providers. Users' tolerance, or perhaps senior management tolerance, of problems or inability to add features is much higher with outsourced services. If this were not so, recent days-long outages on many of the big platforms would have sent corporates scurrying back to local services, but that doesn't seem to have happened. To put it another way, imagine the outcome if a local email system was unavailable for days on end. Heads would roll, meetings would be had, projects would be initiated. Outsourced problems? Oh well, what can be done.</p>
</div>2022-01-04T10:09:07ZBy rephlex on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:e8fe22d550774a98ed561631ba5f97addeb8602frephlex<div class="wikitext"><p>Sorry to hear you are unable to run a scalable, working email service. But it is a quite simple one man task to set up and maintain such infrastructure.</p>
</div>2021-12-26T07:34:27ZBy Private Email Administrator on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:1ed63c1b00d791bcd2bb97990ff3a588fb68f494Private Email Administrator<div class="wikitext"><p>I run my own, primarily to learn how it all works, plus to avoid having all my email scanned for data to sell to brokers. However, it also allows me to see something of how the big providers handle email. </p>
<p>For example, Yahoo! will attempt to use SSLv3 (deprecated in 2015 for lack of security). If my system doesn't offer that, it simply switches to sending in the clear instead of using any of the more secure options my server offers it. ATT periodically blocks my system, sending bounce messages. If I follow the process in the bounce message, I find I'm not on any of the upstream block lists they use, and the admin who responds to me states that my server "is not blocked". Amazon's mail infrastructure bounced a message back to me, because it was looping through their systems. After 25 hops, they just reject the email. Oh, and the "Received:" headers gave me the names and IPs of 25 internal machines. GMail is not broken, just annoying. They will bounce an email saying "this message fails RFC822 checks", with no further details. And no awareness that RFC822 has been obsoleted for some time. Even Apple will periodically block my emails. They, at least, will respond reasonably and fix it within a day or two. In this case, it appears to be an over-zealous filtering system. It's only happened twice in the past 5 years.</p>
<p>I don't know if this refutes or bolsters your argument. I think it does show that an email system is hard to get right, even for the big providers. I think there's an argument in favor of running a small email system, though. Being smaller, and more targeted, it's easier to get right, and easier to keep right.</p>
<p>Private Email Administrator</p>
</div>2021-12-25T17:24:51ZBy Arnaud Gomes on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:ce3d8426d0533f2703ae451ac90d492301ca9128Arnaud Gomes<div class="wikitext"><p>This is where I disagree with Chris: in my experience, big mail hosters, particularly Microsoft, are not really better at spam filtering. Their filters are just more skewed towards false positives.</p>
<p>In fact I think this is a recent development, maybe the last couple of years; Microsoft (and Google to a lesser extent) do not guarantee legitimate mail delivery anymore. In this, they are much worse than most other mail hosting options.</p>
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</div>2021-12-25T11:15:24ZBy Sotiris Tsimbonis on /blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPracticaltag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/EmailServersNoLongerPractical:72d02c596c7884339285a02852c4cfeb600ed690Sotiris Tsimbonishttps://stsimb.irc.gr/<div class="wikitext"><p>Still running my own mail server, one thing I refuse to give up is access to log files, to investigate what happened to an email...</p>
<p>In $DAYJOB we use Google, and there are frequent cases where our users send email to microsoft destinations, remote mail server accepts the email with 250, the recepients reports they never got it, but their IT team claims they don't know where it is... I find that unacceptable!</p>
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