And yet email addresses being domain specific also makes it impossible for end users of popular service providers to migrate to another service, unless they are using their own domain name.
I’ve been self-hosting my personal email for over 20 years, but I would never use it to send transactional mail. That belongs on a different domain using an ESP that has the reputation for it (I prefer Postmark).
The solution to "my transactional email service does not deliver to one ISP" is "use a transactional email service". I have used transactional email services for low volume and highly variable sites and have had very few problems, none of them general blocks - there were warnings from providers and a single digit number of hard bounces when one site had a vulnerability to registration spam (owner thought the previous developers had a honeypot to stop it, turned out it not so).
Its very weird that low volumes are the problem. I have been self-hosting personal email for myself and a few family members (so very low volume) on an OVH VPS for years. I cannot deliver to Hotmail (MS hosted institutional email works, outlook.com works) but that is the only problem I have encountered myself. The heaviest sender in the family had emails rejected by one business.
It's true. The megacorporations are actively blocking communication between human persons because it increases their profit and the rules don't apply to them. But this doesn't mean you need to roll over and just take it. The benefits of hosting your own email far outweigh the problems of delivery to some megacorps.
>self-hosting email is an anachronism of a simpler internet. The good old days. They are long over.
This is only true if you are being paid to run a for-profit business or institution. For human people acting in their own interest the fight for free communication is far from over.
Part of the problem is setting up a login system relying on a complicated network of unreliable mail providers (or SMS or any other poison du jour) in the critical path. That's asking for trouble even when everything on your end is done correctly and going smoothly.
Personally I have never had any issues hosting my own email (for myself or for business customers) for the last 25 years.
The only time I've ever come across a big problem with email in general was when one of my customers was using 1and1.com hosted email, who apparently have a bad reputation due to spam, and some providers outright block them... but moving that company to self-hosted email fixed the problem.
Some people say "this is obviously wrong" and other people say "this is too obviously correct to be worth mentioning." That combination can sometimes indicate an interesting point.
I had one email bounced from that specific provider, I don't have a website on my mail domain, but I explained what I used it for and never had any issues. I send like less than 1 email per quarter to them and it kept working after they whitelisted my ip.
Back when I was first learning about Tech (early 2000's), I installed a mail server at home and configured it all wrong so I gave up on it. A few days later I noticed that my drive was getting full and didn't know why. This is how I learned about a honeypot, I had left it running, someone had used it for sending spam but since I screwed up the setup all the spam was stuck on my computer with nowhere to route out.
Hosting email yourself is fine. Once you figure out the right incantations and order of animal sacrifice, it will stay fine.
Mine has been online for 15 years, and I have no issues. I don't even get much spam because it's a weird domain. No routing issues to anyone. It's been my one and only email service for many years.
However, I must strongly caution everyone: do NOT give an account to someone you aren't already married to. I've been administering my ex's email for ten years, and I expect I'll be maintaining their account until one of us dies. I could kick them out, but we all know how catastrophic it would be to lose your primary email, even if you were given years of time to migrate.
So I'll just grumble about it until I die.
Run your own email server. It's fun-ish. Just don't give your partner an account unless you're also giving them a ring.
I self-hosted for well over 20 years, I did not throw the towel and I do not plan to. Self-hosting is a sign of pride. Neither my government nor my Prime Minister nor even my Ministry of Interior or Foreign Ministry can host their own email.
Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted.
I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.
In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.
I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.
Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.
Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.
- Don't do this and that and you'll disappear from "the internet" (google, now llms)
- Don't..
How about we bring internet back to its roots? Let's keep own directory of websites like in ye good old times and be done with it. Internet became a garden of few big companies. 1995-2005 RIP
I think the big problem is that anyone can email anyone at any time for any reason; and that it's highly abused by people who think what they are doing is fine.
I've been hosting my own email server since 1999. It started in San Francisco, moved to a colo in socal for awhile and is currently in my cellar here in Zurich on a fixed residential ip.
Thinks have definitely gotten stricter over the years, with things like dkim and a few other acronyms I can't remember. But if you follow the rules and keep your server secure I've never had a problem sending to Google, Microsoft, etc.
I'd rather not host my own mail but I like having it close by where if someone wants to subpoena me they factually have to go through me. Also I have so much historical email (27 years) it is GBs and so costly.
Sure, it's a pain in the ass, but why should we scare people away who WANT to self-host?
Pro tip for people with low mail volume or those who can spare a few packets on extra DNS traffic: Validating that a host has a non-provider PTR record which has corresponding A/AAAA/CNAME records resolving back to that same IP address, is enough to filter out a large bulk of spam.
30 comments
[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 56.9 ms ] threadIts very weird that low volumes are the problem. I have been self-hosting personal email for myself and a few family members (so very low volume) on an OVH VPS for years. I cannot deliver to Hotmail (MS hosted institutional email works, outlook.com works) but that is the only problem I have encountered myself. The heaviest sender in the family had emails rejected by one business.
as always: imho (!)
idk:
as a business, if the "main focus" of your business is related to email =?> self-host.
but if this not your core business: why in the world would you even think about self-hosting!?
pay someone "as a service" / for your "peace of mind" and be done with that.
as a private person:
if you are interested in learning a lot about the internet and especially e-mail: do self-host ;)
if not: pay someone a few bucks a month and do stuff that matters to you ;)
just my 0.02€
>self-hosting email is an anachronism of a simpler internet. The good old days. They are long over.
This is only true if you are being paid to run a for-profit business or institution. For human people acting in their own interest the fight for free communication is far from over.
Having said that, I host some of my mail with Hetzner, and even at their scale they sometimes have deliverability issues.
I self-host my own personal email service. And it's fine. Painful at times, yes, but serviceable.
https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2023/0725.html
(but you can just route these through someone else)
The only time I've ever come across a big problem with email in general was when one of my customers was using 1and1.com hosted email, who apparently have a bad reputation due to spam, and some providers outright block them... but moving that company to self-hosted email fixed the problem.
- anyone got any ideas? is this their MOAT?
So this issue seems very specific to TEM
Last time I setup a mail server
Mine has been online for 15 years, and I have no issues. I don't even get much spam because it's a weird domain. No routing issues to anyone. It's been my one and only email service for many years.
However, I must strongly caution everyone: do NOT give an account to someone you aren't already married to. I've been administering my ex's email for ten years, and I expect I'll be maintaining their account until one of us dies. I could kick them out, but we all know how catastrophic it would be to lose your primary email, even if you were given years of time to migrate.
So I'll just grumble about it until I die.
Run your own email server. It's fun-ish. Just don't give your partner an account unless you're also giving them a ring.
Last time I checked, only State Security self-hosted.
I was probably lucky, but I rarely had delivery problems. The last one was a couple years ago with Microsoft swallowing my emails and it was due to the combination of a fairly old exim and a TLS certificate verification quirk at *.protection.outlook.com. I found a fix in the form of a configuration option somewhere on SO.
In all fairness, there is very little maintenance involved, and whenever I have to do maintenance work, I take the opportunity to learn something new. Like this year, I decided to finally replace my aging Debian jessie setup by Arch Linux, and I rewrote all cron jobs as systemd timers.
I must admit that when I send a really important email, I check the mail server log if it went off without errors, but this does not bother me as checking logs manually once in a while is a good thing anyway.
Lastly, a piece of advice: treat self-hosting like a hobby and learn to enjoy it.
Oh and the very last thing: the person who designed Exim configuration for Debian deserves a special place in hell for all the hours wasted. If you set up Exim on Debian, just figure out how to use the upstream exim config and adapt it to your needs.
Some markets just aren't marketing.
- Don't host your website yourself
- Don't operate your servers yourself
- Don't even own a website yourself
- Don't allow robots onto your site
- Don't allow cookies by default
- Don't do this and that and you'll disappear from "the internet" (google, now llms)
- Don't..
How about we bring internet back to its roots? Let's keep own directory of websites like in ye good old times and be done with it. Internet became a garden of few big companies. 1995-2005 RIP
Thinks have definitely gotten stricter over the years, with things like dkim and a few other acronyms I can't remember. But if you follow the rules and keep your server secure I've never had a problem sending to Google, Microsoft, etc.
I'd rather not host my own mail but I like having it close by where if someone wants to subpoena me they factually have to go through me. Also I have so much historical email (27 years) it is GBs and so costly.
The author has two other submissions, one of which is entitled "Programmatic SEO: Generating 100k+ Pages That Rank".
I'm at the point now where I find it incredibly rude when someone expects me to read LLM output without clearly identifying it as such.
Figure I can always change my sender if I run into issues, but at least I control my inbox.
Pro tip for people with low mail volume or those who can spare a few packets on extra DNS traffic: Validating that a host has a non-provider PTR record which has corresponding A/AAAA/CNAME records resolving back to that same IP address, is enough to filter out a large bulk of spam.