DKIM, DMARC, SPF, rDNS/PTR, EHLO… all correct and verified in the email “original source,” BY GOOGLE. Still goes to SPAM folder because **** you, apparently. I hate Google.
Tbh, out of all services I’ve seen people self-host, email is the most common one I’ve seen people describe as a bad idea^tm .
I just chose a paid mail service (mailbox) and called it a day.
I do not understand all the people who are too afraid to try email hosting on their own that are out here discouraging people cause they want to sound right.
Email is hard cause people don’t host it enough and the few corps ignore the minority problems.
If more people shift back to hosting email the balance will tip again.
It is fine if you don’t want to host email but telling people not too without even trying yourself is anti-selfhost IMHO.
I’ve been hosting my e-mail for over 2 decades now, e-mail goes everywhere but gmail (despite working with them for years). They are doing it exactly so people stop doing it.
Even using a reputable hosting provider and personal domain will get you spam black holed these days
I wonder if there should be some kind of law or regulation around this. It’s an antitrust issue. Though no one in Congress would understand what this is.
There most certainly should. But Americans live in a corporatocracy.
Does gmail not do this kind of blocking outside of the US?
This here. My emails end up in gmail spam folders occasionally from what I am told. And I don’t self-host. I just use a good webhoster and my own domain. Fuck google.
Many hosting providers won’t even let you try, they don’t want to host potential spammers.
Soon not using a chromium browser will probably be considered a bad idea
I get what you mean, but this website specifically works completely fine on my Firefox (with uBlock). Please check your browser settings for things like disabled JavaScript.
Yeah everything is disabled its Firefox focus, everything always worked fine then like this past week all sorts of sites started showing that
That screen is from cloudflare. It means you’re blocking their JavaScript or iframe elements used to create the bot challenge. I get it quite often as I still use the old uMatrix extension. Temporarily unblocking and refreshing the page will let you through.
OK I went into the settings and disable JavaScript wasn’t active but I tried disabling all the tracker blocking and it worked
I use a free outbound smtp relay that lets me do like 5k emails on the free tier. I use it primarily for alerts and Immich updates / new user links. But I don’t do inbound so don’t have to expose any ports. Only time I did was to do validation with the relay so just a few minutes during setup.
Yeah we should just let them win. Why fight? It’s not like most of the spam and phishing come from Gmail and hotmail accounts. It’s those fucking self hosters
Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.
Yeah, I figure I did enough of a step by moving to Tutanota. Selfhosting email seems like overkill unless you’re running some large organization or doing self-hosting as a hobby.
Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail.
Stopping your own gmail use is trivially easy. It just scratches the surface. In order to not lick Google’s boots, you also need to stop sending email to gmail users. That means doing an MX lookup before emailing to see if their vanity email address is on a Gmail host. And of course this also means not sharing an email address with gmail users.
I do that, in fact. I also boycott Microsoft. In the end, this means I am not using email much at all.
How’s your self hosted email going? Any advice you can share to avoid some of the major issues?
@toxicmode @galoisghost I think those of us who can should selfhost an email address at least to contact other selfhosters even if we can’t use it effectively to contact users of Big Email. That’s how the network effect begins
Think of it like how a lot of the Fedi defederated from Gab or/and Thereads, except that this time it’s Big email that’s forcing the defederation
https://badrihippo.thekambattu.rocks/clog/staying-away-from-big-email/
Stop tempting me! I might do it.
One question, I currently use proton mail to use my domain for email and there are no issues afaik. Do you think a few years of using proton will have “whitelisted” my domain enough or will all the issues pop up once I change to hosting it myself?
I’ve run a mail server since the late 90s. I gave up running my own outbound years ago. Whether it gets received is too inconsistent. Primarily, make sure the IP you use isn’t on any spam lists. If it is, get a new IP or try to submit appeals. Make sure you have the standard anti spam/authenticity measures implemented (they’re listed in the OP).
These are the minimum. Years ago it was enough to have reasonable delivery. Unfortunately these aren’t that helpful anymore because spammers also set them up (often with seemingly randomly generated domain names). I assume because not having them was a fairly strong signal for being a spammer, so now they also set them up, which also means there’s not really any configuration / setup you can do to seem legitimate (aside from mail volume and the content itself which will be analyzed).
Anyway running your own SMTP itself is easy. The problem is getting your mail to the inbox or at least spam/junk folder (your mail may get blackholed and not even show up in spam). At least when you get a rejection, you know something is wrong, but many times the receiving server will indicate a success code and simply not deliver it to the user (not even to their spam).
Interesting! You said you gave up on the outbound, does that mean you can’t reply to mails you receive? But if you can reply, does that mean the sender (let’s assume someone with gmail) will get it or would even that likely end up blackholed or in spam?
Maybe they send emails using someone else’s smtp server? (Like some paid service that provides smtp?)
I can reply yo emails. It’s what jaybone said – I use a 3rd party outbound (SMTP).
I use Thunderbird as my mail client. In there you can define multiple IMAP/pop accounts (inbound) and multiple SMTP (outbound). So when I click reply, the SMTP I have set for that email address is a 3rd party service that sends emails using my domain.
This does have a privacy implication, so whether that’s appropriate for you is for you to decide. The 3rd party can read and save a copy of your outbound email inclusive of any content included with it (like the email you’re replying to if you include it).
What 3rd party service do you use?
Don’t take this as an endorsement as it’s not really intended to be used for this purpose and I’m probably going to switch, but I’ve been using sendgrid for a few years as I was familiar with it from business use. I was using mandrill before that until they changed their pricing and some other things.
EDIT: also worth mentioning I have a grandfathered free plan.
Honestly self hosted email can be just for self hosters talking to one another and that’s fine
Same. It’s great for a technical challenge. Don’t do it for your primary email unless you’re ok losing emails and having them rejected a lot.
Self-hosting email is quite the undertaking… I don’t have the energy to deal with it and just pay 10€/year for a hosting service.
Here’s an informative (and funny) talk on why self-hosting email in its current state is probably a bad idea.
Most email providers block new domains… You need to have the DNS records up for like 2 years before they start getting accepted… Or contact all the big doers to get yourself whitelisted
False. It’s a scoring system, where a domain registered within the last 14 days gets a negative score. SPF, DKIM, etc all bump the score up.
That sounds right, but I just had it take ~2 years for my personal custom domain stop hitting Trend’s filter we use at work.
I also self host email and so far haven’t had any problems. Initial setup was annoying but it’s required zero effort this past few years, and I don’t think my emails land in spam folders. Maybe I can help?
Shoot me a message at [email protected] (which I’ll delete after it gets a message, for obvious reasons) and I’ll take a look. (I misspelled the name, I apologize, no insult intended)
Honestly I think I’ve received 10 spam messages in the last four years, and five have been from gmail addresses (Best Buy invoice spam) in the past two months. I submit each one to support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse and hopefully it helps.
I might be out of the loop on how email works, but doesn’t it hop between several other email servers on its way from Alice to Bob (and at least some of it must still be unencrypted)? If so and given google’s scale you could probably just assume that even if they’re not your inbox they’re going to be at least handling many if not most emails along the way.
If you control the DNS and the mail server, you get to decide where it goes. However, if any senders or recipients are on gmail, Google basically has all of those emails’ content.
That was the theory, nowadays moest email goes from google or microsoft to google or microsoft. At least 99% of the rest goes directly from the senders provider to the recipients provider. Afaik none of the larger providers still accept non-TLS connections.
Yeah that’s what I’m saying. Even if you’re not using one of the big providers there’s a good chance they’re going to be at least handing it on its way to your self-hosted inbox, and its contents are unencrypted while they’re handling it (unless you encrypt the contents yourself). So there’s not much benefit to self hosting email if your goal is to keep your data out of big tech’s hands (and if that is your goal, don’t send anything important with email)
If neither the sender nor the recipient is hosted by google the email is never going to reach googles servers. It will go directly from the sender provider to the recipients provider.
Depends. Usually not. It hops from your computer to your email provider which then looks up the server of the recipient and sends it there. The recipient’s server might send it on internally and in big installations probably does so.
It is theoretically possible that one of the involved parties has a third party authorised to accept mails on their behalf in case of outages. I don’t believe that is very common nowadays. It’s much more likely that your provider will keep the mail for a few hours to days when it can’t reach the recipient.
But ideally only your provider and the recipient’s provider can read the mail with all connections in between being encrypted. There’s just no guarantee that all paths are encrypted. But I think nowadays that is much more likely than it used to be, thanks to Let’s Encrypt.
Now, if you don’t want any of the servers to be able to read the mail you have to encrypt it with something like GPG. But for that to work you need the recipient’s key. But hardly anyone uses that. And it only encrypts the content of the mail. Not the metadata.
I run my own mailserver in docker and it’s not so hard! There was some difficulty at the start with mail going to spam, but after a little while “warming up” the IP with usage, it works fine. It’s hardest to build an IP’s reputation in the beginning because if your mail goes to spam, it doesn’t typically lead to healthy conversations that can support it’s history.
My trick was to forward all my incoming gmail messages from the account I was replacing into the new server - that way I could receive and reply from the new mailserver if people sent mail to the old one. Once it built up a bit of a history it started working fine, and that took maybe a few conversations over a couple of days.
The thing I have noticed is that you very quickly get destroyed by incoming spam - a more advanced filter is definitely on the list.
One of the problems with self hosting is that a lot of IP addresses have historically been used for spam and still have a bad reputation. If you get assigned one of those IP addresses there’s very little you can do about your mails going to spam.
Another is most ISPs will put your IP in the PBL so unless you use a relay your outbound email is going nowhere. Google fiber was slow on updating their PBL when they rolled out service in my area so I got to send direct for several months before having to use an external relay.
I had a small problem with this, but Linode (others do that, too) allowed me to allocate myself a /56 and that solved it. Since IPv6 is preferred if set up - it’s the protocol that gets used. And so my reputation problems went away.
Honestly, it’s way past time to phase out email
This is a weird take. Care to expand on why you dislike it?
I mean this meme does a good job of explaining my biggest grievance, despite being a theoretically open protocol, it’s been lassoed into a nearly closed network controlled by big tech.
Beyond that, email(SMTP) is nearly 50 years old, and it has anachronistism that show
Outside of corporate life, email in the modern world is basically just a tool for marketing and identity verification, and that sucks, because I remember when it was more than that.
What alternative do you propose that is not based on some proprietary solution?
I can’t speak for @[email protected], but I boycott both Google and Microsoft. This means 95+% of prospective people, corps, and gov agencies I would exchange email with are not getting email from me. They are also not getting an email address out of me.
I have been done with email for nearly a decade now, mostly. So, to answer your question, I use fax and snail mail. Not joking. I feel liberated and don’t give a shit about postage or inconvenience. There is still that exceptional 5% or so who I will exchange email with, which does not have GAFAM in the loop.
I have been done with email for nearly a decade now, mostly. So, to answer your question, I use fax and snail mail. Not joking. I feel liberated and don’t give a shit about postage or inconvenience. There is still that exceptional 5% or so who I will exchange email with, which does not have GAFAM in the loop.
I respect that. Reminds me of Donald Knuth, who stopped using email in 1990: " I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address"
Interesting to see his take on “e-mail” vs “email”. I bet he changes his tune on “email” vs “mail” – where gen-z has decided that it’s okay to save keystrokes by dropping the “e” because no one uses snail mail anymore. Indeed I am always disguested when someone says “send a mail”. I have to ask for clarification and they always confirm that mean email.
Indeed I am always disguested when someone says “send a mail”.
Maybe this is more common when English is not your native language; e.g. in Germany, “mail” is “Brief”, and “email” is just “E-Mail” or more short “mail”, because no one says “elektronischer Brief”.
Interesting to see his take on “e-mail” vs “email”.
So that might just be the origin of this language butchering you observed; as “email” means something different in various languages, lots of people who don’t speak English as their first language might have chosen to use “mail” for electronic mail. That is just speculation of course.
Something new, that doesn’t have the anachronism of a nearly 50 year old protocol.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there is currently a good replacement, but I think one should be developed.
Its strange you think that I’m siding with a proprietary solution, when email is effectively controlled by major tech companies, which is one of its biggest flaws.
when email is effectively controlled by major tech companies,
That is not the case. We both can setup a mail server and email each other without any issues.
Yes, that’s true, but most people aren’t going to host an email server, because it’s a pain(I know, I administrate 3 of them), which means that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Proton, and the other big tech companies will always control the majority of email accounts, and that gives them effective control over the entire network. Our ability to self host servers outside of big techs bubble doesn’t make the bubble go away.
I don’t know where you are living, but in my place there are local “tech collectives” which are non-profit organizations that provide folks with an email address. Of course way too many people are still using gmail, but the alternative is there.
I think what’s worse is that you are basically forced to have one of those corporations email account for a smartphone, and nowadays you are basically forced to have a smartphone to participate in society.
I appreciate your commitment to the bit, but, this is still a shit take. Shut Up Wesley!
Might I ask why you think it’s a shit take? I’m genuinely surprised so many people seem to think email needs to be defended
Hell to the no.
For what reason? Email these days is basically just a machine for marketing and identity verification, and the latter can be done better by other solutions
Plus, despite the fact that email is designed to be open, it has been perverted by big tech into an effectively closed system, as your post makes reference to. I see no real reason to keep email going, when a better less centralized system could be built to replace it.
I self-hosted my own email for a few years, everything was set up and reporting correctly, but Google just would never have it. I think the worst is it would be a bit inconsistent.
Anyway, I switched to an email provider with my own domain and it’s much more reliable. That is until this week, I have noticed that some services are rejecting my domain. I think there is some whitelisting nonsense going on, but in those instances I just use an alias and that seems to work.
I just want to have control of my data!
I just want to have control of my data!
Google:
*fuck
I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It’s a pain for everyone.
This is done on purpose, to make people to switch to their e-mail or use them for hosting.
Google did the same thing with XMPP (they were welcomed when they joined, then they made it so XMPP users couldn’t message GTalk/Hangouts users, but the other way worked), they tried similar thing with Usenet, but they never get dominance there so they let their services to be major source of spam on Usenet until they were blocked, ultimately removing Usenet indexing from Google).
I would really encourage to contact our local reps (both federal as well as state) and encourage them to introduce legislation that would punish this practice.
My email service provider just marks everything as spam. So they’re not alone, you say?
Irritating how much spam comes from Gmail/microsoft.
Probably bad place to ask but.
Self hosting email is complicated only for sending mails or for receiving mail it’s also hard?
Depending on what you want to do you might not need to actually send any mail.
Also, the anti-spam rules do also apply if you are answering a mail, I suppose it does as a response envelopement doesn’t have any evidence that it’s an actual response. But I have no experience self hosting email.
Self hosting receiving mail is honestly, pretty straightforward, all things considered. Setup your MX record to point at a server you control, configure software to save messages however you want. Perhaps the most complicated step is wiring up certbot or similar software to get your SSL certificate for your mailserver. A Debian Linux system,
apt-get install postfix; apt-get install dovecotwill get you nearly 90% of the way there.Depending on your preference. there are docker containers that can do 100% of the process too, with all sorts of nice bells and whistles. If you don’t care about sending email, you can skip DKIM/SPF/DMARC. (though, if you are never sending from your domain, check here: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/protect-domains-without-email/ – there are some entries you can add to DNS to make sure everyone else knows)
@daniskarma @laurenceOfSuburbia yeah the complication is not technical so much as bureaucratic. Email itself is simple, but then you have to jump through hoops of tuning various other technical settings for Big Email to allow you in
I think it’s usually to do with sending, so if you’re only interested in receiving I think you’ll be fine (unless your server uptime’s really bad or something)
Self hosting an email server to send mails that don’t get flagged as spam is a nightmare, I’d rather not attempt doing it again. My Lemmy instance is using SMTP2Go and the free tier is more than enough for my current sending capacity needs
I’ve started mine and it works fine. All the Google shit goes straight to the bin though.
Google Groups allows spammers to subscribe you to their groups in a workspace account, but doesn’t allow you to unsubscribe since you’re not part of that workspace account… Worse - all autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.
Since I do not participate in Google Groups, the nuclear option is to file all mails from Google Groups as spam with a Sieve script.
Note the
requirepart may be too large as may sieve script also contains more rules than this one.require ["body", "date", "editheader", "envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags", "mailbox", "regex", "reject", "variables"]; if anyof( header :contains "List-Subscribe" "groups.google.com", header :matches "X-Google-Group-Id" "*" ) { if header :matches "Subject" "*" { set "subject" "${1}"; } else { set "subject" ""; } deleteheader "Subject"; addheader :last "Subject" "[Google-Groups-Spam] ${subject}"; fileinto "Junk"; }autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.
This sounds like a pretty effective way to get yourself unsubscribed from groups you don’t want to be in.
They will be drowned in hundreds of „Thanks for your email, but we don’t do support via mail. Please open a ticket at $URL“ and „Thanks for your mail, we will get back to you shortly. Your ticket ID is #123456“. Also everything you add as an auto response will be distributed to all other victims in that group, so I chose to not be a dick.
