"Don't like this? Build your own!"
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No can do...
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray?
No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this network.
Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.
I have been self-hosting my email since I got my first broadband connection at home in 1999. I absolutely loved having a personal web+email server at home, paid extra for a static IP and a real router so people could connect from the outside. I felt like a first-class citizen of the Internet and I learned so much.
Over time I realized that residential IP blocks were banned on most servers. I moved my email server to a VPS. No luck. I quickly understood that self-hosting email was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I have been fighting back out of pure spite, obstinacy, and activism. In other words, because it was the right thing to do.
But my emails are just not delivered anymore. I might as well not have an email server.
So, starting today, the MX records of my personal domain no longer point to the IP of my personal server. They now point to one of the Big Email Providers.
I lost. We lost. One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers.
This is unethical, discriminatory and uncompetitive.
Record scratch
Freeze frameWait, uncompetitive?
Please bear with me. We will be there in a minute.
First, some basics for people who may not be familiar with the issue.
No need to trust my word. Google has half a billion results for "my email goes directly to spam". >Search any technical forum on the internet and you will find plenty of legitimate people complaining that their emails are not delivered.
What's the usual answer from experienced sysadmins? "Stop self-hosting your email and pay [provider]."
Having to pay Big Tech to ensure deliverability is unfair, especially since lots of sites self-host their emails for multiple reasons; one if which is cost.
Newsletters from my alumni organization go to spam. Medical appointments from my doctor who has a self-hosted server with a patient intranet go to spam. Important withdrawal alerts from my bank go to spam. Purchase receipts from e-commerces go to spam. Email notifications to users of my company's SaaS go to spam.
You can no longer set up postfix to manage transactional emails for your business. The emails just go to spam or disappear.
Big Tech companies are under serious scrutiny and being asked to provide interoperability between closed silos such as instant messaging and social networks.
Well, email usage is fifteen points above social networking.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. Nobody noticed the irony of regulating things that matter less than email.
Right now institutions don't talk about regulating email simply because they take it for granted, but it's not.
In many countries politicians are forced to deploy their own email servers for security and confidentiality reasons. We only need one politician's emails not delivered due to poorly implemented or arbitrary hellbans and this will be a hot button issue.
We are all experiencing what happened when politicians regulated the web. I hope you are enjoying your cookie modals; browsing the web in 2022 is an absolute hell.
What would they do with email?
The industry should fix email interoperability before politicians do. We will all win.
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I don't really understand the technical details of what he's describing - is it deliberate, or is it just because things have got complex?
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@Doctor-Phibes said in "Don't like this? Build your own!":
I don't really understand the technical details of what he's describing - is it deliberate, or is it just because things have got complex?
From what he wrote, e.g.,:
I implemented all the acronyms, secured antispam measures, verified my domain, made sure my server is neither breached nor used to relay actual spam, added new servers with supposedly clean IPs from reputable providers, tried all the silver bullets recommended by Hacker News, used kafkaesque request forms to prove legitimity, contacted the admins of some blacklists.
I believe he has demonstrated reasonable diligence to get his system to work. He also mentions “his community” the SDF, which do have a bunch of very knowledgeable old-school Unix/Internet admin gurus with whom he supposedly consulted. So I would like to believe that the problems reside outside his realm of control, and I am sympathetic to his plight.
Still, many people/organizations continue to host their own email services on their own private servers (remember Hillary Clinton?), and they continue to be able to send emails. Our own TNCR uses its own private e-mail server to handle email and it works OK with most other email services (there are known exceptions).
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@Doctor-Phibes said in "Don't like this? Build your own!":
I don't really understand the technical details of what he's describing - is it deliberate, or is it just because things have got complex?
From what he wrote, e.g.,:
I implemented all the acronyms, secured antispam measures, verified my domain, made sure my server is neither breached nor used to relay actual spam, added new servers with supposedly clean IPs from reputable providers, tried all the silver bullets recommended by Hacker News, used kafkaesque request forms to prove legitimity, contacted the admins of some blacklists.
I believe he has demonstrated reasonable diligence to get his system to work. He also mentions “his community” the SDF, which do have a bunch of very knowledgeable old-school Unix/Internet admin gurus with whom he supposedly consulted. So I would like to believe that the problems reside outside his realm of control, and I am sympathetic to his plight.
Still, many people/organizations continue to host their own email services on their own private servers (remember Hillary Clinton?), and they continue to be able to send emails. Our own TNCR uses its own private e-mail server to handle email and it works OK with most other email services (there are known exceptions).
@Axtremus Um, Hillary Clinton was an age ago. It was far easier to host your own email back then.
I gave up on this as well. It almost became a full time job just keeping the email server from getting blacklisted. It started out to affect me probably 10 years ago with random, "You've been put on a bad server list!" It would happen about once a year. Then it started to get a lot more frequent. Then I just gave up and went with GoDaddy email services.
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@Axtremus Um, Hillary Clinton was an age ago. It was far easier to host your own email back then.
I gave up on this as well. It almost became a full time job just keeping the email server from getting blacklisted. It started out to affect me probably 10 years ago with random, "You've been put on a bad server list!" It would happen about once a year. Then it started to get a lot more frequent. Then I just gave up and went with GoDaddy email services.
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It's not quite fair to only blame the big tech companies for this situation.
The main culprit is email spammers.
