<story><title>Ask HN: Why can&apos;t I host my own email?</title><text>I can host my own Mastodon server, or all kinds of other novelty &amp;#x2F; fun things which don&amp;#x27;t seem easily decentralized.&lt;p&gt;Email feels like one of the most decentralized internet concepts, and ironically it&amp;#x27;s seemingly the one thing I &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; self-host unless, from what I&amp;#x27;ve heard, I enjoy being permanently marked as spam &amp;#x2F; blacklisted. What&amp;#x27;s going on? How do we fix this?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>post-it</author><text>Prediction: Any distributed social media (like Mastodon) that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. Sure, you&amp;#x27;ll be able to host your own Mastodon instance, but 99% of people will be on the top 10 hosts and they won&amp;#x27;t peer with you.&lt;p&gt;I think the only way to make distributed social media practical is to have an extremely inexpensive turnkey self-hosting solution for the average person. A Chromecast-like device that they plug into their TV that backs up all their photos, plays music, and also hosts a Mastodon instance. Some kind of very friendly backup solution where you make an &amp;quot;emergency contacts&amp;quot; list, and the device encrypts all of your data and stores it on your emergency contacts&amp;#x27; devices as a backup, and vice-versa.</text></item><item><author>zcdziura</author><text>The problem is that spam was&amp;#x2F;is so bad that extreme measures were taken to curb it. There are all kinds of invisible forces that you abutt that can be difficult to figure out, such as IP blacklists and the like. And even if you set everything up properly and host your email with a responsible host, Microsoft will still mark your mail as spam.&lt;p&gt;I host my own email server with Vultr on an OpenBSD VM using OpenSMTPD and Dovecot, relaying all outbound mail through SMTP2Go (their free tier more than meets my needs). I have all of the necessary DNS entries set to mark my mail as legit, and I sign all outgoing mail using strong 2048-bit RSA keys. Thus far, I&amp;#x27;m able to send mail and not have it marked as spam (at least to everyone that I&amp;#x27;ve corresponded with thus far). It was a lot of work to get to that point, but not terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seanp2k2</author><text>&lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt; XMPP federation &lt;i&gt;cough&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only did Facebook and GChat refuse to peer with little players, they refused to peer among the big players too. We could have had something like IRC for the masses, peered chat servers with bring-your-own-client. Instead, we waited decades for iMessage to get Android support which only happened long after everyone moved on to IG, Messenger, WeChat, etc.&lt;p&gt;Email is probably one of the last great open[ish] distributed systems we’ll ever see. There are just too many incentives to build walled gardens instead.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Why can&apos;t I host my own email?</title><text>I can host my own Mastodon server, or all kinds of other novelty &amp;#x2F; fun things which don&amp;#x27;t seem easily decentralized.&lt;p&gt;Email feels like one of the most decentralized internet concepts, and ironically it&amp;#x27;s seemingly the one thing I &lt;i&gt;can&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; self-host unless, from what I&amp;#x27;ve heard, I enjoy being permanently marked as spam &amp;#x2F; blacklisted. What&amp;#x27;s going on? How do we fix this?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>post-it</author><text>Prediction: Any distributed social media (like Mastodon) that gains mainstream popularity will share the same fate. Sure, you&amp;#x27;ll be able to host your own Mastodon instance, but 99% of people will be on the top 10 hosts and they won&amp;#x27;t peer with you.&lt;p&gt;I think the only way to make distributed social media practical is to have an extremely inexpensive turnkey self-hosting solution for the average person. A Chromecast-like device that they plug into their TV that backs up all their photos, plays music, and also hosts a Mastodon instance. Some kind of very friendly backup solution where you make an &amp;quot;emergency contacts&amp;quot; list, and the device encrypts all of your data and stores it on your emergency contacts&amp;#x27; devices as a backup, and vice-versa.</text></item><item><author>zcdziura</author><text>The problem is that spam was&amp;#x2F;is so bad that extreme measures were taken to curb it. There are all kinds of invisible forces that you abutt that can be difficult to figure out, such as IP blacklists and the like. And even if you set everything up properly and host your email with a responsible host, Microsoft will still mark your mail as spam.&lt;p&gt;I host my own email server with Vultr on an OpenBSD VM using OpenSMTPD and Dovecot, relaying all outbound mail through SMTP2Go (their free tier more than meets my needs). I have all of the necessary DNS entries set to mark my mail as legit, and I sign all outgoing mail using strong 2048-bit RSA keys. Thus far, I&amp;#x27;m able to send mail and not have it marked as spam (at least to everyone that I&amp;#x27;ve corresponded with thus far). It was a lot of work to get to that point, but not terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mypalmike</author><text>On Mastodon, I believe it&amp;#x27;s currently somewhat backwards from this. The largest instances are filled with Japanese anime porn, and the smaller instances end up blacklisting them.</text></comment>