<story><title>Exploring Self-Hosted Email Services</title><url>https://synergeticlabs.com/email-alchemy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ishandotpage</author><text>The corporates are pretty good at keeping self hosters emails out of their user&amp;#x27;s inboxes citing &amp;quot;Spam&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>chatmasta</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to be a purist about email, but I just can&amp;#x27;t bring myself to care, because as long as my correspondent is a corporate whore, why shouldn&amp;#x27;t I be too? A copy of the email is going to end up on their servers anyway.&lt;p&gt;In other words, I can only protect email from my provider as long as everyone else on the email protects it from theirs. And it only takes one gmail user on the thread to ruin it for everybody.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m corresponding with people who also care about this kind of thing, we aren&amp;#x27;t using email. If we absolutely have to, then we can encrypt it with PGP.&lt;p&gt;My email use cases are: (1) b2b professional emails, which you expect to be retained for compliance, etc. and (2) transactional emails, which my provider unavoidably has access to and which I protect with strong passwords and 2FA. (That said, I would like to obscure the list of my internet accounts from google, so maybe one day I&amp;#x27;ll migrate my transactional emails somewhere else.)</text></item><item><author>baz00</author><text>I used to run mail server for a large corporation in the late 90s. I always get really excited and nostalgic about running my own mail server when I see these articles. I have a spare domain I use for testing stuff on so occasionally I&amp;#x27;ll futz with postfix and dovecot for a bit etc and get something working on Vultr or some other cheap VPS. Then I&amp;#x27;ll spend an hour getting Thunderbird and K-9 working and I&amp;#x27;ll send and receive a few emails.&lt;p&gt;Then I&amp;#x27;ll remember I just spent 6 hours of my Saturday fucking around with it and now have to live with it and maintain it. So I go crawling back to outlook.com like the pathetic corporate whore I am and go and do something less painful the day after.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll just keep my private comms off email.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Ayesh</author><text>This certainly seems to be the consensus about self hosting email, but but I&amp;#x27;m now convinced otherwise.&lt;p&gt;I send a couple newsletters (one tech related, other for marketing for a coffee shop&amp;#x2F;bakery I own), and it was fairly easy to land on inboxes. Now, I don&amp;#x27;t know with a 100% certainty that they were delivered, but if DMARC records and bounces are anything to go by, self hosted emails aren&amp;#x27;t all that hard.&lt;p&gt;When you buy a VPS, it helps to check if the IP you receive is already blacklisted. After that, it&amp;#x27;s easy to use some outside service to monitor DMARC responses and blacklist. There are about 40 black list databases. My domains and the IP address are on none of them.</text></comment>
<story><title>Exploring Self-Hosted Email Services</title><url>https://synergeticlabs.com/email-alchemy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ishandotpage</author><text>The corporates are pretty good at keeping self hosters emails out of their user&amp;#x27;s inboxes citing &amp;quot;Spam&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>chatmasta</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to be a purist about email, but I just can&amp;#x27;t bring myself to care, because as long as my correspondent is a corporate whore, why shouldn&amp;#x27;t I be too? A copy of the email is going to end up on their servers anyway.&lt;p&gt;In other words, I can only protect email from my provider as long as everyone else on the email protects it from theirs. And it only takes one gmail user on the thread to ruin it for everybody.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m corresponding with people who also care about this kind of thing, we aren&amp;#x27;t using email. If we absolutely have to, then we can encrypt it with PGP.&lt;p&gt;My email use cases are: (1) b2b professional emails, which you expect to be retained for compliance, etc. and (2) transactional emails, which my provider unavoidably has access to and which I protect with strong passwords and 2FA. (That said, I would like to obscure the list of my internet accounts from google, so maybe one day I&amp;#x27;ll migrate my transactional emails somewhere else.)</text></item><item><author>baz00</author><text>I used to run mail server for a large corporation in the late 90s. I always get really excited and nostalgic about running my own mail server when I see these articles. I have a spare domain I use for testing stuff on so occasionally I&amp;#x27;ll futz with postfix and dovecot for a bit etc and get something working on Vultr or some other cheap VPS. Then I&amp;#x27;ll spend an hour getting Thunderbird and K-9 working and I&amp;#x27;ll send and receive a few emails.&lt;p&gt;Then I&amp;#x27;ll remember I just spent 6 hours of my Saturday fucking around with it and now have to live with it and maintain it. So I go crawling back to outlook.com like the pathetic corporate whore I am and go and do something less painful the day after.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll just keep my private comms off email.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>radiowave</author><text>One pragmatic solution to this is to use an email relay service to handle the outbound mail. Now, the hair-shirt self hoster&amp;#x27;s response to this idea might be, &amp;quot;But that means trusting a third party!&amp;quot; And indeed it does. But as the parent comment points out, in the vast general case we&amp;#x27;re committed to trusting whichever third parties our correspondent uses (or finding alternive means of communication.)</text></comment>