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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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It is not that simple to run your own email server anymore. Big providers like Google will treat emails from your server as spam and you will have a difficult time having the mail properly delivered. So big tech has effectively squeezed out federated email.
Set up DKIM and they'll accept your email. That's just anti-spam / anti-phishing; it's not an attempt to shut down independent email.
The big players do definitely try to shut down independent email. We don't have to let them succeed though, and the way to fight back is to host your own.
Edit: *one way to fight back.
Hmm. If what you were saying was true, then a lot of new Lemmy instance operators would be having problems with email verification.
Lemmy allows using any smtp server to send emails. Can use Googles servers, fastmails servers etc.
It's different from running your own email server. If you run your own, then Google and the others are definently not going to trust it. There are lots of blog posts about the pain of running your own email server.
There are literally no problems running your own server if you comply with anti spam measures.
Most germans are on gmx.net, and they block residential ips. So it's impossible to send them messages. So i had to abandon my efforts.
You shouldn't run email server from a residential IP address. That's one of the conditions how you comply with anti spam measures.
?? then clearly, i CANNOT run an email server? without buying my way into a higher status of ip address?
i can host fedi from residential ip's, and that's a huge part why it's possible for us to talk right now (of course, i need cloudflares help for this, since i have no ipv4 address - but other than that)
I don't see this as a problem. It's not like VPS is a luxury and costs a fortune. You'll waste more money on powering your PC 24/7.
A VPS is basically just a complicated way of making an account with a large infrastructure provider imo if i can't have a raspberry pi, that costs only electricity, and have it host an email server
the protocol is not open! at least it is more closed than i'd like - it's open enough for companies, granted
If I have to have a computer, imo it’s not open. It should just be in the air or it’s literally an impossible barrier for anyone to get past.
?? This is clearly not what i'm saying. Residential Hosting is technically possible - everything works as intended, it's just that a tiny bit of extra logic on the recievers side rejects the delivery.
That's very different from...? Demanding the air? Hosts it?
I just think the requirement is red tape, and i have no idea why yall are so ready to accept, that you shouldn't own the machienes you run your code on, if you're not a company.
Suree, i am a bit oblivious, it may be that it's as "easy" as calling your isp. It's just that my isp never picks up, and sends the pinkertons after me to get me to stop calling.
I don't know how much electricity costs where you live, but running a RasPi 24/7 would cost around £2 per month here. Then you also need to factor in internet costs, backups, maintenance, etc. You can get a VPS from £5 per month with everything included. You can get something even cheaper if you really want to. There's literally no point running anything at home, except for Home Assistant.
And yes, everything is open. You just want weird things.
A VPS is rented
Thats like not understanding why people own a home I mean yah i coul get a static ip i guess that would actually make sense
It's not the same as owning a home. Also you can put your own hardware on premises or rent a static IP address. All of your arguments are nothing but ignorance.
Not that guy but I see the confusion here. What he really means is self host which could mean running something in your garage or could mean running something on a VPS as long as you're doing it yourself. You can definitely self host email. You can even run it in your garage you just need to tunnel through a VPS or something with a non residential IP.
Suree in the grand sheme of things getting a non-residential ip shouldn't be too hard
But i still think it's one of those pieces of red tape that have killed a lot of diversity
This is absolutely a reason to close your home server -i mean if you're buying an VPS anyway that uses the same bandwidth it would use with the server set up there
Why keep a server in your garage? And then you're not truely independent anymore, because of a small policy somewhere
I DO think garage hosting is an important part of an ecosystems freedom.
I can garage host fedi, and i AM in this very moment. For web services it's just DOS Protection that we need Men in the Middle for. Which is sad but, actually not an artificial requirement.
I do agree, but at this point most residential connections are probably behind CGNAT so wouldn't even have a public IP associated with just their connection anymore. You can always buy a business line and have them connect it up to your home. I think that would also give you a non residential IP?
I am hosting this server behind a dynamic ipb6 address, which a script send to the cloudflare api every time it changes
As long as you have a DSLite ipv6 non-nat address, you can be on the web - with compromises xD
My parents are still behind a dynamic ipv4, which is not behind a NAT
You sir are living on the edge
How does that work, complying with anti spam measures?
You need a fixed, non-residential IP address. You need a domain name with SPF. You need to set up DKIM. And you need to set up DMARC.
In theory, you only need DMARC, but some old email software somewhere might not support it.
And then you can use services like https://www.mail-tester.com/ to check if everything is set up correctly.
I’ve had hosted email from a service provider for years and never had a problem. I’m not talking anyone big here.
This is truly not meant to be snarky: It sounds like you don't know how email works.
FUD
I have self hosted my email for five years. I'm a hobbyist and it is no problem for me.
Occassionally (very rarely) an email to a new address I've never sent before will end up erroneously in a spam folder. This never happens when I send to a business. Instead of everyone throwing up their hands and saying email is way too hard now, how about we hold the big providers accountable for their obvious bullying?
Because we can't. Who are you going to complain to about it?
Don't get me wrong, would love to give them as much pain as possible over this. But I don't see how we can do anything. If I start my own email server, I'm probably going to miss important emails and end up in lots of troubleshooting things. I'm wish it wasnt so. The ideas of the original internet was amazing but capitalism can't be reasoned with.
It consumes all until there is nothing left.
some of them blacklist large blocks of ip addresses. Lawsuits can go a long way to forcing them to justify and/or stop this. EFF is working on this, so I give them money. The other thing I can do personally is write to legislators and make sure they are aware of the issue. It's not yerribly satisfying, but I hope it helps.
In the meantime, I will not be deterred from self hosting. F*@k google.
If anything anyone could also just pick a mail routing server, pay like $50 a year and have as many emails for as many domains as they want. I got one, I have like 8 domains pointed to it for emails. All I had to do was fill in the blanks for the DNS page for the domain (mx, and the spf+dkim) and all emails I send go to inbox like butter. Unlimited email accounts, takes 15 seconds to make, no phone no name no nothing just email+pass and it exists now.
gmail was nice for a bit, but shit man I don't want to give my life story and phone number every time I want to make an email address.
Keep up the good fight. I'm grateful you are trying. And fuck Google.
Why do big companies always mark you as spam, and why is it always Hotmail?
My experience is that I have to remove myself from spamhouse once every couple of months, because Hotmail decided that my 5 emails to different accounts was spam. TBF, it's better than silently failing which is annoying as hell.
The problem with email is the same is always been: antiquated software.
The email protocol was never designed for an internet with bad actors and bots. It's from the early hopeful days. We absolutely need a better email system - however, it's simple use, the fact anyone can run one, it's simplicity, is what made it so useful.
The difference with Lemmy(et. al.) Is that the protocol is designed in the modern age, and isn't required to also keep up with bad actors for legacy reasons. If Meta decide to join and fill it full of bad actors, Lemmy has a choice email never had. Lemmy can choose to add verification, peer-conversation, trust keys.
It however still has the same basic problem: to be useful for everyone, it has to work with everyone. The discussions and decisions about how that happen are not just technological, but also moral and ideal-based.
Meta, then, in this context, is the first spam email server. How Lemmy/the community/etc respond will be the challenge.
There's nothing wrong with email. It is essential for all business transacted online. It's still, by far, the most useful federated software. All that the "bad actors" can do is send messages that the receiver didn't want, and that's trivial to stop.
That's absolutely not true. I run my own email server with multiple domains and multiple accounts and it's no where close to a difficult IT task.
If anything it's the ISPs that will hassle you for outbound SMTP. There are ways around that but generally blocked by default
You're talking about something completely unrelated to security then. If you want to run services out of your home then you need to buy a business level connection. Or find a VPS service.
None of this will cause you problems with the big names in email as long as you follow the spam procedures.
I was actually agreeing with you, in that running a private mail server is not a difficult endeavor as long as you take those things into account. Most VPS and CSP will block SMTP by default (just recently went through this with AWS, had to specifically request the service) since most everyone doesn't have a clue how to secure mail relays and stay off blacklists.
Google, Live, AOL, Yahoo etc might hassle you for DKIM or SPF, but in my experience the ISP is the first hurdle.
Ah i see. Yeah i went through that process with AWS too. It sucks but it's not a horrible process.
I'm yet to see a vps service that is not outright banned on gmail.
I run on AWS Lightsail, have been since 2018 and all is working fine.
Yeeaaah, I should have worded it as "cheap vps service".
To be fair, the example OP used was that two independent email servers could still send mail to eachother even if they can't send mail to gmail. I do feel like social networking has a little bit of an advantage over email there, because email, to be useful, needs to be able to talk to almost anyone you might need to send an email to, those specific users. If a few big instances defederate small instances in that scenario, you basically have to use the big instances because you will most likely need to talk to specific users who are on those big instances at some point. However, in a social network, you want to be able to talk to enough people to have discussions and content, but it doesn't matter as much if you can talk to any specific user or specific account, so it's much more viable to have a smaller network of independent instances that still functions if cut off from the big ones, as long as they can collectively retain enough users to be interesting.
And this is what people are afraid of with meta joining Mastadon.