Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone… unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t…
And this is how you kill an open standard. Good resource to share with people cheering for Meta to adapt ActivityPub etc.
@Jo Oh god, that reads horribly like this article about Google killing XMPP that spread around last week: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
For anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q
This gets little in depth on this issues.
Thinking about starting my own personal email server, but to use it seriously I’ll have to weigh the pros and cons. If anyone has anything on this to share I’d appreciate it.
Short answer: Don’t.
Long answer: It is a massive amount of work, not just to setup, but also to maintain. On top of the fact that the big email providers block smaller email servers like crazy. Even if you had business class Internet service at home, the IP range is most likely already in their block lists. And if you have it on a VPS, the amount of time and effort it takes to get the security and filtering going properly is nightmarish.
It really sucks, but it’s a fait accompli.
Would agree.
Even when done 100% by the book and correct. Companies like Google and Microsoft, in particular, will just randomly send the email to spam.
I gave up after years of fighting the good fight and went to googles free tier. That is now over and I probably just need to move to some other service.
Also dont use a gTLD or if you do, have a backup .com or .us as well. Many forms dont recognize things like .email as legit.
Even if you set up everything perfectly you encounter email providers that only have allow lists and you have to jump through hoops to be allowed to send emails to them (like publishing your whole name and address). I loved the fact that I had a mail server but in the end it didn’t make sense.
I use fastmail. I pay for it, and it works great.
Yeah, I think this is done to provide the illusion of choice. The rate limits are high enough to allow personal emails through, but for any mass emails or corporate emails this forces you to use Google. Unfortunately a standard corporate strategy, it’s why corporate office suites are so generic and tend to be from one of the big companies.
When I went to the DMV my independent mail server was immediately filtered into spam when I tried to email them my proof of insurance. It was no trivial thing for them to get it out of the spam filter, either
Anyone know a decent alternative at a reasonable price though? What if I have an @gmail today, and I want to move my storage elsewhere and have that just forward?
I switched to ProtonMail and have really enjoyed it. I was using my own domain with Gmail so my email address didn’t even change.
For those considering Proton Mail: There is one great benefit or disadvantage, depending on how you see it. As all traffic is encrypted, Proton Mail does not support standard IMAP or POP3. It’s therefore best used with the official Proton Mail app rather than third party apps. On desktop, you can use your favourite email client (Thunderbird et al) only if you install a “bridge” which decrypts incoming emails before forwarding them to the client: this bridge is, in turn, only available to paying subscribers.
That said, it’s a great service, and the fact that they have a viable business model which doesn’t depend on selling out their users might be a good thing.
IMAP supports TLS, what’s Proton’s excuse for enforcing their own delivery protocol?
Proton is end-to-end encrypted - they don’t have the keys themselves. With TLS, encryption is between you and the server, but the information can be decrypted on the server side.
At least that’s my understanding of it. If you want Proton’s own words, they wrote an explanation on their website. :)
Any advice or hints on how to switch over? I wanted to do it years ago but I dread having to change my main mail address on everything, from apps, tools and games to bills or RL document-related stuff, it sounds like a horrible mess and ton of work
My recommendation (assuming you have a normal @gmail addy and not a custom domain like I had) would be to use email forwarding. So you can leave your Gmail as is, but set it up (in the settings) to automatically forward all your email to your new protonmail address. Then you can gradually change the important contacts/sites to your new email at your leisure.
I do highly recommend buying a domain and setting up your own email address though, it gives you a lot more portability going forward. You can actually do a lot with your own domain, and it helps you maintain trust better.
Anyway, enough preaching lol, protonmail also maintains a guide to help people switch: https://proton.me/easyswitch
I feel like step 1 is just buying a domain so you can have control over your e-mail address, and then you can switch providers whenever you want (or host it yourself).
If you already pay for extra iCloud storage you can use a custom domain for e-mail with iCloud for $1/mo (which many people are already paying for). Apple’s still a pretty big e-mail provider, so maybe that doesn’t address all of your concerns, but it’s a really cheap way to use a custom domain that more people should take advantage of imo.
I host my own e-mail and it’s pretty care free these days (I don’t send bulk e-mails, though, so I don’t contend with rate limits at all). Honestly, more people should do it instead of buying into all of the fearmongering about e-mail… It’s a little tricky to set up right, but the impossibleness of the situation is somewhat exaggerated. The best defense for self-hosted e-mail is if more people actually do it… Otherwise you’re just capitulating to the large (and slightly less large) mail providers.
+1 on having your own domain. I was using gmail for a long time, and recently switched to my hosting provider’s included-with-purchase email. Having my own domain made the move transparent to everyone, and relatively painless.
I use posteo.de which is a german provider. It costs 1€ per month. Did not have any problem with them and I’ve been using them for years by this point
migadu.com works really well for me. I also have been using namecheap’s email service without any issue whatsoever.
I don’t know if this fits your needs, but check out setting up a mailinabox instance.
God damn it Google!
And this is happening after SPF, DKIM and DMARC provided a solution to the spam problem.
Any mail system can remove practically all spam by insisting messages conform to those three standards
But that is not true at all. Spammers can easily send mail with all proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and signatures. A lot of spam is and will be sent like that. Those extensions do not make spam impossible, they just make it easier to track and block.
But this does not change the point of the article – in this case it is a specific domain sending very specific non-spam messages. SPF/DKIM/DMARC prove it is not someone else – GMail has no ground for blocking these (unless were are not told something).
And GMail has been breaking mail for years now. E.g. I hate them for breaking message threading by ignoring threading headers and forcing own view on how messages should be grouped.
How does one send a spam email that passes SPF and DKIM if one doesn’t have access to the DKIM private key, or the DNS server to edit the SPF or DKIM records?
- Open a Gmail account, send spam.
- Buy a domain, setup SPF and DKIM, send spam.
- Hack an SMTP server, send spam.
You can’t… But you can register a domain and set up your own DKIM key and DNS records and then use it to send spam (until you get blacklisted, anyway). There’s a cost to doing that, though, so it’s less appealing.
Anyone got a different site covering this? This site’s HTTPS certificate is invalid or sth which doesn’t inspire confidence
Valid cert.
It’s hosted on blogspot, it’s a google issued certificate, to me seems valid
But the posted link is
http://nothttps://, so browsers will mark it as insecure.Ah I assumed that Google had enough engineers to set automatic https redirection on blogspot…
The term you’re looking for is ‘Horizontal Conduct’ and it’s illegal. The hard part of course is making that claim against the team of lawyers that Google would be able to field.
I have the same problem, emails delayed by hours…
I doubt that this is a problem with just Gmail though…
What a surprise! (no)
Google is evil.
Ever since “we will not share or sell your data,” I just assume everything that google does is a potential bait and switch
Here’s another fantastic article related to this. It’s about someone who’s had to give up on selfhosting.
It’s actually far worse than the Igregious article makes it look.
I wish they’d gone into a bit more detail about the issues they had, where they hosted, how they tried to fix their ip reputation, which providers blocked them, etc.
I’ve experienced the same issues in the past, but didn’t find any of the insurmountable.
Though admittedly mine is more ‘small business’ than ‘self-hosted’, so I can afford to buy a small IP block and run on dedicated hardware.
