You must log in or # to comment.
True story. Email is one of the last things I’d try to host myself.
This person has been there.
I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.
The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.
deleted by creator
I knew someone online who did.
Their autism level was in a category that I’ve yet to find words for. The train people fear them.
that third one killed it for me. I hate what the Internet has become. We need to setup a second Internet that somehow can’t be monetized.
It’s called the i2p network
Correct. Come to I2P and experience 90s internet again. It’s slow but has character, if by character you understand I mean anonymous Geocities.
Honest question: is there also a boatload of sketchy stiff to avoid if you just wanted to have a nice SFW time? Early 2000s internet before Google indexed everything had some pockets of unsavory.
Also, is it just a bunch of middle aged dudes in mostly text forums? That’s like 85% of my experience with 90s internet.
I haven’t stumbled upon much sketchy stuff, you’d need to know where it is and discovery is still fairly manual though indexing services exist. Of course you need to find those services in the first place…
Anonymity is more of a focus than 90s internet, so it’s hard to tell who anyone really is but you’re probably right. There are active Russian and Iranian dissident text forums though.
However, for me, it’s the people just hosting personal websites e.g., a darkwave radio site, or a cryptography blog. Obviously the barrier to entry means it leans fairly techy.
Cool, thanks for sticking with me and explaining.
How would you recommend someone start exploring i2p?
If you’re not yet on I2P, start with https://geti2p.net/ and then set up an I2P router. Once you’re on I2P, personally I use notbob.i2p to see what’s up.
To avoid? Remember when you had to go to Yahoo! Directory to find the few websites which exist? It’s like that.
Yes, to avoid. Boolean search operators looking by filetype led me to 2 instances of finding someones CP foolder circa 2000. No real easy way to report it back then.
I understand that 90s internet was much more streamlined and meager, withy own fair share of geocities pages. But I2P also exists in a more complicated time.
So it’s slow, barely contains anything, and near useless. Got it.
With black jack and hookers?
I’m locked in a contract with a company that enshittified their services a little and assigns restrictive IPs to non-Business customers that have been using port 25, but am switching to a more libre ISP as soon as it ends. I basically snoozed and didn’t realise the ISP hadn’t been rated the best for several years.
I stopped hosting my own email servers many years ago, even when I was being paid for it. Any time anyone mentions DKIM or yahoo throttling or anything of that nature I get a thousand yard stare and and start to hyperventilate. I’m sure it easier when you aren’t sending 5 million messages a month, but who needs the headache.
ai image… with positive vote??? on myfediverse??? what a shame
Because it’s hard to notice it.
it looks uncanny and i also know OP, they used to post chatgpt slop here
I downvoted it the moment it popped up.
This is an amusing thread for me as my day job used to be unfucking postfix and exim servers daily for a fleet of vps and dedi boxes.
unfucking postfix
This is not a task for the feint of heart, nor was it ever, even back when the technology was first invented. I salute you.
Tbf most of the time you just had to clear ssd space and rebuild indices after restarting services as mostly the mail was there but stuck in queue
I have no experience with any type of backend mail management or anything like it.
But I do have a corporate email through Microsoft exchange. I hate multiple apps on my phone, so I have it as an extra account in my Gmail app.
And it sucks. I don’t get a lot of emails, only the last 3 or 4 emails actually show up in the app.
But my biggest, angriest problem… Is mail getting stuck in the queue.
If I’m sending a short email? Fine, I can use the app. Fire it off and it’ll send immediately.
But if I write a long email? It will say it’s sending, it’ll sit in the outbox, but it will never… ever… send. Ever.
No amount of Wi-Fi cycling or data cycling, cache clearing or phone restarting will ever ever get that email to send. It will just sit there silently failed. Not even acknowledging it’s failed when you poke at it, let alone with a notification or something.
The first time I realized it happened, it was an unfortunately important email.
Would you like to guess what the problem is? I pulled my hair out for like a day before figuring it out. I’ll put it in a spoiler tag so you can guess.
Again: short emails send immediately, long emails never send, and sit silently failed for eternity.
spoiler
When you write a long email, at some point it saves a draft. For some reason, that draft is what holds everything up. If I remember correctly, even deleting the draft doesn’t make it send… If ever I forget, and it happens again, I have to copy my whole email to the clipboard, open exchange in the web browser, find the draft (which is never complete, always only half or less of what I wrote) paste my full message into the draft, and then manually send it.
I guess technically it’s my own fault, I could just use the exchange app and it would probably solve this. But I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to, email is not new. But it is terrible. Like printers. Bah.
Al slop
Wait, why? I thought I was generally gold at spotting these things, but here I’m struggling. The only thing that looks a little out of place to ne is the ring on his pointing hand, but that might genuinely be a dark band + shadow. What else have I missed?
The tie is the most egregious part, if you zoom in the pattern makes no sense at all.
Well i somehow got trained at detecting slop. I didnt had to notice details just looking at it confirmed
Give it up, dude. The models that just recently came out are so good you are kidding yourself if you think you can tell them apart from photographs.
Your slop-pooping machine is bad at text parallax and it still looks gross
You’re a slop-pooping machine.
Don’t shame me for my IBS
This seems more like a poorly assembled template than GenAI
The image is hypersaturated and hyperaveraged
highly recommend https://mailinabox.email/ for setting up and and ticking every compliance box. dmarc, spf etc
unfortunately you can be the best, most compliant host on the planet with the with a cleanest of IP’s… google is still going to randomly and silently drop your email to different email addresses. so its pretty much completely untenable for non hobby project.
fuck google so fucking hard
You should be able to clean that up with a relay on a known accepted provider. Sending out emails through Amazon SES should be reasonable without them selling your information.
Selfhosting isn’t as clean as it used to be, you pretty much have to buy some form of protection to play.
I self-host my emails, but use an SMTP relay for sending. IMO, the interesting part of self hosting email is the storage. Outbound sending is more complex and there’s not as much benefit to self-hosting it.
I use Mailcow and have it configured to use a relay per domain. Email clients use the Mailcow server as their SMTP server, and Mailcow (well, Postfix) handles sending it to the appropriate relay.
What SMTP relay are you using ? I’m considering switching to Migadu but open to other options.
I’m relaying through an MXRoute account, but I’ve used SMTP2Go too and they have a decent free plan with 1000 emails per month.
I have Stalwart installed and use an SMTP relay too. I can send and receive email just fine, never had an issue with that. The only thing that doesn’t really work is the account setup (when you add your account to an email client). It doesn’t detect the settings, so I have to add them manually and I have to ignore the certificate warning but maybe I’ll get around to fixing it someday.
It doesn’t detect the settings
Autodiscovery needs DNS SRV entries to be added for each domain. The legacy Exchange- and Outlook-specific way was a file at
/autodiscover/autodiscover.xmlbut I don’t know if email clients still use that.I have to ignore the certificate warning
I’m not familiar with Stalwart but you should be able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates.
I still self host. Since 1997.
Since 2000, nothing beats mimedefang on sendmail to this day.
I work for a web hosting company. Do we offer clients mail services? Hell no.
Self hosting for years and have none of these issues, but I’m going to migrate soon and will probably be able to use this as a checklist 😐
AI slop yet again!
I’ve actually been having a great time with simple-nixos-mailserver.
Running with a dedicated ipv4 at a highly reputable hoster, to my knowledge, I haven’t landed in a spam folder yet!
https://lemmy.zip/comment/19712446
Reminder of this:
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
And that mailu.io (and other similar projects) makes self-hosting email almost trivial 😁 (at least for people that can run a pre-configured
docker-compose.ymland buy their domain etc)Mailcow internal on Debian VM.
SMTP2Go free external relay.
Have had the occasional issue after an upgrade or reboot can’t find my LetsEncrypt cert and will bork the system until I manually fix it. Perhaps my latest script update finally resolved that.
Otherwise, not that bad. Been running my own email for about 5 years or so. I don’t sign up for many outside services with it. It’s mainly for internal alerting or testing purposes but still works very well.
How do you handle backups?
The other side of email is that it has become the default identity provider for the Internet. If that VM becomes unrecoverable somehow, how would you get access to your past emails?
I was using Veeam when my stack was on VMware, but after moving to Proxmox I’ve been unable to get the Veeam agent working properly for VM recovery.
I tried Proxmox Backup at one point, and while it did work for base VM backup, the interface and capabilities of it just don’t stack up to Veeam in my opinion, and I’m more concerned about file backup than VM recovery as I can easily recreate anything in my stack through my documentation.
I’m actually glad you mentioned that because I do need to revisit it. The few times I did have to recover the VM from backup I was able to do so when my backup process was working, but I’ve thankfully not had any recovery situations in the past 2 or so years since moving to Proxmox. And recovery doesn’t help in situations where your cert is expired which is usually my issue historically.
As for past email recovery, Mailcow does have documentation on recovering from a failed server\database, but I consider my personal deployment volatile since I’m only using it for alerting and mostly internal only services.
I would fully switch over to it if I had more personal time, and if I knew I could make my family comfortable with accessing it. But right now I feel the risk is too great to move anything personally or financially important over. In the event something bad were to happen to me, I’m the only one with knowledge on how to recover the environment and I don’t need my family to take on that burden if I were to become incapacitated or forbid, pass away suddenly.
