I stopped thinking of any email as “private” regardless of where it’s hosted, when I realized that everyone I email uses Gmail anyways; so all my emails end up going to Google anyways.
It made me an email nihilist
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I stopped thinking of any email as “private” regardless of where it’s hosted, when I realized that everyone I email uses Gmail anyways; so all my emails end up going to Google anyways.
It made me an email nihilist
I hate it. it was supposed to be open standard
Microsoft Exchange and the web-based Outlook probably still has a plurality of email volume, because of their dominance in enterprise. Even on the web based consumer space, Apple and Yahoo still have significant market share.
Tbh, out of all services I've seen people self-host, email is the most common one I've seen people describe as a bad idea™️.
I just chose a paid mail service (mailbox) and called it a day.
Same. It's great for a technical challenge. Don't do it for your primary email unless you're ok losing emails and having them rejected a lot.
Yeah we should just let them win. Why fight? It’s not like most of the spam and phishing come from Gmail and hotmail accounts. It’s those fucking self hosters
How's your self hosted email going? Any advice you can share to avoid some of the major issues?
I've run a mail server since the late 90s. I gave up running my own outbound years ago. Whether it gets received is too inconsistent. Primarily, make sure the IP you use isn't on any spam lists. If it is, get a new IP or try to submit appeals. Make sure you have the standard anti spam/authenticity measures implemented (they're listed in the OP).
These are the minimum. Years ago it was enough to have reasonable delivery. Unfortunately these aren't that helpful anymore because spammers also set them up (often with seemingly randomly generated domain names). I assume because not having them was a fairly strong signal for being a spammer, so now they also set them up, which also means there's not really any configuration / setup you can do to seem legitimate (aside from mail volume and the content itself which will be analyzed).
Anyway running your own SMTP itself is easy. The problem is getting your mail to the inbox or at least spam/junk folder (your mail may get blackholed and not even show up in spam). At least when you get a rejection, you know something is wrong, but many times the receiving server will indicate a success code and simply not deliver it to the user (not even to their spam).
Maybe the way to fight GMail's outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.
I've been hosting my e-mail for over 2 decades now, e-mail goes everywhere but gmail (despite working with them for years). They are doing it exactly so people stop doing it.
Even using a reputable hosting provider and personal domain will get you spam black holed these days
I wonder if there should be some kind of law or regulation around this. It’s an antitrust issue. Though no one in Congress would understand what this is.
Me and a couple other people have ran into on the internet have thought that we need to invent "email 2", a clean slate implementation of email that serves it's asynchronous long form and attachment friendly function while leaving behind Decades of Cruft . We can make it into an encrypted by default and have conveniences that we never had before. It might even be an actual useful thing instead of just being the thing you sign up for accounts with to get to 2fa codes and spam from websites you buy stuff from
Love this idea!
I feel like Arcane/Delta Chat is a step toward this. It somehow uses an email protocol and it works just like Signal or any other message app! I dunno how the heck it works but it's super cool.
That's something I want too: An open standard my friends and family can be on, where "the market" isn't.
Edit: I see, it seems the issue in the main thread is:
But getting people on other email providers to talk to each other... shouldn't be an issue then?
"normieverse" hit me like a brick
LOL I honestly can't tell if that's good or bad, in this context. XD
Frankly, I'm rather shocked it hasn't happened by now.
We've tried to bandaid over it with various weird things, but fundamentally SMTP is just weird.
I could easily imagine a domain having some SRV record to advertise "hey, I support NeoSMTP", and peers switching to that instead, possibly pinning on successful NeoSMTP negotiation.
Get rid of a lot of the relaying which has not been useful in modern times and only a liability, and perhaps offer an https option to be less likely to be blocked (a TXT record to indicate url, and a node could declare their NeoSMTP entry point as https://mail.server/NeoSMTP/ or whatever works for them).
Oh, there have been plenty. The issue though is the classic "make a better standard, and now you have N+1 standards".
Everything is wrong with SMTP. It's still in use because it's supported everywhere. Anything that wants to replace it either needs to entirely replace it in one fell swoop, or it needs to be backwards compatible.
The result is that occasionally a new thing comes up, a handful of people try it but there isn't critical mass to make other features really useful so it fades.
Jmap is also an emerging standard. https://jmap.io/
Looks like replacing IMAP rather than SMTP, which is significantly less thorny.
I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It's a pain for everyone.
This is done on purpose, to make people to switch to their e-mail or use them for hosting.
Google did the same thing with XMPP (they were welcomed when they joined, then they made it so XMPP users couldn't message GTalk/Hangouts users, but the other way worked), they tried similar thing with Usenet, but they never get dominance there so they let their services to be major source of spam on Usenet until they were blocked, ultimately removing Usenet indexing from Google).
I would really encourage to contact our local reps (both federal as well as state) and encourage them to introduce legislation that would punish this practice.
I put dog shit in my ass and Google knew five minutes before it happened, filmed it, and sold it back to me as a custom highlight of my home alone shenanigans. I find this a bit egregious, personally.
Ngl, I can't blame most for flocking to Gmail. It's a lot more of a pain in the rear to self-host something like that, and it's just plain convenient.
It's the same reason a lot of the people leaving Gmail go to essentially the Privacy Google (Proton) as the replacement.
If you want you can PM me your dkim and dmarc and SPF policy. Or just send me your url and I'll look it up. I used to fix these for a living. It's likely an issue with your SPF not being properly annotated.
That's cool of you to offer that to them.
Self-hosting email is quite the undertaking... I don't have the energy to deal with it and just pay 10€/year for a hosting service.
Here's an informative (and funny) talk on why self-hosting email in its current state is probably a bad idea.
I have this problem for a while as well. Similar to you all mechanisms are implemented multiple sites say the configuration is correct, even headers in Gmail say DKIM and SPF passed. E-mail arrives everywhere except for gmail.
Thanks for posting, at least I know I'm not the only one.
Running your own email server is also a good way to get a ton of headaches from your isp
I run my own mailserver in docker and it's not so hard! There was some difficulty at the start with mail going to spam, but after a little while "warming up" the IP with usage, it works fine. It's hardest to build an IP's reputation in the beginning because if your mail goes to spam, it doesn't typically lead to healthy conversations that can support it's history.
My trick was to forward all my incoming gmail messages from the account I was replacing into the new server - that way I could receive and reply from the new mailserver if people sent mail to the old one. Once it built up a bit of a history it started working fine, and that took maybe a few conversations over a couple of days.
The thing I have noticed is that you very quickly get destroyed by incoming spam - a more advanced filter is definitely on the list.
One of the problems with self hosting is that a lot of IP addresses have historically been used for spam and still have a bad reputation. If you get assigned one of those IP addresses there's very little you can do about your mails going to spam.
*fuck
Google Groups allows spammers to subscribe you to their groups in a workspace account, but doesn't allow you to unsubscribe since you're not part of that workspace account... Worse - all autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.
Since I do not participate in Google Groups, the nuclear option is to file all mails from Google Groups as spam with a Sieve script.
Note the require part may be too large as may sieve script also contains more rules than this one.
require ["body", "date", "editheader", "envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags", "mailbox", "regex", "reject", "variables"];
if anyof(
header :contains "List-Subscribe" "groups.google.com",
header :matches "X-Google-Group-Id" "*"
) {
if header :matches "Subject" "*" {
set "subject" "${1}";
} else {
set "subject" "";
}
deleteheader "Subject";
addheader :last "Subject" "[Google-Groups-Spam] ${subject}";
fileinto "Junk";
}
@laurenceOfSuburbia
This ain't anything new. They have been doing this for decades and will still do it forever. Just move on with it, since it like trying to figure out something which has no meaning at all.
Just know for sure that every company has systems designed by some developer based on a whimsical mindset of someone at the very top. So, I can care less for these stupid companies and their useless management.
I self-hosted my own email for a few years, everything was set up and reporting correctly, but Google just would never have it. I think the worst is it would be a bit inconsistent.
Anyway, I switched to an email provider with my own domain and it's much more reliable. That is until this week, I have noticed that some services are rejecting my domain. I think there is some whitelisting nonsense going on, but in those instances I just use an alias and that seems to work.
I just want to have control of my data!
I just want to have control of my data!
Google:

i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it's not a standard .com .net etc domain...
Most email providers block new domains... You need to have the DNS records up for like 2 years before they start getting accepted... Or contact all the big doers to get yourself whitelisted
False. It's a scoring system, where a domain registered within the last 14 days gets a negative score. SPF, DKIM, etc all bump the score up.
They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.
The dumb thing is, all it really does is push spammers onto using botted/stolen accounts which work way more effectively, and everyone else is forced to set up their email with Google or Microsoft.
If your domain isn't big enough to be recognized, all that SPF and DMARC won't mean crap to them.