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OpenBSD developer, Gilles Chehade, debunks multiple myths regarding deployment of e-mail services. While it is some work to deploy and operate a mail service, it is not as hard as the large corporations would like people to believe. Gilles derives his knowledge from having built and worked with both proprietary and free and open source mail systems. He covers why it is feasible to consider running one.
I work on an opensource SMTP server. I build both opensource and proprietary solutions related to mail. I will likely open a commercial mail service next year.
In this article, I will voluntarily use the term mail because it is vague enough to encompass protocols and software. This is not a very technical article and I don't want to dive into protocols, I want people who have never worked with mail to understand all of it.
I will also not explain how I achieve the tasks I describe as easy. I want this article to be about the "mail is hard" myth, disregarding what technical solution you use to implement it. I want people who read this to go read about Postfix, Notqmail, Exim and OpenSMTPD, and not go directly to OpenSMTPD because I provided examples.
I will write a follow-up article, this time focusing on how I do things with OpenSMTPD. If people write similar articles for other solutions, please forward them to me and I'll link some of them. it will be updated as time passes by to reflect changes in the ecosystem, come back and check again over time.
Finally, the name Big Mailer Corps represents the major e-mail providers. I'm not targeting a specific one, you can basically replace Big Mailer Corps anywhere in this text with the name of any provider that holds several hundred of millions of recipient addresses. Keep in mind that some Big Mailer Corps allow hosting under your own domain name, so when I mention the e-mail address space, if you own a domain but it is hosted by a Big Mailer Corp, your domain and all e-mail addresses below your domain are part of their address space.
Earlier on SN:
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)
Re-decentralizing the World-Wide Web (2019)
Usenet, Authentication, and Engineering - We Can Learn from the Past (2018)
A Decentralized Web Would Give Power Back to the People Online (2016)
Decentralized Sharing (2014)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pino P on Monday September 02 2019, @03:25PM
In one breath, the featured article claims forward-confirmed reverse DNS, SPF, and DKIM are enough to reach the users of another mail server. But in another, the article recommends setting up an IP reputation system such that these three aren't enough:
How does one build IP reputation in the first place without enlisting the services of a Big Mailer Corp?
And how does a subscriber to a home ISP set up the forward-confirmed reverse DNS anyway without paying beaucoup bucks per month to upgrade to a static IP? I've read reports of there being cities (or entire countries such as Myanmar) where all subscribers start behind carrier-grade NAT, only business subscribers may lease a static IP at confiscatory extra monthly cost, and upgrading to business service requires business paperwork, such as articles of incorporation. Putting mail on a VPS doesn't count either because AWS and other VPS providers are also Big Mailer Corps.