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posted by chromas on Monday September 02 2019, @09:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the needs-more-XML dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday September 02 2019, @05:25PM (4 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Monday September 02 2019, @05:25PM (#888892)

    ... the problem is the whole stack.

    * Ever tried to thread emails?
    * Ever tried to chat to someone over email?
    * Ever tried to recover an email you sent a couple of months back?
    * Ever tried to send a big photo?
    * Ever tried to access email on a mobile device?

    I know, IRC is for chat; FTP is for sending big photos (or http nowadays or whatever); thunderbird can filter/search emails reasonably well, etc etc.

    BUT the point is, this is *basic stuff* that WhatsApp and FriendFace and all the rest can do without faffing with multiple clients and generally soaking up time in worthless endeavour. So *email is deprecated* for the great majority of people.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @06:12PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @06:12PM (#888905)

    * Ever tried to thread emails?

    Mutt threads emails just fine. Granted, email threading is not as accurate as Usenet threading, due to lack (or non-use) of the References header by a lot of clients, but otherwise mutt does a fine job threading emails.

    * Ever tried to chat to someone over email?

    UI issue, not protocol/transport issue. There is nothing stopping an email client from providing a chat UI interface for an email thread (beyond the fact that no one has written one yet).

    * Ever tried to recover an email you sent a couple of months back?

    Ever tried to recover an IM you sent a few seconds back?

    Non-permanence (or lack of local storage of 'sent' items) is another UI issue, not a protocol/transport issue.

    * Ever tried to send a big photo?

    Email the transport has no restrictions on the size of an email. All size restrictions are server size restrictions, often pointless today as modern servers do not do stupid things like try to receive an entire email into RAM before writing it to disk (which is where the original size restrictions imposed by servers came from, to prevent resource exhaustion).

    * Ever tried to access email on a mobile device?

    K9-Mail on a mobile device accesses email just fine (and it even threads). Again, UI issue, not transport/protocol issue.

    • (Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:02PM (2 children)

      by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:02PM (#889179)

      Email size restrictions are hardly pointless. For example: there's a lot of issues with multiplicative effects for example.

      Consider: If I send a 100 MB email to 100 users on your personal hosted mail platform, it can explode out into 10,000 MB (10 GB). The system suddenly is dumping 10 GB of data out of nowhere into users' mailboxes, which depending on how users are configured can cause all kinds of trouble. As you can imagine this problem only gets worse the larger the attachment sizes you allow.

      There's other problems like the effect on spam scanning. Also, larger mails take longer to process, and users are accustomed to email being (seemingly) instantaneous.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:53PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:53PM (#889187)

        The point being that the restriction is simply artificial, for reasons other than the email transport protocol.

        • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 06 2019, @01:00PM

          by PiMuNu (3823) on Friday September 06 2019, @01:00PM (#890494)

          Sure, there are workarounds, fixes, improvements. My argument was all about what is implemented and available *now*. I understand that all of this stuff is available *now* through WhatsApp or Slack; the only issue is walled gardens, which for the vast majority of users is not an issue.