Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @11:04PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @11:04PM (#889014)

    because otherwise you'll just be spending all your time sifting through spam. Spam has almost completely ruined email.

    Nope. Run my own email, on my own server, on my home internet link. Have been doing so since circa. 2000 (so about 19-20 years or so now). My main email address has been unchanged in all that time.

    I get, maybe, 1 spam getting paste the filter every 6 months. Otherwise, Crm114 cleans all the rest up and I simply don't see any spam.

    And that one every 6 months, feed it back into crm114 so it can learn, and wait another six months.

    So, no, one will not spend all their time sifting through spam, provided one knows to use a good spam filter.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=1, Touché=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Touché' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1) by nekomata on Tuesday September 03 2019, @05:45PM (1 child)

    by nekomata (5432) on Tuesday September 03 2019, @05:45PM (#889240)

    I have been running OpenBSD with OpenSMTP for 5-ish years. My SPAM filtering is just greylisting and bgpd based black/whitelisting (http://bgp-spamd.net/). I get literally zero spam mails. Not kidding, I can't remember getting a single spam email since I set this up. Also the setup is generally pretty good, I don't have problems with getting into other ppls spam boxes etc.

    The whole setup takes a weekend, and then an openbsd update every 6 months wich is the most painless, best documented system upgrade I have ever experienced. YMMV of course, but I have not found a personal email server to be a hassle at all.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @04:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 04 2019, @04:25AM (#889375)

      One of my coworkers was half a beat from pulling the trigger on changing our our mail server for a hosted solution, despite the fact that we run plenty of other servers. He happened upon an article about greylisting. He set it up, and it made a huge difference according to him. Apparently, just the act of delaying mail keeps most spammers from trying again. In addition, it also buys just enough time for other automated anti-spam systems to flag the sender as suspicious. In addition, most addresses where we need an email RIGHT NOW, send us email often enough that they don't get caught by the greylist.

  • (Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday September 03 2019, @06:57PM

    by DECbot (832) on Tuesday September 03 2019, @06:57PM (#889257) Journal

    I have Comcast run my spam filter for the mail server in my basement. I get zero spam, just updates from my FreeBSD server whining about 'update this' and 'new release that' and 'the raspberry pi detects that you're out of salt in your water softener tank'. Though I've noticed there are a lot of false positives with Comcast's filtering. Perhaps I should get around to asking them to stop blocking port 25 or set up my server and router for port 587, but then I'd have to do something about the spam.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base