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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: 5, Informative) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:24PM

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:24PM (#889182)

    Yeah he doesn't address the hardest parts in my opinion.
    * Keeping your systems up to date. This is admittedly more of an issue with someone like me that has to run many mail systems besides doing many other things. Mail systems have a lot of moving parts. Changing out some parts (updating) sometimes causes problems in other parts, and merely running apt-get update or whatever does not necessarily update things like what ciphers you are using. You need to be reviewing what updates will do before you run them, anticipate what will break and handle those things, and then also handle what actually breaks when you try the update.
    * Dealing with mail systems that are not correctly configured. Tons of small scale mail systems are not configured correctly. Example: You can set up to block mails conditionally based on a domain's SPF record, but you will quickly find all kinds of places violate their own screwed up SPF records all of the time (banks, marketers, etc) and you will not be able to make everyone in the world learn to fix their own things, nor can you simply block out every goofball that has a mess of a mail system, so you need to learn how to compromise on this sort of thing. Then there's other examples of goofed up systems: people running ancient MTAs with only ciphers from the 90s, people sending mails with bizarre formatting, systems that send huge amounts of junk mail but trickles of critically important mail...

    I could go on, that's adequate for now.

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