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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, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday September 03 2019, @02:45PM
I am not sure how to best reply, but I am disappointed when I read that people are willing to let an advertiser block ads because it is too hard to set up something themselves.
It isn't hard nor inconvenient; but there are obstacles that can stymie one's chances for success.
Email addresses themselves don't just start receiving advertisements -- they have to be harvested or handed out. If you create an "amazon@mydomain.wtf" account on your email server hosting mydomain.wtf, and only use it for amazon, you will get only amazon and their marketplace seller info. If you get anything else, chances are someone there sold you out. I have numerous accounts and no I don't have them all linked on my phone. I check then when I need to. I have accounts that I've sent to and from the internet and other servers for years and years, and never have once received an unsolicited message. It can be done, but if that is too inconvenient, then it can't be done for people unwilling to take the steps necessary to keep things private.
If you have an email address for just here -- for just ebay, for just facebook, for just this or that, you can significantly diminish the amount of spam, and identify where it comes from. If you use one adress for everything, or just a few for everything else, they're going to get spammed and keep getting spammed because you're regualrly using them for everything and/or everything else.
And for the love of god, do not use html in email unless you have some sort of non-email related network edge filtering to block well-known 1x1 single pixel.gif server hosts. Once your carefully protected email address is used in webmail or an html rendering email client to pull down that "LOOK A LIVE EMAIL ADDRESS CHARGE!!!" pixel, there is no undo button. That is hard to track over the long term, so the best bet is to not enable HTML in your email client unless you have a good reason to for a specific message.
These controls are not easy for someone like my mom to abide to, but I still don't steer her to google... even if it is easy to become a host for the internet's version of the cordyceps mushroom of email ecosystem content harvesting.
That all stated, and I didn't really explain much...I can't get into ISP stuff or actual effort involved in setting up a server--the article covers much of that ground anyway. I fully agree that there are inconveniences, ISPs that get in the way, the matter of hosting such a server, setting it up. It's all a value proposition. What is it worth to a person to be in control? To accept that maintenance may need to be done from time to time? I am not the type to throw in the towel and let an advertising company manage the filtering of unwanted ads, but that is just me... I'd much rather get ads by mistake than by design. And it really hurts when a preventable situation takes place, usually by someone else sharing my contact info (on purpose or not). People don't read the EULAs, and really, harvesting your email is a business model, and google and the others that provide email services are enriched much much more when you let them read the emails as well to better target ads to you that will not be stopped by their advertising revenue supported unsolicited advertising filter.
I also understand and appreciate and experience myself... that sometimes one doesn't have the time, nor the inclination, to do stuff like this. I'd never admonish anyone that doesn't have the time to put up with BS, but I also think that the BS comes indifferent sizes and grows over time depending on choices. I'd rather receive email due to my own operation mistakes than to get them by design from a company funded almost entirely by ad revenue, and further expect them to not read those emails to then present ads to you... outside of emails.
Have you looked at the gmail past order tracking? Have you tried to delete stuff in it? One at a time. Some people i know have years and years of amazon orders and ebay orders and shipping info and google tracks it all, because their spam filters do that, too.
To me, the inconvenience of not using gmail seems to spiritually or metaphysically outweigh the challenges of having to check a few different accounts I set up myself on a domain or two that I control, but I am weird like that I guess. I am lazy, don't get me wrong, but I'll put in as much effort as I can to ensure that I *can* be lazy.
That said, gmail is a great solution for people that don't share my views, in whole or in part, and I don't hold it against them--like I said, not everyone cares, and sometimes, what they do care about is using that time otherwise spent on server stuff, and using it on family or life or work or anything more interesting. I can't argue with what makes a priority a priority, but I for one don't want some tech company finding out what my priorities are so that they and their valued third party business affiliates with seperate privacy policies and security policies can better advertise to me about these priorities of mine that I didn't share with them to begin with.
sorry if this was disjointed; I couldn't write it all at once and so this may not appear fluid or cohesive.. but I think the point is made. Also, Grishnakh, this isn't an attack in any way... please don't take it like one. My opinion is sort of strong but I am biased in that in both work and outside of work, I approach internet use the same way, but get paid/rewarded for it as well as a job choice. At least I have no affiliate links to send to you in email!)