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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: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Monday September 02 2019, @01:31PM (2 children)
Back in 1996, e-mail clients sucked.
Not compared to today's variety of web mail and M$ Outlook toys. Back then, there were Pine, Mutt, and Eudora. All three blew away the capabilities of most current day clients, especially web clients. Actually, Mutt is still around now and has a quite a dedicated following because it is so darn useful. Pine, now Alpine, would be prominent too but for GMail's intentionally broken IMAP implementation which trips up Alpine. Thunderbird is new but has been rather stagnant because of Mozilla trying to kill it off again and again. However, it too blows away M$ Outlook's work flow (in regards purely to mail) and capabilities. It would be the main replacement for Eudora. And that's not bringing in late, great Procmail or its current equivalent Maildrop.
Mostly what has changed is that no new people have learned to actually use mail clients. The few times I've made the effort to look and the fewer times I've dared to interview anyone about their (lack of) e-mail skills I've been shocked with the ineptitude. Most people will assert that they know how to use e-mail but these days as good as no one actually does or maybe even actually can. It's just as bad among the M$ resellers posing as IT staff, though their fault lies with their severe affliction of the Dunning-Kruger effect dosed with some massive professional dishonesty.
Sadly the one obvious possible solution doesn't work any more. That would be to have schools, from K-12 through graduate schools and vocational schools actually get back to periodically orienting students in proper use of mail clients, mailing lists, and nettiquette. However, as shown from the fiascos that the "Internet Driving License" type trainings are, that won't get off the ground. The curriculum will not be allowed to cover anything of pith. Further, none of the teachers know how to use e-mail themselves and have basically cargo culted a few patterns of behavior that are the minimum needed to give the appearance of getting by and that is hidden in part by the crap mail tools passed off as mail clients these days.
I don't know of a way out besides what was proposed in the blog post. Or failing that, at least trying to use mail services from a smaller provider. The larger companies, that the blog author referred to as "Big Mailer Corps" are doing what they can to break mail in whatever little ways they can with an eye towards capturing or the protocols.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 02 2019, @01:42PM
Believe it or not, my 9th grader is enrolled in "digital tech" which is a pre-req for all other computer courses in high school. The syllabus purports instruction in IP addressing, DNS, e-mail, cyber safety, and of course a word from our sponsors: MS Office application use. I was a little surprised at the amount of low level stuff they say they're going to teach to "everyone" - of course, that's like learning the periodic table in Chemistry - doesn't make everyone an organic chem expert.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Monday September 02 2019, @02:26PM
This is because certain large companies want to teach everyone to "text", locking them in to buying cell phones from them.
It is also disappointing to see how few people can even write a single, coherent, paragraph exceeding 140 characters. I constantly run in to idiots that have no clue how to properly post on a forum. (Hint: a dozen one sentence posts one after the other are considered SPAM!). I've already run in to consumertards who think everyone must have a stupid cell phone with the ability to "text", with texting, Twatter, and Facefook as the "only" possible way to communicate.