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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: 4, Insightful) by Pino P on Monday September 02 2019, @03:14PM (11 children)
Does the advice to "get a different ISP" include moving yourself, your SO, and your children to a different city for the primary purpose of ending up in the service area of an ISP that is friendly to home-based side businesses and other power users? And if so, how will you afford a second move in case your ISP ends up acquired by one that imposes a policy less friendly to power users?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @06:16PM (10 children)
Most ISP's offer 'business' class lines for a bit more per month.
Two of the advantages of business lines often are:
So there's no moving necessary, just "get a different ISP" (i.e., get a business class line, which is often with a 'different' ISP because the business and residential sides of the company named X are often operated independently).
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday September 03 2019, @03:29PM (8 children)
"get a different ISP" does not exist, and won't until we have true competition. My options are bad and worse: Comcast and Verizon- dumb and dumber.
Of course they play games with prices, but generally "business class" costs more than double the residential rate.
Your statement about "no blocked ports" is somewhere between fantasy and complete fabrication. Not sure where you live or what options are available to you, but here in the US, with one of the, if not the biggest, Verizon, port 25 is completely blocked. For businesses SMTP is on port 587, and for residential, 465.
As I commented elsewhere in this discussion, Verizon will only pass emails with a valid verizon.net email in the "from" field.
The best fix I know of: the wires (fibers) need to be owned publicly, then the ISP can be anyone anywhere, and they can compete reasonably.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @04:56PM
exactly. you don't need port 25. port 25 is for losers.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @05:24PM (4 children)
Spoken by someone who clearly has no working knowledge.
I've got Verizon FIOS, business class, and port 25 is not blocked, for either direction. The difference is business class. In fact, no TCP or UDP ports are blocked. That's what gets you the "unblocked ports" link in today's world, the magic "business class" link.
How do I know port 25 is not blocked. Because I've been running my own mail server in my basement on the FIOS link for my domain for the numerous years I've had the link now, sending and receiving emails just fine over Verizon's network.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday September 03 2019, @09:12PM (3 children)
Back when Verizon FIOS was an option, I had a server working just fine on port 25 with the residential service. Though I suspect this have likely changed in the last 10 years.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday September 04 2019, @01:06PM (2 children)
> Back when Verizon FIOS was an option...
Interesting. It's not anymore? Maybe you moved...
The little hosting company I took over as admin for about 11 years ago was supplied by a T1, and a Comcast line. They had over 512 static IPs! Very few actually used / assigned. No clue who did what or why- that's what I inherited.
Owner wanted / needed to reduce costs, and FIOS was available, so I integrated everything into 5 static IPs on business FIOS (we had an option for 5 more if needed). Port 25 used to work perfectly, but as I wrote elsewhere in this discussion, Verizon slowly but surely chipped away at it, first moving to port 587 which required an fairly easy authentication mechanism, but which 100% broke stupid Qmail (idiot code- that project needed to die).
But then more and more limitations. Maybe we're blacklisted because some of the clients' websites were being used to send spam through the webform, but it was very minimal, and Verizon have very effective spam scanning / filtering, so I'm not sure what all the whining is about.
Even at home I'm on Verizon (sometimes- I also have a Comcast Xfinity account login and can get neighbor's WiFi- completely legal- it's part of Xfinity) and they completely shut off port 25- sending is on port 465.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 04 2019, @02:56PM
Verizon sold many of its landline service areas to Frontier Communications, including where I live. Subscribers were switched from Verizon FiOS to Frontier FiOS.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Wednesday September 04 2019, @03:45PM
I was in a Verizon FIOS area in Virginia until moving cross country. Frontier FIOS in Indiana port 25 was open, but then I moved again and I am now limited to Comcast or one bar of cellular.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 04 2019, @03:01PM (1 child)
AC meant that, for example, Xfinity (Comcast's home offering) and Comcast Business (Comcast's business offering) are technically different ISPs with different policies that happen to share a parent company.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday September 05 2019, @12:21AM
Yeah, I get that, but thanks for clearing it up for others who might get some useful info here. I think Verizon is the same way, or became that when they bought AOL and Yahoo!.
Somewhere in this discussion I mention that I have Verizon residential at home, but am part-time admin for a small hosting company that connects through Verizon Business. Verizon Home uses port 465 for smtp, but Verizon Business used port 587 for sending.
If you're a true nerd, or just feeling masochistic: https://pepipost.com/blog/smtp-port-465/ [pepipost.com]
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 04 2019, @02:58PM
A user of the green site claims [slashdot.org] that business ISPs in one country have a standard practice of refusing service to individuals and putting even businesses behind NAT until they lease static IPs at an additional monthly fee. So in addition to switching from residential to business service, one has to price out the fees to form an LLC and to add a static IP address, and the price quickly becomes prohibitive for a residential power user.