SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 02 2019, @03:21PM
1) E-mail isn't hard if you configure correctly = E-mail isn't hard if you know how to do it right = Easy things are easy if you know how to do them. (Unspecified: the effort required to learn how to do it right).
2) " most operating systems and distributions provide multiple alternatives, pre-packaged so you can install and run with a simple command." = "Rely on what's already there." = Using a store bought hammer is better than forging your own. (But was anybody saying email is hard because you should be forging your own hammer / writing your own packages by scratch?)
3) Industrial spammers trying to get a relay are looking to use misconfigured protocols. See Point 1.
4) "You will never reach “absolute 0 spam”, it was proven mathematically in the 2000s, but the amount you’ll receive while self-hosted can be as low or lower as what you receive at Big Mailer Corps." But unsaid is that Big Mailer Corps filter spam by leveraging their economy of scale. It doesn't matter if the amount is same if I can't filter it as efficiently as the big boys, or have to spend more time developing my filter rules than I do in reading/replying to my legitimate email.
5) Sending to enterprise players who have rules is not hard if you know and abide their rules. This one likely has some truth to it in terms of not a tremendous amount to learn and implement. It still has a flavor, though, of "take the time to learn it and it is easy." Even author admits this, "This is why I wrote this has more substance than the other claims. It’s true that IF you don’t even try to do the minimum work, THEN you’ll start with a penalty."
The whole thing amounts to "it's not hard if you take the time to learn it," while conveniently ignoring that the real arguments are that the economy of scale of big players makes the amount they charge for services less than the value I place on my time to do other things with it. If someone wants to run their own email server as a hobby, that's cool, if their ISP is cool with it. Just like running anything else as a server service: if you want to spend the time to make it work, more power to you. But trying to suggest that I'll end up better off by replicating what others do more cheaply doesn't sound like a solution. And if this person has reached the level of thinking of opening his own commercial mailing service then his level of knowledge is such that I question whether he remembers what it was like to be starting out in it. I also wonder how many hours he has spent getting to the point where he now finds it easy.
I could be off base, and I know there are Soylentils who run their own mail servers here and that's cool. It could be legitimate but this reads a little like a Meteorologist saying, "Understanding the weather is easy.... if you understand the weather."
This sig for rent.