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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:09AM
I think that attitude is unfair. Most people, including tech industry professionals, don't like to learn new things when they aren't forced to do it. I could save a good bit of money making my own lattes, my own beer, my own Mexican food, my own Thai food, my own Indian food. I could save a good bit of money doing my own plumbing repairs, and electrical wiring upgrades, and auto maintenance and repairs. I could save money and open up the possible options for Halloween outfits for my kids if I learned sewing and related arts and crafts. I'd have an easier time vacationing in Mexico if I learned Spanish and a nicer time vacationing in Japan if I learned Japanese. My dogs would require less effort to take care of and have a better quality of life if I learned how to train them better. My life would be easier if I could do furniture repair (since I have kids and dogs).
I host my own email. So what. I learned how to use Docker and AWS. So what. But generally I'm one of those too many people that do not ever want to learn anything, anytime - I'm proficient at very few of the skills on that long list above. And unless you're a Renaissance Man (or Renaissance Woman or Person or whatever) - I doubt you're proficient in many of them either.