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posted by chromas on Monday September 02 2019, @09:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the needs-more-XML dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ilsa on Tuesday September 03 2019, @08:23PM

    by ilsa (6082) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 03 2019, @08:23PM (#889283)

    I am impressed by how often this seems to be coming up lately. What frustrates me is how much people downplay the spam aspect.

    No, running an SMTP server is not hard. But neither is playing a game of Go.

    But like playing Go, it's not the base rules that are difficult, it's the innumerable levels of bullshit you have to deal with in the process. Setting up a mail server that bother operates as a good 'net citizen, and properly handles spam, and doesn't allow your mail to get caught in other people's spam filters, is an absolute, complete pain in the ass.

    You *absolutely* need to make sure several critical pieces are in place, some of which may not even be possible to do depending on how irritating your ISP is.
    -Your EHLO has to be exactly right
    -You need a Reverse pointer address configured
    -You need an SPF record
    -You need DKIM set up
    -make absolutely certain as to your server settings that you haven't created an open relay.

    And even if you do everything correct, you _still_ might find your mail not reaching it's destination because the destination server may be using some kind of half-assed configuration or spam protection service that insists your email follow some non-RFC compliant thingamabob that you couldn't possibly have anticipated ahead of time.

    And this is just for sending mail. I haven't gotten into how much of a pain dealing with incoming email/spam is.

    The fact is, the good guys lost. They lost a long time ago. It is so easy to set up a mass-spamming operation that it's basically playing a game of whackamole. Personal anti-spam tools are just not good enough anymore, because the spam landscape is constantly changing. Your only option is to find a spam service that _proactively_ monitors incoming spam, implements honeypots, RBLs, etc, and updates it's rules constantly. Anyone that relies solely on basic Bayesian rule filtering is going to have a hard time. You'll probably want to implement RBLs on your server as well.

    MXLogic used to be an excellent service, but then Intel bought them for god-knows-why reasons, and then sank the whole ship. We've been struggling to find a decent anti-spam service ever since.

    A lot of these things are set-once-and-forget, but spam has taken what was once a very useful service and turned it into a Mad Max hellscape that requires constant monitoring, tweaking, etc. If you are an end-user, it's annoying. As a sysadmin, it's a bloody nightmare because you have users bothering you about spam, interrupting whatever real work you're trying to do.

    So no, technically running a mail server is not hard. It's just an effing pain in the ass, and depending on what you're trying to do, may simply not be worth the ongoing time commitment.

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