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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: 1) by DECbot on Tuesday September 03 2019, @09:12PM (3 children)

    by DECbot (832) on Tuesday September 03 2019, @09:12PM (#889293) Journal

    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)

    by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday September 04 2019, @01:06PM (#889503)

    > 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

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday September 04 2019, @02:56PM (#889548) Journal

      Back when Verizon FIOS was an option...

      Interesting. It's not anymore? Maybe you moved...

      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

      by DECbot (832) on Wednesday September 04 2019, @03:45PM (#889568) Journal

      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