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I don't understand why so many folk on #mastodon are recommending against running your own #mail server.
The fundamental premise of the #fediverse is distributed diversity yet when it comes to email apparently centralising the whole planet to @gmail is the preferred outcome.
This is broken and dangerously wrong.
Running your own mail server is equally as valid as running your own #mastodon instance.
And if you want to get started with running your own mail server, you could do worse than follow @mwl who has published a book on how to do so.
@markd
I get the impression that it's really hard, but more importantly that it's so easy to get blacklisted and so hard to get it fixed that it's not worth it.
The big email recipients like GMail and Outlook will just dump your emails, never let you know they've done it, never tell you why, never tell you how to fix it.
@negative12dollarbill @markd Your concerns on the latter half of your point, I'd like to demistify that as I run an email server on my pubnix Hashnix.club
You actually get status code messages all the time if something hasn't gone through, and IDK about Outlook but at least on Gmail's part, they let you know how to set up their GSMTP on your server for the purpose of having messages pass through their system to whoever is on their services.
Hopefully this is helpful info to ya. Figuring out an email server can be tricky, but once it clicks, it's as manageable as any other internet host server software.
@superfxchip @markd
Thanks! I'm not trying to set up my own at the moment, just relaying horror stories I've read elsewhere. I'll try to find some examples. Glad it's working for you.
@superfxchip @negative12dollarbill No doubt it is a bit tricky and it does take work, but it's as important, perhaps even more so than decentralizing social media, that we don't let email turn into a small cartel of providers.
If we were ever to lose the ability to run our own mail servers that would be a truly great loss of the one and only democratic, decentralized, globally addressable communication system.
There will never be another email so we need to protect and nourish this one.
Here's one thread on the topic I've seen recently:
https://techhub.social/@tristan@tech.lgbt/112815855477245104
“I had so so many problems with big providers (google, yahoo, microsoft) either sending all of my mail directly to spam or silently discarding it. didn’t matter how much DKIM or SPF i set up or how many different hosting providers (with clean IP blocks!) i tried. those large email services will not even engage with you to help debug unless your mail volume is in the thousands a day.”
@negative12dollarbill @superfxchip Yep. It's true. The big providers are basically arseholes who could not care less about smaller providers and self-hosters.
Having worked for these providers I know that they mostly don't care or don't have the resources to care.
The only solution is to make them less relevant.
@markd Yes, it is broken, but we are already in a state where you literally cannot run your own. That's why people say it.
@simontoth So we either acquiesce or resist.
And FWIWs I've been running my own mail server for multiple decades and all deliveries work just fine. So this notion that you cannot do so for yourself is mostly just urban myth.
@markd OK, fair enough.
But you are one positive point contrasted against a lot more negative experiences.
Also, Gmail isn't the only option. There are plenty of "small-ish" webhosts that have a mail server as part of the offering.
@simontoth "But you are one positive point contrasted against a lot more negative experiences".
Is this not an argument for suggesting that email diversity is at great risk?
"There are plenty of "small-ish" webhosts that have a mail server as part of the offering".
So how is running your own mail server any more of a problem than emulating a "small-ish" webhost?
My point is that email diversity is at risk and "small-ish" webhosts are vanishing which exacerbates the risk. Do you disagree?
@markd Sorry, but I'm out.
I will not play this game of reframing things into political statements.
@simontoth Perhaps someone with more credence will influence you.
Grady Booch has a few thoughts on how important diversity is:
https://bird.makeup/users/grady_booch/statuses/1814794800560005391
@markd nobody is saying they prefer that outcome, or that running your own mail server isn't a valid choice; they are saying it is extremely difficult and to go into it eyes wide open about the initial and ongoing challenges. there's no call to be snooty about that.
@engagedpractx No one is being snooty. But when was the last time your saw a post encouraging self-hosting of a mail server?
@markd you are being very hoity-toity
@engagedpractx I'll bite. Why? Suggesting that folk should run fundamentally distributed software in a distributed way is "hoity-toity"?
Email is a last bastion against Internet centralisation so I think it deserves some effort to preserve, but apparently this is a bad call. Tell me why.
@markd You are deliberately misinterpreting what other people are consistently and repeatedly saying. They are in fact *documenting* the problems caused by centralisation, not acquiescing in it. And you're coming along saying 'well people SHOULD do the difficult thing.' That's... very open source of you but please, someone, explain to me how that actually challenges the dominance of Gmail? An actual open source advocacy strategy would involve an anti-trust lawsuit, not homebrew mail servers.
@engagedpractx Not true. They are mostly acquiescing. Show me otherwise.
@markd There's the hoity-toity I was talking about. You have privileged access to reality and instead of justifying what you're claiming you demand other people provide evidence to refute it. That is not and never has been how argument works, and I am not proceeding further with this conversation.
@markd I run my own mail server. It can be complicated to set up a full stack (although setting up a basic mail server is easy).
@markd I run my own mail server. You’ll have a heck of a time getting Google and Microsoft to not reject email from your cloud provider’s IPv4/IPv6 addresses… but once you’re past that point, it’s actually quite nice.
@markd I’m in a technical field but pretty amateur when it comes to system administration — and have been running my own mail server for over a decade.
It’s something I feel compelled to do because more people should. None of it is actually that hard. It mostly comes down to a willingness to read docs.
@markd It's really damn hard. I did it for a business and had non-stop complaints about not receiving email. Ended up tunneling outgoing messages through AWS ses to get decent results for account confirmations.
I can see this in the fediverse too. Obviously not the centralized crap, but people who want to defed entire domains. People told me it doesn't matter where I sign up, and I see calls to defed the gigantic instance I'm on all the time.