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Have at it, you can get better quotes on hostedtalk though 😂
Whoa whoa. E-Mail is not only for randomly writing out of the blue to other people. And arguably these days it is less and less for that. But E-Mail is also for:
That's only some that immediately come to mind and don't require 100% big service deliverability from you.
And the first point is the exact biggest reason to self-host E-Mail, instead of giving some company employees full unhindered access to the keys of your kingdom. The latter two, also work perfectly well with self-hosting.
Not my experience at all, and I have a lot with literally hundreds of networks over the years.
Google uses much more than IP addresses for fingerprinting and scoring, and you need to consider other factors if this is really happening on networks which you think are clean for their criteria (and you can't know, only make an educated guess).
For example: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr... all work fine almost always, and generally speaking have always been. DigitalOcean for example is a relatively dirty network, but maybe not by LET provider standards.
Some of the providers advertising here survive only thanks to shady customers and have entire subnets full of crap like scrappers, phising and even spam, so you need to consider that.
Commercial VPN providers are (again, generally speaking) way dirtier than your average hosting provider.
I think what many people fail to remember is that many people and sites seem to believe email as a form of identity management. You can click on a confirmation email sent to that inbox? You're obviously that person.
It's definitely a risky click for @jar
I think the author of the article makes a few mistakes in his diagnostic.
You should never use a service where you cannot report a problem or where the administrators are out of reach. Of course it includes the "big techs" but they're not alone.
The underlying issue is that most of them delegate their filtering decisions to third parties. And many of them rely on the same centralized IP and domain blacklists.
Because of how the filtering is done, the End User generally never discovers that any filtering is happening. Only the sender may be notified by his mail relay of the delivery failure.
Of course, the blacklisters are not going to put the IP addresses of the big Email Vendors into their lists, if they did, millions of people would be notified of delivery failures with the risk of them discovering who is responsible.
Even 20 years ago the computing power wasn't a problem. He probably has this impression because he's been using SpamAssassin. The real reason for why they are taking the "shortcut" is carelessness toward their service and users.
The excuse of saying that you should block messages before delivering them because it takes disk space is also heavily promoted by the blacklisters. Indeed, if the message was simply delivered to a Spam folder with the actual reason for which it has been classified as such, users could discover who is responsible for the filtering.
The good news is that there is some success in getting the big email services to remove centralized blacklists.
Another problem is that too many administrators of smaller services are not even aware of their reliance on blacklists. Sometimes this is because they have used an easy installation script for convenience, or because they've copy/pasted a configuration. And of course, there are those who do not understand the ethical implications of doing such a thing or are just foolish.
This doesn't make any sense. The MX records are for inbound, not outbound, he could have used a different relay for sending mails yet still use his own relay for receiving (perhaps he doesn't know that?). Instead, he switches to a provider that his known for contributing to the problem. This is... disturbing.
I was going to post the same thing, but held back. Your "link" was displayed text. Sure, I know how to reveal the actual URL, but it is an extra step that I prefer to avoid. That isn't as bad as TinyURL and other link shorteners. I never click on a link without inspecting the actual URL first.
On forums, I post the full URL for all to see. On other forums, I change "URL unfurl="true" to "false" to display just the link. No questions, no worries, nothing hidden.
My advice:
Post the URL for all to see. Don't hide it in text that reads, "Link to the article."
Why you pretend you know these... your were born the other day
Oh, not entirely useless.
I still host at home. Though it helps that my ISP is more geared to commercial accounts so to the outside world my IP addresses (and the range around it) look like safe business addresses and are probably more trusted than those of most VPS hosts and more residential oriented ISPs.
I've had very little by way of deliverability problems (a brief issue some time ago on a domain that I'd neglected to setup SPF and DKIM for).
The issue with replicating my safety is cost: this ISP is more than most home accounts, twice as much in fact. I get other benefits from that (a small IPv4 range instead of a single dynamic address, no limits on server hosting other than “be a good network neighbour and don't break the law”, and I'm treat like a small commercial customer so when something goes wrong on the line they fix it PDQ if it is them or chase BT-OR for a fix if the problem lies there, ...) but it might not be worth it for most people.
I've seen this argument before, but yet to see an example where this is actually an issue. Sure, if you're using a text-based mail client like elm or pine, then maybe, but I'd also imagine people making that choice are technically savvy enough to be able to transfer a link to some other system if they need to click on it, and if they've chosen that route for themselves then it's kind of their own fault.
AFAIK, systems for blind whether braille or audio would still have a way of selecting a link to open.
So, in the usual case of needing to authenticate an app (actually, I'm very interested as I was planning to roll out with just e-mail containing a link with a hashed validation token so the client can do zero-knowledge verification that it's genuine) where the app is running on ios or android, are there really any e-mail apps that don't let you click on links?
(I should add, I've also been known to directly less files in my mail dir rather than go through the steps to force gmail to read from my pop3 server when I need a sign up link quickly. The only links that annoy me are once that get %-escaped so I need to edit after pasting into the browser.
I still self-host my personal e-mails. Though I have services from MXRoute, SES, and Mailgun for my clients.
Probably because you didn't put the headline into the url or just left it as bare url. I'm being pedantic, but a blog isn't something I usually refer to as an "article" and so this was a bit suspicious of waste of my time.
Email has been a pain in the ass to deal with. It's almost federalized and there's no longer the adherence to what the internet should be - open protocols and set of standards so everyone can implement it. Now it's just black box algos that determine if you're able to communicate with someone or not.
Self hosting emails can still work. At the first part of the year I moved off of Rackspace Hosted Email (excellent service) on to a VPS running Mailcow (truly great open source email suite) and have not had any issues after the initial setup and testing. As long as you have all of the correct records setup and email/domain validations you're good. I do send outbound with SES almost all, but some I don't. Been just over 6 months I think and no issues. Instead of paying $3-10 per mailbox with a big name like Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, etc. I'm paying a few dollars total for the VPS resources -- no limits on domains, mailboxes, or emails to worry about.
As an individual, using a cheap service like Zoho Mail Lite ($12/y) for your own domain is honestly the best option regardless. Cheaper than a pizza from Pizza Hut for the whole year and you don't have to worry about anything. But if you need a lot of mailboxes or domains self hosting is the way to go if you want to save money.
It is dying due to the things @jar said and done in drink.
I have a mixture.
I self-host email for my own company (send and receive) and only had problems with my client once, but that was the day they upgraded their Outlook server and probably messed up some config as they were complaining about other lost mails after that too. There are relatively few mails though, normally only a couple a day.
I will need to monitor delivery success for another domain though, as my company's internal project will need to send out quite a lot of verification emails once the app is ready to move out of beta, but so far all my test emails to e.g. google, live.com, etc have all worked every time once I'd set up DKIM and SPF.
My personal email is kind of self-hosted, but it's on a friend's server and they handle it all. But that domain and server has been around for two decades, and it's probably built up good reputation on any lists now anyway.
The thing I found interesting about the article / blog post was that he said it's basically impossible to run your own server now, and he's stopped doing that by changing his MX records. I've never heard of anyone having problems receiving mail before, only sending. But that one line was enough to make me question whether the rest of the article was useful or not.