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Curious about how MUCH do you trust MXroute with your own personal stuff?
Preface: I'm a fan of MXroute, and I like @jar and his services. It's a good service, a good value, and @jar has worked very hard to earn a solid reputation, and I know a lot of people use MXroute here on LET, including a lot of hosting providers.
Having said that, since email is the central hub of contact for other services in your life, I'm curious how MUCH do you personally trust MXroute with your most personal and critical email, such as for your bank login email, or other very important email accounts? Government contact info, legal accounts, PayPal, insurance, business accounts, family, dating, Amazon, etc.? What about social media accounts? Gaming accounts? Streaming services? And so forth...
Just wondering how far you are willing to trust MXroute with your important personal stuff?
And to be clear, I'm NOT suggesting you SHOULD or SHOULD NOT do that. I'm not making any comment or judgment about all that since I don't know MXroute well enough yet, and I don't know @jar personally (although he seems like a good person who takes his business seriously).
And of course, we all know there are certain risks with ANY email provider, and email itself is inherently a very flawed technology, etc. AND we all know MXroute is not trying to be the same kind of service as an encrypted privacy service like Proton, Tuta, Skiff (RIP), etc...
But it dawned on me that @jar has been selling these services long enough and has a big enough following that resellers and other hosting providers have come to rely on MXroute in a big way, which means there must be downstream thousands and thousands of end users out there who are using MXroute for their day-to-day personal email accounts too. No doubt many people here in this forum are using it for personal stuff too.
So... I'm just trying to understand the LEVEL of trust @jar has earned here among other LET users.
FYI, as for me, I currently use MXroute for notifications for some server apps I have running, very simple, a fraction of my account limits, just for light non-critical stuff so far. And it works great for me.
And BTW, kudos to @jar for building his business in the unique way he has accomplished it so far, and I can tell he takes it very seriously. I wish him continued growth and success.
Comments
I don't trust anyone, especially an American company, I only host data in Russia.
I don't trust MXroute because they are peeking into my dik pics.
i dont host anything important with them but i wouldnt mind doing it, jar seems like a trustworthy guy
i also think cock.li's "How can I trust you?" part is something most providers would follow / agree with
"How can I trust you?
You can't. Cock.li doesn't parse your E-mail to provide you with targeted ads, nor does cock.li read E-mail contents unless it's for a legal court order. However, it is 100% possible for me to read E-mail, and IMAP/SMTP doesn't provide user-side/client-side encryption, so you're just going to have to take my word for it. Any encryption implementation would still technically allow me to read E-mail, too. This was true for Lavabit as well -- while your E-mail was stored encrypted (only if you were a paid member, which most people forget), E-mail could still technically be intercepted while being received / sent (SMTP), or while being read by your mail client (IMAP). For privacy, we recommend encrypting your E-mails using PGP using a mail client add-on like Enigmail, or downloading your mail locally with POP and regularly deleting your mail from our server.
Also, there's this quote from /g/:
Administering a mail host is sort of like being a nurse; there's a brief period at the start when the thought of seeing people's privates might be vaguely titillating in a theoretical sense, but that sort of thing doesn't last long when it's up against the daily reality of shit, piss, blood, and vomit.
Now that I think about it, administering a mail host is exactly like being a nurse, only people die slightly less often. "
Ask your-self: “Am I so important that someone would go through the logs and read my emails?”.
Email is e-laundry. It is dirty, shitty, reeks like vinegar and smegma hybrid. Who in the whole world would like to see this filth? And no, you are not important and only person who waits you - is your local cemetary grave-digger.
To be fair, I just give the guy money every year, and I never really set up the service. I am the best kind of customer.
My incentive to be trustworthy only increases every year. We're up to 3 people on support and a ridiculous number of customers. I'm definitely not intentionally throwing that away.
0 trust and hope for the best ?
When your own business that you built from the ground up is what pays all the bills for your family (including paying employees, contractors), and especially if you have kids, there is nothing quite like all that to motivate you!
BTW that's the best part of free market economics IMO, when it brings your incentives and motivations in alignment with the needs of your customers.
Best wishes to you, @jar!
So I asked.
Those AI bots is the rock bottom and direct insult to the customer
It's less insulting than raising prices on everyone because a few customers continually ask the same things in only slightly different contexts, throwing off all ability to use canned replies and help articles to reduce support overhead. Every single hosting provider that faces the issue of scaling support fails miserably, so I wouldn't so quickly dismiss my efforts to not go down the same paths they went. At least, if you care whether or not I succeed where so many have failed (which, IMO, is as ideal for the customer as it is for me).
This is one of the biggest reasons that a company massively competing on price eventually closes it's doors, sells out to someone like EIG, outsources support to the lowest bidder, or raises prices on everyone. IMO anyone who doesn't like creative efforts to solve those problems wants one of those things to occur. Hobbyists don't care as much because they can pick up and move to the next newer host that hasn't faced the problem of support scaling yet. But not everyone is just a hobbyist.
This iteration isn't the right one, but AI is the best path to date to resolving this problem every hosting provider faces, and almost all of them fail to beat. You simply have to take humans out of situations where you can reasonably predict the resolution, so that you can have highly skilled humans available to pick up the rest.
i trust mxroute, gmx, skiff, gmail, mail.ru, yahoo etc. but all mails are pgp-encrypted.
Selling out to EIG for millions is the final goal as no sane person would refuse early pension and time for his hobys and familly with total financial freedom.
I appreciate your PGP comment, but.... Skiff????
Nah, you guys will be dealing with a Donnell even after I die.
Please don't ever do this.
👁️👄👁️
No it's okay, I met with Rob Monster about acquisition. I'm sure he's going places.
I'm all in for family being #1, but thank goodness there are plenty of "insane" people who have a higher purpose than just selling out.
Disclaimer: I am no longer a customer not because I had problems with the service (I didn't have any), but just because I like self hosting things for fun and I now self host email too. I will very likely use MXroute again in the future for myself if I stop self hosting, and will definitely recommend the service to others who might ask my recommendations or suggestions.
Even though I have never met @jar and I don't know him, he has gained my trust because of the way he has been open and transparent with customers and this community on a number of occasions, even in circumstances that might have looked not so good for MXroute like time taken to recover from an outage and things like that.
People who like Jar have the decency to be honest when something goes wrong and admit mistakes and problems while also communicating how they are going to improve for the future, are IMO less likely going to be the kind of person who also snoops into your emails for any reason whatsoever. That's my gut feeling at least.
Having said that, of course it's a relatively small provider if you compare it with the likes of Google etc, so there is always a risk about privacy and security in general. But would you trust e.g. Google more than MXroute? I most certainly wouldn't.
I personally pay for the service, but I'm still not sure about moving my main email over. Currently it's used for things such as alerts from Proxmox. I'm not too worried about jar reading my emails, unless he really wants to see years of promotional email I haven't deleted. I am however worried about the event of MXroute or the servers that MXroute is running on are compromised. Am I paranoid? Probably.
This is not about Jar / MXRoute -- I'm paranoid person
I have hosted my own e-mail for i think ... 2 decades now?
At least few years before starting Pulsed Media for just this domain, and i recall running MTAs in the 90s.
It's such a shame that hosting your own email (the outgoing part mostly) is too difficult these days. Even i find it arduous at times these days.
Also i didn't find e-mail service able to provide the level of service i need (my inbox is regularly over 100k emails ... after filtering, automation etc.) and even thunderbind on Linux struggles with it, never mind email service providers ironically enough.
Personally i think email is badly borked these days, really badly. I have an idea how to fix it but we are too small of a business to affect that level of change or even develop the PoC fully
The world needs more services like @jar 's MXRoute tho. We almost transferred our business email over to MXRoute, but we got a new lease on life with a little bit of elbow grease, but again today we are reminded we might have to move to someone who specializes on email and email alone. For no reason, we've got listed on SORBS for MTAs which only relay pulsedmedia.com billing emails; Meaning a customer who opted in has caused the listings ... and not 1, but 62 cases over 12 months!
Which means, just to get our legit opt-in email out, we'd need to maintain a constant rotation of IPs like spammers, or grow big enough to get whitelisted by almost all providers.
E-Mail is completely fucked and the only solution out is to make it paid via BTC Lightning micropayments imho
-Aleksi
Anything but email and crypto together, please
@jar
Pitch this idea for a Hollywood movie. Terrorists and/or elaborate heist by taking over email provider and doing a massive simultaneous 2FA hack. Bonus points for super privacy oriented mail provider that had global cartel and other baddy clients where the payout is hundreds of billions.
This is a perverted thing
This is pure masochism
if you use gmail and the likes you can definitely use/trust mxroute.
For this only Gmail/Hotmail I would trust. Using Hotmail since 1999 for my paypal and finance accounts and Gmail for government ID and contract account. Recently I've started using Protonmail.
Counterintuitively enough, I don't trust anyone outside of The Big Three (Google/Microsoft/Apple) with my personal emails. Sure, I know the NSA is reading all of my emails, but at least I know it is just the NSA and not everyone else. I have nothing against MXRoute personally, I have the same attitude towards all 'smaller-scale' email providers. I would similarly not trust my domain registrar or telco with personal email.
I am less worried about the provider being untrustworthy, as much as I am worried about a rogue employee, freak lightning strike taking out a small provider's DC, that sort of thing.
I chose not to self-host the most critical of my personal emails because I don't want to panic every time my server decides to pack a mental. Using a commercial provider gets me guaranteed uptime, and using my own domain lets me have some outward mobility of the service goes to hell.
S23 Ultra only goes to 100x zoom, he isn't peeking yet.
Yeah, pretty well said. Because CB didn't have existing/legacy services I opted to try a different path for this business and avoid the time/headache. E-mail is so integral, but also such a headache. How can you not offload it to someone reputable for the prices @jar asks?
The flip side, always use some tool to backup your e-mails (you're backing up your e-mails, RIGHT?!) and if MXRoute closes up it's not hard to change MX records and move over. I can say that I think the likelihood of @jar reading our "New Order Notification" e-mails is 0, and even if he did it wouldn't benefit him at all. @jlet88 I'd say while e-mail is integral, it's also not hard to change so I find the risk to be fairly minimal. As a hosting provider we should always have multiple avenues of communication available in the event one stops working (email, website, billing portal, control panel, and discord) and I wouldn't trust anything sent via e-mail (ever, under any circumstances) to be fully private/secure/confidential.