memes

Tbh, out of all services I've seen people self-host, email is the most common one I've seen people describe as a bad idea™️.

I just chose a paid mail service (mailbox) and called it a day.

I stopped thinking of any email as “private” regardless of where it’s hosted, when I realized that everyone I email uses Gmail anyways; so all my emails end up going to Google anyways.

It made me an email nihilist

Self-hosting email is quite the undertaking... I don't have the energy to deal with it and just pay 10€/year for a hosting service.

Here's an informative (and funny) talk on why self-hosting email is probably a bad idea.

I work for state government and even we have trouble with email reputation issues from the big orgs. It's a pain for everyone.

Me and a couple other people have ran into on the internet have thought that we need to invent "email 2", a clean slate implementation of email that serves it's asynchronous long form and attachment friendly function while leaving behind Decades of Cruft . We can make it into an encrypted by default and have conveniences that we never had before. It might even be an actual useful thing instead of just being the thing you sign up for accounts with to get to 2fa codes and spam from websites you buy stuff from

I run my own mailserver in docker and it's not so hard! There was some difficulty at the start with mail going to spam, but after a little while "warming up" the IP with usage, it works fine. It's hardest to build an IP's reputation in the beginning because if your mail goes to spam, it doesn't typically lead to healthy conversations that can support it's history.

My trick was to forward all my incoming gmail messages from the account I was replacing into the new server - that way I could receive and reply from the new mailserver if people sent mail to the old one. Once it built up a bit of a history it started working fine, and that took maybe a few conversations over a couple of days.

The thing I have noticed is that you very quickly get destroyed by incoming spam - a more advanced filter is definitely on the list.

If you want you can PM me your dkim and dmarc and SPF policy. Or just send me your url and I'll look it up. I used to fix these for a living. It's likely an issue with your SPF not being properly annotated.

*fuck

I have this problem for a while as well. Similar to you all mechanisms are implemented multiple sites say the configuration is correct, even headers in Gmail say DKIM and SPF passed. E-mail arrives everywhere except for gmail.

Thanks for posting, at least I know I'm not the only one.

I also self host email and so far haven’t had any problems. Initial setup was annoying but it’s required zero effort this past few years, and I don’t think my emails land in spam folders. Maybe I can help?

Shoot me a message at test-message-lawrenceOfSuburbia@mspencer.net (which I’ll delete after it gets a message, for obvious reasons) and I’ll take a look. (I misspelled the name, I apologize, no insult intended)

Honestly I think I’ve received 10 spam messages in the last four years, and five have been from gmail addresses (Best Buy invoice spam) in the past two months. I submit each one to support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse and hopefully it helps.

@laurenceOfSuburbia
This ain't anything new. They have been doing this for decades and will still do it forever. Just move on with it, since it like trying to figure out something which has no meaning at all.
Just know for sure that every company has systems designed by some developer based on a whimsical mindset of someone at the very top. So, I can care less for these stupid companies and their useless management.

I self-hosted my own email for a few years, everything was set up and reporting correctly, but Google just would never have it. I think the worst is it would be a bit inconsistent.

Anyway, I switched to an email provider with my own domain and it's much more reliable. That is until this week, I have noticed that some services are rejecting my domain. I think there is some whitelisting nonsense going on, but in those instances I just use an alias and that seems to work.

I just want to have control of my data!

Google Groups allows spammers to subscribe you to their groups in a workspace account, but doesn't allow you to unsubscribe since you're not part of that workspace account... Worse - all autoresponders for the spam will also be forwarded to all members of said group.

Since I do not participate in Google Groups, the nuclear option is to file all mails from Google Groups as spam with a Sieve script.

Note the require part may be too large as may sieve script also contains more rules than this one.

require ["body", "date", "editheader", "envelope", "fileinto", "imap4flags", "mailbox", "regex", "reject", "variables"];

if anyof(
    header :contains "List-Subscribe" "groups.google.com",
    header :matches "X-Google-Group-Id" "*"
   ) {
	if header :matches "Subject" "*" {
		set "subject" "${1}";
	} else {
		set "subject" "";
	}
	deleteheader "Subject";
	addheader :last "Subject" "[Google-Groups-Spam] ${subject}";

	fileinto "Junk";
}

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

The dumb thing is, all it really does is push spammers onto using botted/stolen accounts which work way more effectively, and everyone else is forced to set up their email with Google or Microsoft.

If your domain isn't big enough to be recognized, all that SPF and DMARC won't mean crap to them.

i never had problems with Google, but Outlook always blocks my emails, just because it's not a standard .com .net etc domain...

Most email providers block new domains... You need to have the DNS records up for like 2 years before they start getting accepted... Or contact all the big doers to get yourself whitelisted

I put dog shit in my ass and Google knew five minutes before it happened, filmed it, and sold it back to me as a custom highlight of my home alone shenanigans. I find this a bit egregious, personally.

I might be out of the loop on how email works, but doesn’t it hop between several other email servers on its way from Alice to Bob (and at least some of it must still be unencrypted)? If so and given google’s scale you could probably just assume that even if they’re not your inbox they’re going to be at least handling many if not most emails along the way.