> The premise is that by learning some of the fundamentals, in this case Linux, you can host most things yourself. Not because you need to, but because you want to, and the feeling of using your own services just gives you pleasure. And you learn from it.
Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmail account. I'd bet that most normies would be in deep shit, since that's basically their identity online, and they need it to reset passwords and maybe even to log into things. I bet there are a non-zero number of HN commenters who would be fucked if they so much as lost their Gmail account. You've got to at least own your own E-mail identity! Rinse and repeat for every other online service you depend on. What if your web host suddenly deleted you? Or AWS? Or Spotify or Netflix? Or some other cloud service? What's your backup? If your answer is "a new cloud host" you're just trading identical problems.
My singular issue with self hosting specifically with email is not setting it up. Lots of documentation on setting up an email server.
But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers.
As a contrived example, if Google blackballs your server, who do you talk to about it? How do you know? Do that have email addresses, or procedures for resolution in the error messages you get talking with them?
Or these other global, IP ban sites.
I’d like to see a troubleshooting guide for email. Not so much for the protocols like DKIM, or setting DNS up properly, but in dealing with these other actors that can impact your service even if it’s, technically, according to Hoyle, set up and configured properly.
> But running it is different issue. Notably, I have no idea, and have not seen a resource talking about troubleshooting and problem solving for a self hosted service. Particularly in regards with interoperability with other providers.
It's nearly impossible to get 100% email deliverability if you self host and don't use a SMTP relay. It might work if all your contacts are with a major provider like google, but otherwise you'll get 97% deliverability but then that one person using sbcglobal/att won't ever get your email for a 4 week period or that company using barracuda puts your email in a black hole. You put in effort to get your email server whitelisted but many email providers don't respond or only give you a temporary fix.
However, you can still self host most of the email stack, including most importantly storage of your email, by using an SMTP relay, like AWS, postmark, or mailgun. It's quick and easy to switch SMTP relays if the one you're using doesn't work out. In postfix you can choose to use a relay only for certain domains.
IME the communities around packaged open-source solutions like mailinabox, mailco, mailu tend to help each other out with stuff like this and the shared bases help. Maybe camp a few chatrooms and forums and see if any fits your vibe.
Most services, including email providers, spam databases, and "ip-ban sites" have clear documentation, in terms of how to get on their good side, if needed, and it is often surprisingly straightforward to do so. Often it's as simple as filling out a relatively form.
Have you ever tried to use it? Because I fought for about 2 months with both Google and Microsoft, trying to self-host my mail server, to no success. The only answer was amongst the lines 'your server has not enough reputation'. Even though perfectly configured, DKIM, DMARC, etc. Now imagine a business not being able to send a message to anyone hosted on Gmail or Outlook, probably 80-90 percents of the companies out there.
I feel you. I had my email on OVH for a while, but they handle abuse so bad that Apple just blanketed banned the /17 my IP was in. And I was lucky that Apple actually answered my emails and explained why I was banned. I doubt Microsoft and Google would give you any useful information.
They claim that, but everyone small I know who self hosted email has discovered that forms don't do anything. I switched to fastmail 15 years ago and my email got a lot better because they are big enough that nobody dares ignore them. (maybe the forms work better today than 15 years ago, but enough people keep complaining about this issue that I doubt it)
Own your own domain, point it to the email hosting provider of your choice, and if something went horribly wrong, switch providers.
Domains are cheap; never use an email address that's email-provider-specific. That's orthogonal to whether you host your own email or use a professional service to do it for you.
As for the domain risks, my suggestions is to stick with the .com/.net/.org or something common in your country and avoid novelty ones such as .app, .dev, etc, even if you can't get the shortest and simpler name. And if you have some money to spare, just renew it to 10 years.
> I will lose some email history, but at least I don’t lose my email future.
I back up all my email every day, independent of my hosting provider. I have an automatic nightly sync to my laptop, which happens right before my nightly laptop backups.
If doing so id also recommend not using the same email or domain for the registrar and for your email host…. If you are locked out of one you’d want to be able to access the other to change things.
Agreed. I’ve had the same email address for a decade now but cycled through the registrar’s email, Gmail, and M365 in that time. Makes it easy to switch.
The risk may be real, but is it likely to happen to many people?
The reason why I bring this up is because many early adopters of Gmail switched to it or grew to rely upon it because the alternatives were much worse. The account through your ISP, gone as soon as you switched to another ISP. That switch may have been a necessary switch if you moved to a place the ISP did not service. University email address, gone soon after graduation. Employer's email address, gone as soon as you switched employers (and risky to use for personal use anyhow). Through another dedicated provider, I suspect most of those dedicated providers are now gone.
Yeap, self-hosting can sort of resolve the problem. The key word being sort of. Controlling your identity doesn't mean terribly much if you don't have the knowledge to setup and maintain a secure email server. If you know how to do it, and noone is targetting you in particular, you'll probably be fine. Otherwise, all bets are off. Any you don't have total control anyhow. You still have the domain name to deal with after all. You should be okay if you do your homework and stay on top of renewals, almost certainly better off than you would be with Google, but again it is only as reliable as you are.
There are reasons why people go with Gmail, and a handful of other providers. In the end, virtually all of those people will be better off in both the short to mid-term.
Self hosting at home - what is higher risk? Your HDD dying or losing Gmail account?
Oh now you don’t only self host, now you have to have space to keep gear, plan backups, install updates, oh would be good to test updates so some bug doesn’t mess your system.
Oh you know installing updates or while backups are running it would be bad if you have power outage- now you need a UPS.
Oh you know what - my UPS turned out to be faulty and it f-up my HDD in my NAS.
No I don’t have time to deal with any of it anymore I have other things to do with my life ;)
Different strokes for different folks. Motivation for me has been a combination of independence and mistrust. Every single one of the larger tech companies have shown their priority to growth above making good products and services, and not being directly user hostile. Google search is worse now than it was 10 years ago. Netflix has ads with a paid subscription, so does YouTube. Windows is absolute joke, more and more we see user hostile software. Incentives aren’t aligned at all. As people who work in software, I get not wanting to do this stuff at home as well. But honestly I’m hoping for a future where a lot of these services can legit be self hosted by technical people for their local communities. Mastodon is doing this really well IMO. Self hosted software is also getting a lot easier to manage, so I’m quite optimistic that things will keep heading this way.
Note, I’ve got all the things you mentioned down to the UPSes setup in my garage, as well as multiple levels of backups. It’s not perfect, but works for me without much time input vs utility it provides. Each to their own.
If your trust is violated, typically the worst that happens is you are fed a couple more relevant ads or your data is used for some commercial purpose that has little to no effect on your life.
Is it really worth going through so much effort to mitigate that risk?
Again, it's a value judgement, so the answer is largely personal. For me, yes. The social license we give these larger companies after all the violated trust doesn't make sense. If your local shop owner/operator that you talked to everyday had the same attitude towards your when you went shopping and exchanged pleasantries with most weeks, people would confront them about their actions, and that shop wouldn't last long. We have created the disconnect for convenience, and tried to ignore the level of control these companies have on our day to day lives if they are so inclined or instructed to change their systems.
Cloud is just someone else's computer. These systems aren't special. Yes they are impressively engineered to deal with the scale they deal with, but when systems are smaller, they can get a lot simpler. I think as an industry we have conflated distributed systems with really hard engineering problems, when it really matter at what level of abstraction the distribution happens when it comes to down stream complexity.
It introduces some pretty important risks of its own though. If you accidentally delete/forget a local private key or lose your primary email domain there is no recourse. It's significantly easier to set up 2FA and account recovery on a third party service
Note that I'm not saying you shouldn't self-host email or anything else. But it's probably more risky for 99% of people compared to just making sure they can recover their accounts.
I have seen much more stories about people losing access to their Gmail because of a comment flagged somewhere else (i.e YouTube) than people losing access to their domains (it is hard to miss all these reminders about renewal and you shouldn't wait until then anyway so that's something under you control).
And good luck getting anyone from Google to solve your problem assuming you get to a human.
Google will never comment on the reasons they disable an account, so all you've read are the unilateral claims of people who may or may not be admitting what they actually did to lose their accounts.
Not only that, but it helps to eliminate the very real risk that you get kicked off of a platform that you depend on without recourse. Imagine if you lost your Gmail account. I'd bet that most normies would be in deep shit, since that's basically their identity online, and they need it to reset passwords and maybe even to log into things. I bet there are a non-zero number of HN commenters who would be fucked if they so much as lost their Gmail account. You've got to at least own your own E-mail identity! Rinse and repeat for every other online service you depend on. What if your web host suddenly deleted you? Or AWS? Or Spotify or Netflix? Or some other cloud service? What's your backup? If your answer is "a new cloud host" you're just trading identical problems.