this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
298 points (98.7% liked)
Linux
46775 readers
1854 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm curious about this too.
A lot of self-hosted FOSS people draw the line at hosting their own mail servers. Even if Mozilla created a new ~~domain~~ hosting server for handling, the big three could still reject the traffic like they do for people hosting outside the three now, under the guise of spam filtering.
I'd be ecstatic if they did something here, but I'm not really clear on what a solution would look like. On top of them spreading thin as you mentioned
*edited 'domain' service to 'hosting' service
I have my own domain (even if hosted on a relatively small provider) and I don’t have that much of an issue tbh?
I edited the comment, I really meant hosting server, not domain.
Having a custom domain isn't a big deal, it's really where that domain is hosted that creates forwarding issues. Since the majority of email is handled by the 'big three', anything that's hosted outside of that is often flagged as spam or is refused to be delivered. That's allegedly because there are malicious senders also hosted on third party servers (and fair enough, there likely are), but this causes a bit of a potential monopoly that could easily be abused, and there's obvious motivation to push people into a particular service for data collection.
Even if it doesn't happen often, occasional failures can be a huge problem if you're sending critical communication and it isn't reaching target inboxes because of filtering. It's enough of a headache that even most avid self-hosters tend to avoid it.
That is absolutely unreasonable, as the email files don’t actually tell you who the sender is beyond the domain from where it’s sent. The email protocol is SUPER unsafe and really really easy to spoof as someone from the big three
My understanding is that it's a combination of correctly deploying authentication (DMARC, DKIM, and SPF) and the actual IP address of the server that can get you into trouble. If you incorrectly set up authentication, OR if a malicious sender spoofs you (likely because you didn't set up auth correctly), it can get your IP blocklisted. And unless you're monitoring if you're blocklisted, you often don't know that things aren't getting delivered until someone tells you.
And then you're still kind of at the whim of the big players, because they could change or update their authentication standards, and if you're not on top of it you can find yourself in the same boat, even if you're doing everything else right.
It's not impossible, it's just a headache. But if i'm being honest, i'm a bit of a novice so it could be easier to a more trained network administrator.
Just curious what you are using. I have a domain as well, and occasionally consider setting up another email server for it. I also still have some old old accounts that are still linked to my domain email, but I just haven't run an email server in years. Is it something turnkey that I don't need to spend weeks configuring? In fact I might only turn it on long enough to receive emails so that I can change the accounts.
I use Mailcow and it works well. Easy to configure, and it uses Docker so it's self-contained and very easy to move to a new server if you ever need to do that.
I'm using an SMTP relay for outbound emails, though. I didn't want to have to deal with IP reputation issues, especially with Microsoft/Hotmail. I'm hosting my server on a VPS, and spammers in the same subnet can result in the entire subnet getting blocklisted. Configuring a relay is easy in Mailcow's UI, and can be configured per domain.
I am not happy with my provider, currently waiting for the email hosting to expire so that I can maintain just the domain there and eventually user zoho for hosting
Thanks. I will take a look.