We are now 364 Microsoft outages away from countries and companies recognising that running their own email services is the way the system was meant to be. #SarcasmButOnlyHalf
0 Boosts
0 Likes
@aarRJaay Yeah, I hear that all the time, but it simply isn't true. My little server is happily sending and receiving mails to and from all big providers. I have never been blocked by them. In 20+ years.
Also: email is still one of the most important services out there, no matter how often its death has been predicted and no matter how often techbros tell me that it cannot be saved and that self hosting email is futile and I should just give in and move my email to Microsoft or Google. I am now officially a grumpy old man, yelling at clouds while keeping his postfix and dovecot up and running ;)
@jwildeboer
That's great!
And I wish, more people would realize that there are many more things between doing it all yourself and selling your soul to GAFAM.
For the equivalent of two hours minimum wage you can have people host the emails for you and your family professionally for a whole year without feeding all your private communications to marketing and AI models.
@jwildeboer do you have any issues with deliverability hosting yourself? Anti-spam filters and whatnot are a big part of why I haven’t bothered but I’m very curious.
@zachery_delong I do get the occasional spam/phishing mail, but it is around 5-10 per month in a total traffic of several thousand. I report them via Spamcop or simply add the sending IP to my firewall, depending on my analysis. Which is supported by some scripts. Takes me in total maybe 5 minutes per day.
@jwildeboer @25admins this week were talking this week about an AP service replacing it, and frankly I think they're onto something.
@jpaskaruk Yeah. Everything that can send and receive messages has been promoted or proposed to replace email in the past 30 years. Weird thing, email is still here and not losing ;) @25admins
@jwildeboer Is it, though? Or is it getting extreme attention because it is still the canonical baseline for things, however janky?
I have no "kill SMTP" agenda, but, it was designed for a completely different Internet.
@jwildeboer the thing is, this outage has shown that Outlook / Exchange / Teams AREN'T e-mail and messaging - they're walled-garden 'MS Communication Apps' - if they weren't, it would still work when one part goes down. Remember when you could hos t your own and use SMTP? I don't think Outlook does that anymore #Microsoft #MIcrosoft365Outage
@aarRJaay I not only remember how you could host your own mail server, I am still doing it ;)
@jwildeboer heh.
I used to have a very small web site. The hosting provider at the time provided not only the space for my handful of html files that made up my "site" but it also came with "your own mail server" so you could have yourname@yourowndomain.whatever email addresses. I'm SO long out of that game that I have no idea what goes on under the hood or whether it might be a good idea for the less tech savvy amongst us. What say you?
@rozeboosje I wrote a 5 part series on how I run my mail server that manages 20+ domains on a small Linux box [1]. Feel free to read it and decide if it is worth it for you to go down that road. If not, know there are quite some mail-in-a-box solutions that run as containers etc. However — I have never used one of those, so cannot help you there. But others here can and will!
[1] https://jan.wildeboer.net/2022/08/Email-0-The-Journey-2022/
Jan Wildeboer's Blog
Jan Wildeboer
Warning. This whole series is not a simple HOWTO. This series is about how I run my mail server. I go through the configuration, line by line and explain. It’s not going to be a simple Copy/Paste to run your own mail server. You have been warned.
⁂
More from
Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:
@rozeboosje And also — there is absolutely nothing wrong with using a small provider to host your email accounts. That also helps to keep the internet a bit more decentralised. And that is what we all should think about. How can we reverse the centralisation of the past many years back to what the internet was supposed to be — a system that is built on decentralisation to be resilient.
@jwildeboer Of course, yelling at clouds is a part of my job as an IT systems architect.
@jwildeboer also though, from what I've heard from people who try to host their own email, the big companies block anything that isn't their own (or their big friends) so again, its not the federated, free, open protocol it once was.