this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
422 points (95.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40730 readers
324 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

IIRC, it's nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you're sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you're stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.

That's on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.

We need something better than email.

[–] tabletti 5 points 6 months ago

On top of that, most ISPs block port 25 on residential IP addresses to combat spam, making it impossible to go full ”DIY”

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

We need something better than email.

Say everyone agrees and the entire world swaps to some alternative. Email 3.0 or whatever.

Wouldn't we just have the same issue? Any form of communication protocol (that can be self host able) will get abused by spam. Requiring a lot of extra work to manage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don't have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Isn't the current email system kind of a web of trust. Microsoft, Google etc.. trust each other. But little me and my home server is not part of that web of trust making my email server get blocked.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it's all managed by corporations, not individuals.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Realistically I don't see how it would ever not be managed by a corporation. Your average person doesn't know how and doesn't want to manage their own messaging system. They are just going to offload that responsibility to a corporation to do it for them. We are just going to have exactly the same system we have now. Just called some else besides email.

I wish there was a better solution but I am not seeing a way that doesn't just end up the same as email.

[–] AnUnusualRelic 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well, there's always, you know, mail.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Aah, the good ol‘ wooden variety

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I self-host mine using Mailcow, but I use an outbound SMTP relay for sending email so I don't have to deal with IP reputation. L