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[The Guardian] There is no moral high ground for Reddit as it seeks to capitalise on user data
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Except email is hugely centralized now (with Google and Microsoft) even though it's technically a federated protocol. So there's a huge barrier to entry to spin up your own federated server if you actually want to send/receive any mail with it... I think the lesson here is that we need to be constantly vigilant about potential centralization in the Lemmybin Fediverse as well.
There's no more barrier to spinning up one's own email server than there has ever been. One simply needs, at a minimum, a server in the internet, a DNS domain, and know how.
A server on the internet has never been easier, thanks to cloud providers. In fact, many cloud providers will give you a working email server, so that you don't need to do all the sysadmin things to get software like Bind or Postfix up and running. These hosting providers make it pretty simple run your own personal email server and domain.
The big providers are successful because most folks don't want to stand up their own email server, they just want to use email. But anyone can go it, if they have the time and interest.
I think you're right about the ease of spinning up a cloud server, but I respectfully disagree on the rest of it—and it's for one simple reason: IP address reputation management. Spinning up a server such that the Big Guys will actually trust it and willingly receive mail from it is not a trivial thing to do in 2023. I've been running mail servers for years and I think there are still blacklists I'm on.
This is why I gave up trying to run my own email server. It became clear it was turning into a racket quite a while ago. I would hear from someone that they didn't receive an email, so I'd check with their provider and sure enough I'd been blackholed.
I'd go through all the steps to clear everything, re-send the message and it would go. Send a second message and my server was instantly blackholed again for "spamming" or "suspected open relay" or some other reason. All the "Big Guys" as you call them of course carved out exceptions for each other, but no matter how many security signatures or other measures I implemented it was basically an instant lockout.
It got to the point where I was forced to sign on with a "Big" provider for routing.
It's really a sad state of affairs, and it just goes to show how important true federation is. Maybe someday something federated will come in to replace email, and we'll get another shot. I haven't given up on email though.. I'm just super cynical about it.
I don't think we need to replace email, we need to not have astronomically big corporations being able to control it.
I don't think we necessarily need to replace email (even though it's largely built on a mishmash of ancient tech held together by twine and bailing wire). I just think that in order to not have astronomically big corporations control it, we might have to building something new. The corporations aren't going to willingly relinquish control of email, but they won't (at the outset) control something that's designed to replace it.
If you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears!
I agree corporations won't willingly reliquish their control, but that's why the government steps in! I'm a socialist, so you can imagine how I want that done.
That'll happen just as soon as the corporations don't also pull the strings of the government. :D
We're working on it! Very slowly...
The main reason for this is that most mailservers 1st check centralised blacklist providers, then and only then look at spf and dmarc record. When dmarc would be the 1st check and only on it's absence blacklisting (or greylisting) would be applied it would be so much easier. (And I still have to figure out how to do that in postfix)
That sounds like a good approach. Now to get the Big Guys to do it....
I'll be glad when I got my setup this way, saves 5m wait on mail getting past greylisting when they have dmarc.
It's not that simple with mail. Most centralized mail servers have strict requirements for domains that they will not sort into spam, and if you are sending a lot of mail from your personal server, you will probably end up on a spam list. I don't do it, so I am not an expert, but hosting your own email server to do anything useful is pretty complicated.
Still, I guess you could argue that this is as it should be, as it prevents people from making spam servers, while still theoretically not being impacted that much for personal use servers. But I don't personally know anyone who seriously hosts their own email server anymore.
You're right about the difficulty in running the mail software on a server you administer, but hosting companies can take care of that for you. It's not hard to run your own mall service, if you go with service as a service instead of rolling your own infrastructure.
I've got no less than 5 different domains with my own email service, and I don't have to deal with the complexities you reference. My hosting provider handles that for me.