The Death of Decentralized Email : opensource

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 94 points 3 months ago

You can't successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won't work)

You can't successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can't successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

[-] ramble81@lemm.ee 38 points 3 months ago

You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own Datacenter

Calling complete BS on that. I work in a medium size company and we do just that. Don’t know what he’s thinking.

[-] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 21 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Sure, you can run one, good luck getting even a halfway decent delivery rate to mailboxes at any major mail provider. Even if they never receive a spam message from your server, your server is an "unknown" which counts against you. And if one person in your small company of 10 or 100 or even 1000 people gets their e-mail hacked and sends spam? Prepare for the rest of them to get punished for it. Running an SMTP server is a nightmare which is why, over time, more and more of the economy has just shifted their SMTP servers to organizations who professionally run SMTP servers instead of having their own.

[-] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 33 points 3 months ago

Set up dkim/SPF properly, make sure the ip you plan to use is clean before you start, sign up for MXtoolbox blacklist alerts and if you get on a blacklist (doesn't happen often if you do a bare minimum of proactive security), you request removal. It's really not hard.

[-] bahuma20@feddit.org 27 points 3 months ago

I am running my own mailsever for over 10 years without any blacklisting problems...

[-] Corgana@startrek.website 15 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Right, but try doing that with a 10 day old server created in 2024. That's the hurdle people are referring to.

[-] Samsy@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 months ago

This works, too. It's actually common that your dmarc-entry needs some time to be accepted everywhere. Wait a few days more and your mails don't hit the spam folder on google and outlook.

[-] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago

Just did that a few months ago. No issues yet.

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[-] majestictechie@lemmy.fosshost.com 21 points 3 months ago

I work as a Sysadmin for a web host who sells VPS's. I've helped many people setup domains on their server to cover SPF, DKIM and DMARC passes on a daily basis. Most use these for personal or business level mail delivery without issue.

Are there hurdles to overcome? Sure. But it's not exactly hard as long as you have a IP that's isnt a poor reputation (which as an ISP we help delist and improve). But it's not impossible.

Its more "convenient" to use a third party mail provider just as Office365 since you pass on all that setup and responsibility onto their framework, but it's not hard to setup a decent level of mail service yourself.

[-] ErwinLottemann@feddit.de 9 points 3 months ago

have mine running for nearly 20 years now and never had any major issues with delivery 🤷

[-] Supermariofan67@programming.dev 7 points 3 months ago

I've never had any issues getting mail delivered to major providers

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago

You're spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of "gmail silently drops my email")

Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that's where much of the world's spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.

[-] Auzy@beehaw.org 5 points 3 months ago

That's not why people move to big hosters.

They move because you don't need to waste money managing them, and they have reliable backup

We used to host our own, but big providers are so cheap and have such a good interface that it doesn't make sense to host our own.

It's the same reason why most companies don't host their own web servers.

Even large corporations use AWS or similar.

[-] xyguy@startrek.website 10 points 3 months ago

Can, yes.

Should, maybe.

Enjoy doing, unlikely.

And for sure your home isp has all the email ports blocked upstream.

With all that being said, to call SMTP dead is wildly insane. I do figure it will die someday though. Probably around the same time of universal IPV6 adoption during the year of the linux desktop.

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[-] ikidd@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago

I'm going to add "bullshit" to the first. I've gone 2 decades running a few email domains on my home servers, on 3 different ISPs. Its not rocket surgery.

[-] coronach@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

All the ISPs I've used block the relevant ports.

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[-] halm@leminal.space 81 points 3 months ago

I know there are problems with big email providers subverting decentralisation to benefit their business models, and throttling mail from independent or self-hosted domains. But I couldn't take the analysis seriously past this statement:

You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

[-] ___@lemm.ee 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Bitcoin is hypercapitalist? A decentralized value store not controlled by any one country and immune to money printing inflation? What are you smoking?

[-] kogasa@programming.dev 20 points 3 months ago

Bitcoin is more widely seen as a vehicle for speculation rather than a decentralized currency. Unlucky.

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[-] Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 16 points 3 months ago

Capitalists will even sell you communism if it makes them a dime, end result is cryptocurrency is half assed solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

Like inflation is a great example, you shouldnt have to add modifiers onto its definition, inflation is inflation - bitcoin by design must inflate

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[-] Darohan@lemmy.zip 14 points 3 months ago

I mean, it's been shown that it's relatively easy for a big company to control the price of Bitcoin, and there's nothing more capitalist than wanting to get away from the control of countries and states that might get in the way of making as much profit as possible so,,,, yeah no I'd say hypercapitalist is a valid accusation. Bitcoin was designed to beat the big banks and capitalist status-quo, but I don't think that we can pretend it succeeded anymore.

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[-] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it's pretty hard to argue it's not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

Bitcoin's market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden's GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it's been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

Like, be mad if you want, but it's a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don't like it, you can fork it and change it, because it's open source.

[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it's not a good one. And it's one that most people have not used, and don't intend to

It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it's a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really

[-] Sethayy@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 months ago

God damn bitcoin >> SSH?? (1999)

That's a pretty steamy take if I've ever heard one

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[-] refalo@programming.dev 9 points 3 months ago

"Sent from my iPhone"

[-] halm@leminal.space 5 points 3 months ago

It's an ungoogled Android actually, but I can see how that ruins your joke 🙂

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[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 50 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't buy this. I'm still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email's continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
Having said that, it's a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.

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[-] notannpc@lemmy.world 30 points 3 months ago

Immediately skeptical by the ai generated tombstone as the article image, and the skepticism was warranted. Massive L take from a “bitcoin educator”.

[-] allywilson@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago

Same, seen the AI generation and was out.

[-] amanda@aggregatet.org 28 points 3 months ago

I should have expected the rug-pull at the end when I read:

You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer

However, I was still surprised!

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 17 points 3 months ago

Defederating bad actors/spammers should in theory be good enough? Domains aren't free and I don't think it's worth it for them to buy a new domain to just be able to spam for a short time again.

[-] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Domains aren’t free and I don’t think it’s worth it for them to buy a new domain to just be able to spam for a short time again.

Literally what e-mail spammers do.

Agreed defederating can help solve obviously malicious instances, it doesn't solve spammers abusing good instances. E-mail and AP are very similar at a protocol structure level.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 14 points 3 months ago

Is it though? Don't email spammers just spoof the domain or send without a domain? I'm not entirely sure if that's different from how the fediverse works. I'm not too knowledgeable about this topic.

[-] halm@leminal.space 12 points 3 months ago

Don’t email spammers just spoof the domain or send without a domain?

Very much so. Out of the spam that I do see in my inbox, the sender domains are usually spoofed, while the reply-to addresses are usually gmail.com, hotmail.com or outlook.com.

[-] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Don’t email spammers just spoof the domain or send without a domain?

They do both, depending on the spammer and the type of spam they send. In e-mail, you have an e-mail server, you can use it to send mail to users on other e-mail servers. Each e-mail server can choose to accept or reject email from other e-mail servers based on whatever reason they want. AP/Lemmy/Mastodon is basically identical to this. I'm not sure how exactly bluesky is setup but I get the impression it's similar. In Nostr, servers aren't federated (each relay is seperate, if you want to send/recieve content to another user on a different relays you just talk to that relay directly instead of having "your relay" act as an intermediary), but the structure is still pretty similar.

Nostr does have this hashcash type system (requiring proof-of-work to weed out spam), but I haven't come across any relays that actually enforce it, it will be interesting to see if that changes in time. I also saw a GitHub issue about adding something similar to AP but I think they chose not to implement it.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 9 points 3 months ago

Replying to your edit:

it doesn’t solve spammers abusing good instances

This is an instance moderation problem. If you're letting spammers in, you need to use a better application process or something similar to that. A big problem with email spam is that most email services allow anyone to sign up for free without any checks.

Ultimately defederating bad actors and defederating "good" actors who fail to moderate their own users is necessary.

[-] makeasnek@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

This is an instance moderation problem. If you’re letting spammers in, you need to use a better application process or something similar to that. A big problem with email spam is that most email services allow anyone to sign up for free without any checks.

Which is one reason, this author is arguing, that e-mail has become so centralized. Doing that kind of manual moderation and curation is expensive, the bigger instances out-compete the smaller ones who don't have as much resources to dedicate to it. As more and more instances get "de-federated" for not having as good of anti-spam measures as the bigger instances, more users will sign up at big instances to avoid defederation risk. Just like how many people use gmail simply because their email delivery rate is so good. If I send from g-mail, there's very few servers which will reject my message or throw it in the spam folder. I'd love to run my own mail server, but even as a dedicated sysadmin it's impossible to get decent delivery rates.

The more anti-spam checks we have, yes we weed out spam, but we also make it accessible to less users as well.

AP has been blessed so far with not having to fight too much spam. Look at very popular, very centralized, very resourced platforms like Facebook, spam is still a problem on their platform despite massive resources put towards fighting it.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 6 points 3 months ago

Hmm I feel like some pooling of effort with spam detection built into the software (lemmy for instance) could help spread the effort of spam fighting to other, smaller instances and not just centralised to the big ones.

But it's difficult to say what will happen I guess. We need to just keep being vigilant when it comes to stopping spam while keeping in mind our shared goal of a decentralised social Internet.

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[-] the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 months ago

You need to set up dkim to prevent spoofing. Each message sent has a digital signature that matches one on a DNS record for your domain. You can also set an SPF record, which will tell the recipient what up addresses are authorized to send mail on behalf of your domain.

The recipent must have policies in place that reject mail which fails dkim/spf

[-] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago

But most people don't pay for software, especially if there are "free" and legal alternatives.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 8 points 3 months ago

I'm not sure what you mean with that or how it relates to what I said, could you elaborate?

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[-] pyre@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

i can't read anything that's presented with that shitty cover image without a hint of irony

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

(This is as much an answer to some of the comments already raised, as to the article - which like most such personal pieces has pros and cons.)

As part of a previous job I used to host email for a small business - this was about 15 years ago. I ended up spending several hours to a day a week working on it; apologising to users, tracing and diagnosing missing sent email and the endless, ENDLESS arms war against incoming spam (phishing was much less of a problem then). The trust from the company in our email operation was very poor and you'd regularly hear someone apologising to a customer because we hadn't contacted them, or answered their email. The truth is much was going astray and staff were relying more on the phone than email because they knew it worked. You might guess from this that I'm terrible at running an email system but I don't think I am. I started moving email back in the late 80s when Fidonet was the thing, so I have some miles travelled. Tools have improved a bit since then, but so have those used by the bad guys.

I still consider one of the best things I did for that company was move our company email onto Gmail Business (which was free for us as a charity) Every single one of those problems went away immediately and suddenly I had a lot more time to do more important stuff. I would never self-host email again despite running several personal servers.

Plenty of people say they self-host just fine, and great for you if that's so. But the truth is you won't always know if your outbound mail silently gets dropped and you have a far higher chance of it arriving if it comes from a reputable source. There are a huge number of variables outside of your control. (ISP, your country, your region, your software, even the latency of your MX or DKIM responses factor into your reputation)

You take the decision on whether any perceieved risks of privacy through using a third party outweighs the deliverability and filtering issues of self hosting, but please don't say it's simple or reliable for everyone. If it's simple for you, you're either incredibly lucky or just not appreciating the problem.

[-] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I never run a mail server but Google already placing my mail sent via my xyz domain hosted on proton to spam folder silently.

I guess running my own will be a lot worst.

P.S. I know that's a bad TLD choice, and I'm planning to migrate, but that will take a lots of time and work to the point I wonders if that worth it as I don't sent many anyways.

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[-] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 3 months ago

And threads will be the death of decentralized lemmy. But we still have mailing lists, and most of my mails go to decentralized users on those lists. You just gotta know where to look, and you'll find gold.

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