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True story. Email is one of the last things I’d try to host myself.
This person has been there.
I’m still there. I’ve always wanted to be able to offer an email service to family or friends. But, even though I’ve been doing it for a couple of decades, it’s never been stable enough to offer to them. For part of that time it’s because I didn’t really know enough of what I was doing, but the more I learned and the better I got at it, the more I started to lose the war against both spammers and against the major service providers who kept making it harder and harder to prove you’re not a spammer.
The latest one was literally issue 3. My provider splits an IPV6 /64 among multiple VPSes, when most of the world, including blocklist publishers, think a /64 is for a single “entity”. The only way to resolve it was to not use IPV6.
deleted by creator
I knew someone online who did.
Their autism level was in a category that I’ve yet to find words for. The train people fear them.
that third one killed it for me. I hate what the Internet has become. We need to setup a second Internet that somehow can’t be monetized.
It’s called the i2p network
Correct. Come to I2P and experience 90s internet again. It’s slow but has character, if by character you understand I mean anonymous Geocities.
Honest question: is there also a boatload of sketchy stiff to avoid if you just wanted to have a nice SFW time? Early 2000s internet before Google indexed everything had some pockets of unsavory.
Also, is it just a bunch of middle aged dudes in mostly text forums? That’s like 85% of my experience with 90s internet.
I haven’t stumbled upon much sketchy stuff, you’d need to know where it is and discovery is still fairly manual though indexing services exist. Of course you need to find those services in the first place…
Anonymity is more of a focus than 90s internet, so it’s hard to tell who anyone really is but you’re probably right. There are active Russian and Iranian dissident text forums though.
However, for me, it’s the people just hosting personal websites e.g., a darkwave radio site, or a cryptography blog. Obviously the barrier to entry means it leans fairly techy.
How would you recommend someone start exploring i2p?
If you’re not yet on I2P, start with https://geti2p.net/ and then set up an I2P router. Once you’re on I2P, personally I use notbob.i2p to see what’s up.
Cool, thanks for sticking with me and explaining.
To avoid? Remember when you had to go to Yahoo! Directory to find the few websites which exist? It’s like that.
Yes, to avoid. Boolean search operators looking by filetype led me to 2 instances of finding someones CP foolder circa 2000. No real easy way to report it back then.
I understand that 90s internet was much more streamlined and meager, withy own fair share of geocities pages. But I2P also exists in a more complicated time.
So it’s slow, barely contains anything, and near useless. Got it.
With black jack and hookers?
I’m locked in a contract with a company that enshittified their services a little and assigns restrictive IPs to non-Business customers that have been using port 25, but am switching to a more libre ISP as soon as it ends. I basically snoozed and didn’t realise the ISP hadn’t been rated the best for several years.
highly recommend https://mailinabox.email/ for setting up and and ticking every compliance box. dmarc, spf etc
unfortunately you can be the best, most compliant host on the planet with the with a cleanest of IP’s… google is still going to randomly and silently drop your email to different email addresses. so its pretty much completely untenable for non hobby project.
fuck google so fucking hard
You should be able to clean that up with a relay on a known accepted provider. Sending out emails through Amazon SES should be reasonable without them selling your information.
Selfhosting isn’t as clean as it used to be, you pretty much have to buy some form of protection to play.
This is an amusing thread for me as my day job used to be unfucking postfix and exim servers daily for a fleet of vps and dedi boxes.
unfucking postfix
This is not a task for the feint of heart, nor was it ever, even back when the technology was first invented. I salute you.
Tbf most of the time you just had to clear ssd space and rebuild indices after restarting services as mostly the mail was there but stuck in queue
I have no experience with any type of backend mail management or anything like it.
But I do have a corporate email through Microsoft exchange. I hate multiple apps on my phone, so I have it as an extra account in my Gmail app.
And it sucks. I don’t get a lot of emails, only the last 3 or 4 emails actually show up in the app.
But my biggest, angriest problem… Is mail getting stuck in the queue.
If I’m sending a short email? Fine, I can use the app. Fire it off and it’ll send immediately.
But if I write a long email? It will say it’s sending, it’ll sit in the outbox, but it will never… ever… send. Ever.
No amount of Wi-Fi cycling or data cycling, cache clearing or phone restarting will ever ever get that email to send. It will just sit there silently failed. Not even acknowledging it’s failed when you poke at it, let alone with a notification or something.
The first time I realized it happened, it was an unfortunately important email.
Would you like to guess what the problem is? I pulled my hair out for like a day before figuring it out. I’ll put it in a spoiler tag so you can guess.
Again: short emails send immediately, long emails never send, and sit silently failed for eternity.
spoiler
When you write a long email, at some point it saves a draft. For some reason, that draft is what holds everything up. If I remember correctly, even deleting the draft doesn’t make it send… If ever I forget, and it happens again, I have to copy my whole email to the clipboard, open exchange in the web browser, find the draft (which is never complete, always only half or less of what I wrote) paste my full message into the draft, and then manually send it.
I guess technically it’s my own fault, I could just use the exchange app and it would probably solve this. But I don’t want to, and I shouldn’t have to, email is not new. But it is terrible. Like printers. Bah.
I stopped hosting my own email servers many years ago, even when I was being paid for it. Any time anyone mentions DKIM or yahoo throttling or anything of that nature I get a thousand yard stare and and start to hyperventilate. I’m sure it easier when you aren’t sending 5 million messages a month, but who needs the headache.
What kind of operation was this? That’s 170,000 emails a day!
Backend provider for Realtors. New listing alerts and updates on properties that potential buyers were tracking.
Long ago I think it was 2006, I worked in a computer store/corporate it support that used to also be a 56k dial up isp. When i first got hired it was supposed to be like a paid internship. 2 weeks in the guy “mentoring” me was fired. Only other employees was the owner was had a PhD in information technology from 1984 and never kept up and his wife who did the accounting.
Over the next year he hired and fired probably 15 people and then decided he liked me enough to make me full time. He had no idea what he was doing and neither did I. Basically I was responsible for 8 business networks(including a 150 employee credit union), any computers a customer brought in, and our own internal network.
One day it was slow so I was browsing various web comics. The owner comes on at 1030(we opened at 900) furious with me. He claimed I was “reading a page with black text on a white background” which meant I was reading how to operate a spam business. That was his proof, a page with black text and a white background which he could not find my history.
He had received a letter from his isp that we were sending 2.5 million emails a day, we had 72 hours to resolve the issue or we were to be cut off. I argued that I didn’t run a spam operation, he had no proof and there were simpler explanations. It got so heated I quit, keep in mind I was only employee.
Next day the credit union was having a server issue and he had no one to fix it. He called me asking for me to return, I negotiated a $1 hour raise, an official written letter of apology, pay for time the previous day and that day and told him I would be back the following day.
I went in, solved the server issue(eventually found out cleaning crew was unplugging the power strip to plug in their vaccum over night and the server was configured not to restart when power returned). Went back to the office and talked with the owner. He showed me the letter and it identified 2 ip addresses as being the source. Neither was my computer and I didn’t recognize them. There was a command you could send over the terminal to open the CD tray based on ip address. I ran the command and basically walked around looking for a computer with open CD trays.
Turns out there was 2 servers, outside of our firewall directly facing the internet and yes for the memes they were originally dns servers from the 56k isp days. They were running original nt4, completely unpatched, with no security software installed and permanent outside facing ip addresses. I ran a virus scanner on it, I stopped when it detected over 100k infected files. Disconnected the servers, waited 10 minutes, called isp and effectively all email had stopped (the boss and myself both sent 1 email to confirm it was still working).
Spam farm.
ai image… with positive vote??? on myfediverse??? what a shame
Because it’s hard to notice it.
it looks uncanny and i also know OP, they used to post chatgpt slop here
I downvoted it the moment it popped up.
Al slop
Wait, why? I thought I was generally gold at spotting these things, but here I’m struggling. The only thing that looks a little out of place to ne is the ring on his pointing hand, but that might genuinely be a dark band + shadow. What else have I missed?
The tie is the most egregious part, if you zoom in the pattern makes no sense at all.
Mostly to me it’s about the quality. Everything in focus is incredibly smooth, more so than you’d get with a normal camera or phone, while the background is blurred. This looks like a convension setting of some sort, they would’ve taken the photo with their scratched phone camera and posted it immidiately without trying to edit anything.
Also, the text is different on every board. The top 2 texts are oriented straight at the camera, while the bottom texts are angled a bit, but not angled equally. Indicating it wasn’t just copy pasted, but an attempt to get a new angle every time. This could just mean badly edited, but I’m going with AI on that part too, because someone badly editing a joke like this, would simply copy paste the first textbox after getting the angle sort of right.
Well i somehow got trained at detecting slop. I didnt had to notice details just looking at it confirmed
Give it up, dude. The models that just recently came out are so good you are kidding yourself if you think you can tell them apart from photographs.
Your slop-pooping machine is bad at text parallax and it still looks gross
You’re a slop-pooping machine.
Don’t shame me for my IBS
This seems more like a poorly assembled template than GenAI
It is definitely both.
The tie pattern is probably the most obvious artifact, but the lighting and focus being inconsistent is what kicks off the intuitive “this is definitely GenAI” sense
The image is hypersaturated and hyperaveraged
Self hosting for years and have none of these issues, but I’m going to migrate soon and will probably be able to use this as a checklist 😐
I self-host my emails, but use an SMTP relay for sending. IMO, the interesting part of self hosting email is the storage. Outbound sending is more complex and there’s not as much benefit to self-hosting it.
I use Mailcow and have it configured to use a relay per domain. Email clients use the Mailcow server as their SMTP server, and Mailcow (well, Postfix) handles sending it to the appropriate relay.
What SMTP relay are you using ? I’m considering switching to Migadu but open to other options.
I’m currently relaying through an MXRoute account, but I’ve used SMTP2Go too and they have a decent free plan with 1000 emails per month.
I have Stalwart installed and use an SMTP relay too. I can send and receive email just fine, never had an issue with that. The only thing that doesn’t really work is the account setup (when you add your account to an email client). It doesn’t detect the settings, so I have to add them manually and I have to ignore the certificate warning but maybe I’ll get around to fixing it someday.
It doesn’t detect the settings
Autodiscovery needs DNS SRV entries to be added for each domain. The legacy Exchange- and Outlook-specific way was a file at
/autodiscover/autodiscover.xmlbut I don’t know if email clients still use that.I have to ignore the certificate warning
I’m not familiar with Stalwart but you should be able to use Let’s Encrypt certificates.
I still self host. Since 1997.
Since 2000, nothing beats mimedefang on sendmail to this day.
I work for a web hosting company. Do we offer clients mail services? Hell no.
Hosting email is bad because the few companies everyone tells everyone to use run email. It is fine if hosting email isn’t for you but discouraging others to not try is exactly how we lose ground ona completely open protocol. Everyone who is willing should host email. There are “distros” like mailinabox and mailcow that make it very easy. The more folks that host it the more the larger hosts will have to start to be more of a tram player.
@[email protected] guess i’ll block this person, most of their posts are slop
“Babe, BABE, listen to me! I don’t care about what your friends say, Google dress it up like it’s something magical, but it’s just IMAP under the hood. That Let’s Encrypt cert is better than anything VeriSign will sell you. Now let’s review your subscribed folders again, I assure you, you saw that college acceptance letter and filed it and it’s your own fault for having client side rules.”
Personally I use addy.io (previously anonaddy). Self-hostable and an easy way to get and control your own email @
