Comment on I Believe That It's Important For All of Us to Understand What 'Decentralization' Truly Means. Please, Let's Talk About That

flamingos@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Radiant_sir_radiant@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
  My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Spam protection is hard given SMTP was never designed with it in mind.

    I also self-host my email, but I use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with all that stuff. My server sends outbound emails to a company that’s got that all figured out. Maybe that’s not “true” self hosting, but it’s really no different to people that self-host but put Cloudflare in front of their server.

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