Comment by moray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moray | Hacker News Reader

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There are a number of things that can (and should) be done to prevent outgoing emails from your SMTP server not to be rejected or flagged as SPAM (or worse your IP address blocked).

A part from the obvious basics (IP reverse lookup working, TLS support, SMTP auth for your users..) you can also set up DKIM [1] and SPF [2] that help a lot and are well supported by big providers like gmail.

But more importantly not ending up in a blacklist is important, so if you have users using your service you should monitor the volume of outgoing emails to avoid someone using your server to spam.

There are a few tools that you can use to check your SMTP server MXToolbox and CheckTLS are the two I often use. [3]

I agree though that managing an SMTP server is challenging, I had a couple of issues I had to work on that I am sure would never have happened to a big provider.

[1] http://www.dkim.org

[2] http://www.openspf.org

[3] http://mxtoolbox.com http://www.checktls.com/testreceiver.html

You can do all of these things and still a certain percentage of your emails will disappear into the ether. The game is rigged and the little guy has lost.

I'm willing to accept email is rigged. Who uses it for actual communication these days anyway? I use mine primarily to get lifecycle emails from webapps I tried once and to reset passwords.

What's next, then? There have been lots of replacements for all of the old school protocols like IM and IRC. Even newsgroups have been (adequately?) replaced by forums and link aggregates and facebook. But, I've seen no attempt to replace email. I've seen lots of attempts to enhance email, but none to replace it completely.

>Who uses it for actual communication these days anyway?

People outside of tech bubbles.

People outside of tech bubbles use snapchat, facebook or whatever chat program is popular this week. I know this because I can't get anybody to return my emails. :(

Maybe you should stop self-hosting your email server :)

Defiantly there is a trend away from email outside of business, but in B2B email still rules. The ability to have a record of what was originally said and agreed to has saved my backside more than once.

What do you use to communicate if not email?

I use it constantly, as I have for years: one mailbox for work, one for personal stuff. My whole life flows through email, it sometimes seems. How else would it work?

More and more so Slack, it acts like email, chat, server communications tool, quite handy.

Hm. I hear about Slack but have never actually encountered it and have no idea why it is so popular. Perhaps someday its social network will finally connect up with mine and I'll find out why people care.

For the most part, facebook, twitter and sms. Trying to get people I know IRL to check their emails is a battle I lost about five years ago. If we're talking intra-company, then it's slack, hipchat, Yammer, google hangouts, trello, jira and whatever wiki system or wordpress is in use at the company I'm currently working for.

Email for me, as I alluded to in my previous comment, is mostly about interacting with automated systems. If I need to reset a password, I'll get an email with a link. My car insurance company and web host will occasionally email me asking me for payment. Google emails me to let me know I've logged in using a computer it doesn't recognize (like my phone).

I get a photographer, video maker or someone working in fashion (I am sure there are other cases, I know those) using facebook or <x social tool> for business communication because it is trendy or it is more convenient, but preferring it to emails?

There is obviously a problem here, there is so much talk about privacy and confidentiality and then you give all your communication in the hands of one company.

What I am trying to say is that there is a fundamental technical difference between emails and <faceslaktter>: The first is based on a distributed, well defined (RFCs??), open protocols and formats. The second? It is an application, running on the premises of some company...

Do you even read the posts you're replying to? Nowhere did I say I preferred closed platforms to email. I don't. I used the word "battle" in my previous comment for a reason. You're preaching to the choir.

> I get a photographer, video maker or someone working in fashion (I am sure there are other cases, I know those) using facebook or <x social tool> for business communication because it is trendy or it is more convenient

You know that's 99% of the world, right? You just described everybody but people who work in tech. How am I supposed to communicate with people who don't check their email?

> The first is based on a distributed, well defined (RFCs??), open protocols and formats.

Insecure open protocols and buggy formats. You know all emails travel in the open air, right? This was the primary reason I suggested we replace it, with a system that is secure, easy to use and that people can control.

I do read posts, and I wrongly implied you end up preferring other means to email because people don't answer to emails, sorry about that, but let me expand on my thoughts.

I get that too, people not replying, but I don't think this is only a technical problem unfortunately. With IM systems where you easily get notifications on your phone you have more chance to get a faster response, also when receiving large amounts of emails one tends to skip many of them.. frustrating, for the sender, but that happens to me too from time to time.

I do work in tech though, also in academia, and email is still the first choice (well, from my experience, also I am in Europe.. maybe this counts?)

As for the technical aspect, SMTP and mail transfer protocols are part of a distributed system, and a distributed system must be open, this of course leads to the SPAM issue, but after what, more than 30 years? we have a couple of strong server side implementations that work well. And let's not forget TLS... emails travel in the "open air" as every other protocol that does not use encryption.

I agree that a redesign would be helpful to eliminate some basic issues we still have with emails, but it looks like that at the moment most are busy inventing new proprietary protocols for new way to chat and send emoji around...

Email has not be to replaced, email just needs a better representation.

IMO Inbox by Google fixed that issue for me.

I thought so too.

Well, until you have done everything, — DKIM, SPF and checks are green… And gmail is continuing put your e-mail to spam every now and then :/

The thing is that it also depends on the client side (meaning the software client) and from the sender behaviour.

For instance, I have a client (person) who now and then sends out a newsletter to some hundreds of addresses. He does that directly from the webmail. I always catch him because I have an alert on the mail queue, and every single time I check it I notice that the messages have been delayed because the remote server has a filter on "too many recipients at the same time" or "server sending too fast" or similar.

This affects the way the remote server will consider further emails from your server, and change its "behaviour" temporarily. I use Postgray [1] that does very similar checks, and it is a great deterrent for incoming spammers. So I completely understand this strict checks from the point of view of a sys admin.

Then there is the email content and headers that are checked by spam filters... but that's another story...

[1] http://postgrey.schweikert.ch

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