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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern. It has been a real struggle for me despite having a server I own in a rack with net-neighbors I know.

Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from now?

Having email just down for a couple days while you wait for new hardware to would be a very bad experience.

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So if they route everything through the same set of EC2 instances, that might actually take care of the SPAM issue. I run my own e-mail server and have run into that same issue of not being able to send to gmail/microsoft addresses (unless I contact the person via Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. and tell them to check their spam folder):

https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made...

The way most of these providers deal with spam is they slowly white-list IP addresses. When a company like Mailchip or Mailgun spin up a new server, it's always in a large subnet range they've purchased and they slowly start sending low priority e-mail through it to existing/known receivers and throttle it up to full speed.

If you're running a personal server that sends like 5 or 6 e-mails a days, well that's an issue.

The big players make it difficult to run a small personal server, but running a dedicated business or corporate server that sends 100s of e-mails per day is typically fine once it's well established.

You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters.

"You know what would be a better product? A relay SMTP server that works with Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Fastmail et. al. to pump e-mail from personal servers and ensures it won't get caught in spam filters."

That's basically Sendgrid or Mailgun or even Fastmail itself. They can all relay SMTP for arbitrary domains.

It's actually a totally different product vs Sendgrid/Mailgun/etc.

Such a product would need to have a ToS that states it can only be used for low volume personal and business correspondence, and have per-account rate limiting to enforce that. Doing it this way is necessary to avoid having mail treated as bulk.

I've tried relaying through mailgun to get mail to outlook.com, it does not work.

Rate-limiting would be interesting. If the cost of the service was specifically high enough to be unscalable. Like, $10 per month and you can send 200 emails per day. That’s expensive compared to anything else but fine for personal use.

fastmail already is available for $10 per month, so I guess problem solved?

Do they handle a send-only smarthost configuration that allows arbitrary from addresses within a domain?

As far as I can tell, yeah.

Pretty soon email will require stamps, like paper mail. I wonder if they will sell forever stamps?

Jk, I just thought it was funny that we pay for services which were always seen as a free alternative to paper mail and stamps were a thing of the past.

Proof of Work basically was invented to cope with email spam. That's more or less a stamp.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

If you have a KvK in The Netherlands your PII details are public, and you will start receiving physical spam from companies despite such spam not being free to send. I never receive spam from individuals though; only companies.

On top of that, the costs of electricity are not the same everywhere (they are very expensive in The Netherlands, for example, than in the USA, and China is very cheap). Nor is it widely stable available everywhere (examples include India and Africa). Proof of Work is basically a waste of energy as well.

But this is exactly what I use mailgun for. The free price point kind of enforces that.

Maybe it's just been so long I'm whitelisted?

More likely you actually set it up correctly, with DKIM and stuff, and the parent didn’t.

I had everything set up correctly, including DMARC. I've been doing this a long, long time.

How about https://postmarkapp.com/ ? It is more tailored to "transactional emails", but seems pretty close to what you describe

> The big players make it difficult to run a small personal server

how so? the way i see it, only by making it too easy to use them. if you mean, they reject mail from (eg) dynamically assigned home subscriber IP addresses, you can blame spammers for that, not the big email players.

There's little to no additional security from having email on-site, and much hassle. Assuming you use google or outlook, the advertising bogeyman is just that - a bogeyman.

this is a super niche product, with a lot of useless industro-consumer design thrown in. it's doomed as a business and then where are you? back to gmail.

According to their FAQ, you are basically on your own since your device is the MX server:

> While offline, emails sent to you will not be delivered. This does not, however, mean that they are lost. If your email server becomes unreachable for any reason, the sender’s email server will periodically retry sending the email at a later time. Email servers are generally configured to retry rapidly at first and then back off and increase the time between retries.

> Once your email server comes back online and a retry is performed, you will successfully receive the sent email. If your email server is offline for an extended period of time, the sending server will eventually give up and send a bounce message to the person who sent you the email.

the sounds exactly like the nightmare the GP proposed. what happens when you're on vacation? or even not on vacation but the supply chain is borked or UPS loses your package? even if helm is self-configuring from stored cloud config, this is still a pain and being without email for even a day is painful. 3-5 days (more likely) is intolerable. and if it's longer mail will start to bounce.

> Another big one for me is the failure modes. What do I do when my home connection is down? How about when my connection is down and I'm traveling? What happens when the hardware fails? How about when the hardware fails 5 years from now?

This is the big obstacle preventing me (and I assume others) from moving away from cloud. Cloud services just work, everywhere, all the time (effectively). I'd love to get the privacy benefits of bringing my data "in-house" but I'm not sure I want to take on the equivalent of a part-time sysadmin job.

Yeah. Even though I've had my own collocated hardware since Bubble 1.0, I'm looking to move all of that to the cloud. When your own hardware works, it works reliably for years. But when something breaks it's an urgent fire drill, [1] and I'm entirely over those.

[1] Unless you have warm spares for everything, but that means you're paying twice as much and still will have a non-urgent fire drill to replace the failed hardware so you're back to n+1.

Hey bootsz, when your connection is down, you'll still have a local cache of your messages, contacts and calendar events. Email has retry built in and sending servers typically retry for at least 48-72 hours. The hardware has no moving parts so it should last for a long time, but when there is an inevitable failure, there are encrypted backups that can be downloaded to a replacement device and decrypted using keys only you have access to.

> Yeah, as somebody who has run their own mail server for years, #1 is a huge concern.

Perhaps relay the email out via your ISP account? I do that and it works well.

> Having email just down for a couple days while you wait for new hardware to would be a very bad experience.

Perhaps set up a fallback MX that directs traffic to e.g. a Mailfence account when your primary MX is down? Works for me. Also, mail servers can be cheap hardware (an old x220 will do).

Last point especially. It would be like having all business contact go through IRC with no bouncer and no way to even tell if you were online.

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