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Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

It's not 'hard', it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago. Especially for the few cents you can get professional 3rd party email hosting for.

Edit: I also very much like the disingenuity of articles saying 'X isnt' hard! Just execute these 20 commands!' Duh, executing those commands isn't the problem, it's knowing which commands to execute, and the pain of having to figure out the new commands to execute 4 months later when for some reason something broke and now 20 people are twiddling their thumbs until you fix it. Screw that, running email servers is a horrible tedious pain in the ass you should almost never do yourself unless it's the sort of thing you enjoy (I've run Postfix, Qmail and Exchange servers from the mid 1990's until mid 2000's).

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I totally agree with this and this is actually something that my Engineer Brain and Product Brain are constantly in conflict about. I ran gitignore.io for 6 years and it was not "hard" to run. It was two commands on a web server. The problem was when I was on vacation or at work and AWS/Heroku crashed and I got flooded with GitHub issues/Tweets telling me the service as down[1][2]. All of a sudden, I have to go take a look.

Martin Fowler said something in a talk a few years ago[3] and I think it speaks to this exact mindset. This post is lacking any economic reasons for people to run their own mail server — tell me why me running my own mail server saves me time and/or money.

As another tangent, I'm actually looking at running my own mail server. For me, it's privacy which coincidentally is not even mentioned once in the article.

[1] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/369

[2] - https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io/issues/2

[3] - https://youtu.be/DngAZyWMGR0?t=460

There's also a huge difference between setting up a properly configured server and actually getting things delivered. The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like. Even on the service I use (purelymail.com) the low volume of mail and the fact that it's less than a year old means that even when I email them first, the replies are sometimes marked as spam.

That's a bug with gmail and those who use gmail should be aware they may be missing emails.

"Yeah, but I don't have this bug for my 200 friends that have Gmail plus you want my business and I like Gmail so it's your problem."

This is both true and irrelevant, because your boss/customer/whatever doesn't care about this story.

Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves

Same here, except to Charter, who has apparently just blacklisted swaths of DigitalOcean IPs, probably for some reason. So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.

> So I just can't email my mom. Other than that, a great experience.

You made the point.

Are you using IPv6 or IPv4 to send the emails? DigitalOcean apparently blocks port 25 outbound IPv6 access because whole ranges are getting blocked.

I'm doing IPv4. The discussion is here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-anybody-...

Except it doesn’t work to send an email to someone who I assume is important to you - “it’s a great experience”.

Isn’t that an argument for why you shouldn’t run your own mail server?

Well I just have to do the one more step of forwarding the SMTP to sendgrid or whatever and then it will be top notch. It hasn't been enough of a pain for me yet to do that next step. I just signal her instead of email.

> Running my own for about 2 years now. Spf dMarc and dkim set it is accepted by all mail providers. I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves

This is false. The dmarc reports from Google do not actually give you the portion of email that is placed in recipients' spam folder.

"I also get daily reports from Google how well it behaves"

Do you ever read them? If so, how is daily (!) routine maintenance of your email setup not a massive (well, relatively speaking) headache?

As mentioned by another user:

"The dmarc reports from Google do not actually give you the portion of email that is placed in recipients' spam folder."

So it is just about the server and and dns part (the things I as an administrator can control)

Since I configured it in the beginning the reports are all green so I just glance over them. Takes about 10 seconds.

Then again I like to work with infrastructure so your mileage may vary in regard to how much headaches it causes

The big ones (MS, Google) mark your mail as spam even with SPF, DMARC, DKIM and the like.

This is such a canard. I have almost zero problems delivering to anybody from my closet server, and the only thing that has happened in the last several years was getting notices that AT&T was blocking me. I did a quick relay check and emailed postmaster@. It only took a day or two to get an email saying I was clean to them again, and that was without the DNS security extensions you mention.

Maybe cable modem users are held to a different standard? Dynamic IP addresses? I have DSL with static IPs.

The article points it out, but it used to be harder than it is now.

These days (for a long time now, really), it's hard to set one up that's, say, an open relay by accident. The default configs are pretty much all you need, just replacing a couple of values with those that are custom. Basically, what you're saying is exactly what they're debunking. Also, the article isn't "just execute these 20 commands", it's deliberately non-technical.

I've been running a tiny Postfix mail server since ... 2000 or so, still doing so today. It had grown in to a bit of a monster configuration over 17 years or so, complete with a custom PHP interface to allow me to add user accounts, etc. I learnt a lot doing that, but a couple of years ago I started it all from scratch, with a default config and writing the config into my ansible setup so I don't have to remember it. It was very easy to do. Since then, I've touched that configuration once.

One thing I will mention because I haven't seen it around enough, and didn't know of it until someone said it in passing: if you're getting smap-trapped by gmail a lot, turn on TLS support for outgoing. Made a lot of difference. For postfix that's just adding:

smtp_tls_security_level=may

to main.cf. Don't know why that isn't default.

So despite your claim that it's 'very easy to do', in the very next paragraph you are basically saying that you need to be around people who 'mention in passing' obscure details of email server configuration, otherwise it will 'make a lot of difference'? I mean it seems you disagree with me at first, but then in the rest of your post you seem to be making my point for me, so...

Your comment is perfet. Let me quote:

"OK, then why is everyone saying it’s hard ? [...]

Another reason is because it used to be hard a long time ago. People got traumatized by how hard it was to not screw up and never reevaluated the situation. Some people today genuinely discourage other people from running their mail server, citing the very real difficulties they faced over a decade ago, far before some of today’s tools even existed."

How does running my own mail server save me time, money, or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else? What other criteria should I use?

> or give me capabilities that I don’t have by paying someone else?

The same can be said "why should I grow my own veggies when I can buy them from the supermarket?" - The point is always, always, about Freedom.

When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is.

If you were running your own restaurant and your home grown vegetables caused a worse customer experience would you do it? Running your own mail server which causes more of your mail to go to spam is worse than using a commercial provider.

"When you eat home grown vegetables, the experience isn’t objectively worse. When you run your own mail server it is."

^ I both run my own mail server and use someone else's service for another purpose. My experience running my own mail server is objectively WAY BETTER than using the commercial provider (and I've been doing this for many years in multiple scenarios).

Just because your experience (even if it is repeated) with certain technology goes one way, that doesn't make it universally true.

It’s not “just my experience”. It’s practically a universal experience that the chance of emails sent from your mail server will be blocked or go into a spam folder a lot more frequently than using a commercial provider.

Of all the questions I have to answer on technology decisions, why would I want to answer why did I choose to run my own bespoke mail server instead of spending a few dollars and making it someone else’s problem and so metaphorically chose IBM - ie “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”.

You noticed my point was not about any being better than the other. Growing veggies is a lot more work than buying them too. Again, Freedom.

Privacy is power. Lack of privacy is power too, just not yours.

If you are looking for “privacy” from email - you’re looking in the wrong place. But even if your end is private - the other end probably isn’t.

I absolutely agree.

> - Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it

No. Been there, done that. It was a major PITA. It's not even something I would consider again for small organizations as it's an economic nonsense too.

Amen. I ran my own personal mail server for ~15 years (started with qmail+squirrelmail, moved to postfix+dovecot+opendkim+zpush+roundcube at some point). I enjoyed it but eventually just didn't have the time to care anymore.

Moved everything over to Fastmail about a year ago and haven't looked back. My inner geek still feels bad about not doing it myself but my rational brain is happy.

This. Even running your own IRC, while not "hard", is a PITA enough that companies will shell out a chunk of change to have someone else do it for them. And, they may even get better features as a result.

Eh, it used to be pretty bad but the other year the people from the openbsd project wrote a new mail server with a trivially easy to understand config file (I wrote mine from scratch just a couple hours after finding it.)

If you’re already basically competent with the OS you’re using and have a machine with a decent connection that can be used for mail then it actually isn’t hard.

The config file format is the least of your worries (unless you're running Sendmail, ofcourse). It's about havimg to know about DKIM/SPF/dns weirdness/ etc, and having to stay up to date; about blacklists and greylists and the social dynamics around it; about mailbox storage and backups and users complaining about quotas and attachment sizes and that sort of shenanigans; about how will I let my users set auto responders and filters etc (just send them a link to the sieve man page! Lol); about having to worry about being called over the holidays because every custom server has its own peculiarities. And his talk about 'it used to be hard but not any more!' - yeah sure, just like the dozens of times people said that over the last decades? There's a 'year of Linux on the desktop' analogy in here somewhere.

The config format is the least of your worries also if you're running sendmail - which I do.

You're a much braver soul than I have ever been :)

Yeah, that's the folk wisdom on sendmail. But really, since version 8.0, writing your own .cf (or reading it) should have been regarded as bizarre as crafting your own object files with an hex editor. And sendmail has served me well, over the years; its scariest feature (sendmail.cf) is also a strength - as a Turing complete programmiong language, it allows you to tie your incoming/outgoing mail in square knots, if you feel so inclined, or to solve some unforeseen mail routing configuration/problem/whatever. Of course, if you find someone that has gone to the lenght to write a _LOCAL ruleset that does it - and alas that is a creaft I do not possess, and is dying out. When it does, I will probably make the postfix jump.

I cannot claim prescience, because I started ont the trade when sendmail was THE mail program (though ed was no longer THE text editor): but consider, had I listened to the sendmail bashing crowd a couple years later I would have gone qmail (!!!). For not having done that, I thank the almighty weekly.

> just send them a link to the sieve man page!

That would work if mail providers actually used Sieve, but almost none of them do. I've never understood why.

...

Can't tell if you're serious or not - but if you are, just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that. I mean I used it for many years but I'm a nerd weirdo.

> just looking at man sieve is enough to understand why no sane person would give an average end user access to that

You don't have to force an average user to hand edit Sieve files. You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file that current mail providers put on top of whatever hand-built custom non-standard filtering rules system they currently have. To the end user it would look the same.

But for an end user like me, who already has a huge number of filter rules expressed in Sieve and would like to be able to upload them to an email provider, not supporting the Internet standard format for filter rules is a showstopper. I don't want to have to re-input all my filter rules into an email provider's web interface one by one. I want them to be able to understand the rules I already have in the Internet standard format I already have them.

" You can put the same kind of GUI or web interface on top of a Sieve file"

From a quick google, there does seem to be a Roundcube plugin for managing Sieve filters, but man yet another dependency (or two, as it seems you need a separate daemon as well) in an already brittle (by the time you get to this point) stack...

Look, I understand where you're coming from, and I used Sieve for many years, but it's 2019 - something is not an 'Internet standard format' when the number of users actually using it can be expressed with 4 or 5 digits at best... This horse is not just dead, we're snorting its ground up bones by now. Nobody caters to power users any more. Back when power users made up a sizeable portion of the internet population, yes, but not in 2019...

> something is not an 'Internet standard format' when the number of users actually using it can be expressed with 4 or 5 digits at best

Well, there is no other standard format at all, so basically you're saying we might as well just give up trying to have an internet standard for email filtering. That doesn't seem like a good outcome to me.

Config files really are not the problem with running email. The "why the hell is provider/BigCo/... XYZ rejecting our emails again" dance is, with the answer typically being "no clue, they certainly won't tell us, let's hope it works in 48 hours?"...

People also have different ideas of what "hard" is. I've never tried setting up a mail server so I'm talking out of my ass a bit, but after reading the article it sounds like you'd need to do a bit of googling/trial and error changes to get things set up, probably one of those projects that would take up most of a saturday or at least a saturday afternoon and might run into some hiccups every few months that requires more googling/tweaking.

Even if I'm way off base about the mail server set up being this way, some people still consider this type of "saturday afternoon" project hard compared to something that just works out of the box without any fiddling and can be set up in 20 minutes. I'm not trying to be elitist by suggesting these people are dumb or lazy, just that the semantics of what "hard" is varies for people, especially with little projects that require fiddling/tweaking/looking for outside help.

No, it's not a gigantic PITA anymore. Yes, _15 years ago_, which is what everyone's reference time frame seems to be, it was hard.

Now, there are many solutions that with 1 click do all the painful integrations.

https://mailinabox.org/, https://mailcow.email/, https://iredmail.org/

So please, everyone, stop saying mail is hard now when you don't have any recent experience. A lot has changed in 15 years

I wonder how much background knowledge is needed to execute those 20 commands with confidence.

gigantic pain in the ass correlated to very little money for the effort because come on it's email, which isn't hard.

> it's 'a gigantic pain in the ass' which is (in normal word use) one form of 'hard'. Which is why most sane people stopped doing it themselves say 15 years ago

I've been running my own mail server since 2000 or so. It isn't hard, it takes almost no time at all, and I have my own independent mail that nobody reads, and I make the decision of which mail to accept.

I will take the liberty of classifying the above comment as FUD.

You can use hosted mail with pgp/gpg if you don't want anyone reading your mail.

Otherwise your mail is read in transit on the way to you anyway, so self hosting is false privacy.

Isn't most SMTP traffic over TLS, these days?

Most SMTP traffic is to or from a few large companies.

Incidentally, it is threads like these that make me regret posting anything on HN. Respond to a vaguely worded FUD with a specific first-person example (of doing something for almost 20 years, no less), and get downvoted into negative territory.

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