Show HN: LIV is a webmail front-end for your personal email server
github.com
github.com
Also a few spelling mistakes in the config paths might be worth fixing to make sure people don’t dismiss before giving it a go. For example, the config goes into the path ‘self_configer’ which is possibly a misspelling of configure, but the result is a loss in confidence that the rest of the software is of usable quality.
Nice effort, and congrats for putting it out there!
I will put up some screen shots tomorrow.
> For example, the config goes into the path ‘self_configer’ which is possibly a misspelling of configure, but the result is a loss in confidence that the rest of the software is of usable quality.
Too late to fix that now :(
To be honest, that alone makes this useless for me. Perhaps others can do fine the "archive" functionality, but that seems like a feature that I can't live without.
Also, very few junk mails remain in my archive with my very simple archive rule.
I would not recommend doing this unless you have a really good idea what running a public facing smtpd involves in the year 2021 for full email deliverability to/from all destinations.
Your main problem will be that almost certainly whatever VPS host you're on will have "polluted" IP space from previous customers and neighbouring IPs in the same netblocks. It will be something entirely beyond your control and not likely to ever get fixed.
If you want to self host your own email you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month.
Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS, but a minimum of $150-200/mo for colocation services or a dedicated server from a hosting company that has an absolute zero tolerance abuse policy. Or if you happen to know somebody at such an ISP and can work out a friendly deal with them, that might be an option, and would involve much less money.
And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup.
re: what's "wrong" with common open source webmail IMAP clients, neither rainloop or roundcube are terribly offensive or bad. I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use (both of the above are used by some large universities and others), catering to a niche market of people who want to just self-host personal email.
only to be pushed into spam and plain rejected by "non-mainstream" email providers regardless
Or you can cheat and use sendgrid or mailgun, but that is like caving to the dark side.
I'm 100% sure no spam was sent by my server as everything was logged.
https://blog.roastidio.us/posts/send_my_own_emails/
See if it can help you.
The problem is MS just ignores all that and built their own system, one that works on reputation. If you don't send a lot of mail you don't build up reputation and they block you. Over and over. Even if you never send any spam.
The big names just don't care about standards and they have the market share to simply ignore them.
Seriously, the whole SPAM situation is way overrated. In the name of fighting SPAM, they (the big email providers) blocks us, but they let all the ads in? To add injury on top of insult, they are lenient for paying corp accounts but very strict for "free" personal accounts?
If this does not tell you what "free" big email providers are, nothing will.
Everything perfectly fine, to get better delivery use 3rd party.
From cost perspective, I’m happy because don’t need to pay google $50/m.
Did you offer any real evaluation of the purpose of this post? No. You came here to just shit on it.
Just because you can't do something doesn't mean you should tell others they shouldn't.
Have been setting up and running smtpd for various ISPs since 1999, thanks.
I have the benefit of having seen how it's done professionally on a large scale, which informs my own choice of architecture for my personal domains and infrastructure.
It isn't nearly as bad as your post would suggest. There are plenty of reputable service providers, and plenty of software other than sendmail.
> you need an unimpeachable clean section of IP space, which these days means working with a more traditional ISP that will cost you a lot more for service per month
No, it means working with a reputable service provider. I picked up a VPS from RackNerd. The worst I had to do was fill out a Spamhaus form one time. And that's just because Spamhaus is rubbish themselves.
> Like, not a $5 to $25/mo VPS
I pay $23/year.
> And that's before you get into a proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC setup.
These are the least difficult parts of setting up email service. SPF is a simple DNS TXT record; MX Toolbox provides a record generator[0]. DMARC is also a TXT record[1], even simpler than SPF. For DKIM, things like OpenDKIM exist; Digital Ocean describes how to set it up with Postfix[2].
> I don't see a need for a new third thing that's apparently not designed for large scale production use
The internet is for everyone. Not everyone is a university.
[0]: https://mxtoolbox.com/SPFRecordGenerator.aspx [1]: https://dmarc.org/overview/ [2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...
2) no, openDKIM isn't hard to set up with (for instance, postfix). and neither is properly configured SPF, DMARC, etc. But it's more than 99.9% of email users want to get into. If you're already really confident doing intermediate level linux/bsd sysadmin stuff? sure, knock yourself out, overall it's just another daemon with some text based configuration files, and plenty of good reference material out the on the internet.
If you're determined to do that you're better off with a real IMAP server setup, I recommend dovecot, than whatever this small project is in the linked URL. And then if you want webmail, either rainloop or roundcube. Or just set up a proper IMAP-over-TLS client on all your devices so you don't need webmail.
When setting up my account with Microsoft's feedback loop, DO was already registered as a steward of my droplet IP. It turns out DO doesn't want to be seen as spam-lenient.
I'm not the person you are responding to, but honestly it's not that hard. I used to subscribe to a VPS which recycled its IPs formerly used by spammers, but now I use a company which is way more vigilant about blocking spammers. Not all IP ranges are rife with spammers, so all you need to do is run cheap tests with a few VPS companies to find a good solution.
$5/month VPS is fine; mine has uptime > 1 year. Even if you have bad IP that is constantly blocked, you can cheat and use sendgrid to send mails. It is free for 100 mails per day. The most important thing is now you own all your data.
I made my own web mail because I can and it scratches my itch. Yes, it is not suited for even mid scale deployment, but that's exactly my purpose.
I’ve been using a small VPS (sub $10/month) to self host mail for at least 10 years, and I’ve migrated hosts a few times without issue.
I’ve even migrated to a “polluted” IP on a different provider and getting that removed from RBLs took a couple of emails and the entire process honestly took less than a week.
It took me 10 minutes to host an email server and all my emails get delivered just fine.
If you’re worried about deliverability. Just use a relay server to manage deliverability issues , dkim setup for you , like aws ses
Atleast that way youre receiving emails still stay hosted and private on your personal server , and outgoing emails get delivered by ses.
Ses is pretty cheap too, heck its literally free for 2000 emails or so per month, so no extra cost for personal email servers.
https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
Something like this , lets you setup a decent mailserver under 10 mins with next to no maintenance needed.
(Only had to log back in once , to update the docker image itself)
I get that it's not for everyone, though.
I've talked to a fair number of other mail server owners, doesn't seem like a big deal. I've definitely had more problems with university mail servers getting blacklisted than my personal mail server.
I have noticed problems that fit well with some mail servers considering the age of your domain name.
Sure SPF, DKIM, DMAC, and friends require some work, but so does mysql (which I use for domain, users, forwarding, and similar tables), postfix, sieve, etc.
It's an IMAP client for Elixir which you might find useful in your project! I should really get around to creating a reference example for monitoring a single mailbox.
Also a Dockerfile (and a simple one line instruction) would help this project be easier to try out.
You don't really need a SMTP server, or VPS to try LIV. All you need are a Linux box and some mails in your maildir, and getmail can help to achieve that. You can't send mails though.
What is the problem with Rainloop? [0] I've had no problem with fulltext search yet. Am I missing something? (Not high enough volume e.g.?)
In comparison, LIV read mails directly off the maildir. It is basically the dumb down, web version of mu (https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/), which LIV is based off.
Maybe my statement about other open source webmail is too provoking; but I think this is one of a new kind of webmail.
Wouldn't that entirely depend on the indexing used by the IMAP server? IMAP even supports full text searches with a single command.
Now if you are talking encrypted email, then, yes, IMAP is a problem for full text searches. But you can't do that server side using any method if the keys live only at the email client (as is proper).
* If you just want to download some mails, there is the much simpler POP3 * If you want to access your mail remotely in a convenient way, there is webmail * If you want to do scripting, or advanced manual operations on your mail store, there are terminal tools
IMAP can do all three but is a lousy substitute and holding you back.
Having a local mail spool is great, but email has to be accessible from a lots of different devices in lots of different ways.
That's exactly the point of having your own email server in the cloud with all your mails, so all of your devices can access the vast data through a common webmail interface, without downloading anything in advance.
Mail is complicated. The fine article glosses over the huge pain and risks in self hosting (basically, one foot wrong and you're blacklisted by a major player)
"Do it exactly this way" won't play for a lot of people
Of cause LIV is not for every one; I gave plenty of warnings in the README. I only wish to see more people to write or customize software to do email exactly their way so that we can all learn from it.
Yes, liveview totally pave the road to build data intensive and interaction intensive, server-side driven applications such as this kind of email. And without surface I can't use liveview at all. In fact, I held up from using liveview until surface is mature enough.
LIV is a testament for both liveview and surface. Big kudos to the people behind them.
[0] - https://www.liv.tv/
> no screenshots