Curious, how trivially easy is that?
1. Buy a domain. About $10/year for a .com
2. Buy a /24 ipv4 block with good reputation (maybe like $10k)
3. Get a rack in a nearby datacenter, rack up a BGP-capable router and your servers for redundancy to run email. Takes about $30k initial setup costs if you buy all new, and about $5k initial setup costs if you cut corners and buy used. It'll be $2k/mo after that, so less than the cost of 1 $100 avocado toast per day, quite affordable.
4. Setup your mailserver of choice, such as dovecot + postfix. Enable either a catch-all address, or use recipient_delimiters. The former means "anything@domain.com" works, and the latter means "user-anything@domain.com" works (assuming your recipiient_delimiters are '-'). I recommend using a real catchall.
5. Setup your spam setup, this is the hardest part. I have no guidance here.
6. Point your DNS over, setup SPF and DKIM records, test, and off you go! This should all take about 1 to 3 days if you know what you're doing.
7. Find out that some email will go to spam anyway because you're not using one of the big 4 email providers, but it can't be helped, and anyway no one uses email anymore.
And after that, for less than $30k/year, you have email with catchall or subadressing support. Nice and easy.
You can also pay Fastmail for email and use their "catchall" feature https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942-Ca...
Or Google Apps also has a catchall feature.
Then, after you do this, you can simply give internet archive the email address "internet-archive@mydomain.com", or generate a random string. If you forget the email you used, you can search your email history for the first email they sent you, and check the To field.
Why do you need a dc rackspace and a /24 just to have your email ?
Sure, you could pay fastmail $40/year for this, but that's not really the hacker news spirit, and no one on this site knows how to count as low as $40.
The real justifications you can give yourself:
Shared VPS hosting pretty much all bans email, AWS, DO, etc all have ToS that say "no email" as anti-spam measures.
Shared IP space will go straight to spam due to people having spammed on it in the past. Buy a /24 to ensure you don't go straight to spam.
Rackspace ensures you actually own your email, at least moreso than with other shared hosting, and owning your email is important.
costs around $12/year+domain
Complete FUD.
Here is DO's acceptable use policy:
https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy
You can see that they explicitly have policies for email hosts.
Here is a guide they host on how to setup a mail server:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-run-...
They forbid spamming, not all mail.
> Shared IP space will go straight to spam due to people having spammed on it in the past. Buy a /24 to ensure you don't go straight to spam.
I have had no problems with deliverability to Google from an IP on a shared block. I don't send marketing mails or any other kind of spam though. Microsoft blocks my IP but they are too small (outside businesses) for me to care to give them special snowflake treatment.
Deliverability of your own mails is also irrelevant for the original discussion about using unique email addresses for signing up to services - you don't need to be able to send at all for that.
And actually I think this is a kind of setup people could get into: an Android dist that focuses on self hosting off an older device.
Note that I am speaking from personal experience here. I have been self-hosting email for over a decade, from the same IP, with (roughly) the same DNS records. Occasionally, for no reason, I will end up on the global spam list for Gmail, Outlook, or iCloud - never more than one at the same time, and never with a discernible reason. The best I can figure is that the IP is allocated to me by a hosting provider that occasionally sends out spam from its subnet (aka any hosting provider that doesn’t block smtp). I have also tried self-hosting a different mail server from a variety of residential IPs in different cities and countries, and ran into the same problem.
Where are you finding $100 avocado toast?
- have an iphone/mac w/ icloud+
- go into settings
- add custom email
- get redirected to login to cloudflare
- buy/pick a domain for $12
- icloud+ automatically sets up the MX records on the domain via cloudflare
- enable catch-all emails in icloud settings
- Done!
Takes about 10 minutes & icloud provides the email hosting without any additional fees
2. Configure a catch-all forwarding address to your private GMail
Done.
All a service provider or malicious actor has to do is simply not include it when storing or publishing it to evade tracking.
Stripping it is not uncommon for services to prevent duplicate accounts.