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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

I need to host my emails somewhere. This means that you can't reject the EU in isolation, you have to compare it to the alternatives. And the most prevalent alternative is the US

Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about

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Switzerland, maybe? I've been a happy migadu.com customer for years already.

Funny enough, they mention moving to ProtonMail which is at least based out of Switzerland. It makes this whole chain a bit funny, but I don't blame the commenter for not breaking down every service the OP talked about and the OP did shorthand it to "Migrating to the EU", so fair enough.

Didn't proton fold like a wet napkin when they were asked for information about their users? What I mean is: Switzerland as a whole is probably the wrong metric...

These are also political decisions and the EU is much more powerful politically than Switzerland so if your adversary is the US and they're willing to use lawfare or more than you should probably go with the EU and not Switzerland. Germany is considered one of the most robust legal systems for privacy.

But there is always risk no matter what you do.

Switzerland - as well as EU based providers - have to comply with court orders. And the EU as well as Switzerland issue court orders upon request from friendly foreign states ("Rechtshilfeersuchen" in german) - such as the US.

Wasn't Proton launched as a "your data is encrypted at rest, we could never access it without your consent"? The implication being that even if they received said court orders, they didn't have anything to give. Am I misremembering that?

They encrypt your data insofar as your email, files, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't have information potentially useful to the authorities. See the recent headline where they revealed a user's payment information allowing them to be identified.

Servers of migadu are in france actually

Yeah, you are right. It's a bit buried in their docs.

Anywhere you can rent a VPS or dedicated server, install exim or mox or mailcow. Configure dns correctly and you're good to go

Do any of your emails actually make it into an inbox though? I did this for a server and I couldn't even get it to land in spam on gmail.

Yes but you may need the IPs to warm up and build some reputation, depending where you setup your server the IPs may be burned. Check logs and reputation with some of the postmaster tools the major providers offer and with the services that allow looking up an IP. senderscore used to be convenient to use now it displays a stupid contact form when you try to check an IP, there are others.

To be honest I haven't done the setup for sending a handful of emails but IPs sending hundreds/thousands per day it's fine as long as you don't start spamming people and get flagged.

Yes they do. I wouldn't try it from a residential IP but as long as you run a blacklist check on the IP before you start, and configure DNS correctly, it's generally fine.

In email world, this is as far from 'good to go' as you can get. Good luck getting anyone to read your emails this way.

Do you run your email server? I run two, have next to no problems (the key is in setting up DNS correctly, as I mentioned) and keep getting told this by people who have never tried.

More elaboration on what’s involved in “correctly” would probably drive the point home — “this works because” vs “works for me.”

I made sure to include the word correctly in the reply. Mox mailserver tells you exactly what to do. I think mailcow does as well. A lot of people don't do it and then tell others that selfhosting email with good deliverability is impossible. You set it up once and you're good to go

It depends on whether your IP address has good reputation or not. Don't act like we're idiots, we know what SPF, DKIM and DMARC are. We've seen perfect e-mails (rated 100/100 by deliverability services) get rejected by Microsoft because reasons.

You were lucky, congratulations.

> It depends on whether your IP address has good reputation or not

Addressed in another comment "I wouldn't try it from a residential IP but as long as you run a blacklist check on the IP before you start".

> Don't act like we're idiots, we know what SPF, DKIM and DMARC are.

If you read one comment higher in the thread instead of reacting emotionally, I was specifically asked to elaborate on what the correct DNS meant. Please don't act like those who don't know are idiots.

> We've seen perfect e-mails (rated 100/100 by deliverability services) get rejected by Microsoft because reasons.

No, you haven't.

> You were lucky, congratulations.

What do you call consistent luck? In my case 14 years across 6 different sending domains, 4 different servers with four different hosts using two different MTAs?

> No, you haven't.

I mean I have seen 100/100 on https://mail-tester.com/ get rejected by Microsoft, yes, but feel free to call me a liar if that helps you feel better.

I've just noticed you're the guy who said that people were migrating away from US services "because it's trending"; you're obviously a self-satisfied pillock and I won't engage in further discussion with your tedious online personality

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