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Comment by numbsafari | Hacker News Reader

They specifically left email off of that list. The question is: can I host servers that may compete with the commercial offerings of Google? Can I host my personal blog? Can I host my personal email server?

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I doubt they are trying to cut off competition to GMail. Email is blocked typically as a matter of convention by the majority of ISPs. It requires features 99.9% of customers don't care about in the slightest, and invites spam problems.

It may be blocked by the ISPs that service a majority of people (i.e. cable companies), but I don't have any reason to think that it's blocked by a majority of ISPs.

I'm surprised to hear that. I've never had a problem with an ISP blocking SMTP.

Inbound on port 25? I know my ISP does

Come to think of it, I've never looked at inbound stuff. You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.

If you block 25 outbound, people's mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) could not deliver mail to servers that don't run SSL or TLS (465, 587)

Lots of ISPs does this. They require you to relay via their SMTP-server.

Used to have Bellsouth DSL, and they did this. SMTP/TLS on a different port worked though. But obviously you couldn't run your own e-mail server.

Ideally you would use port 587, which is the designated port for mail submission. See RFC 2476 [1].

This requires that your mail provider supports that port, of course, which is unfortunately not always the case.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2476.txt

> You'd think outbound would be where all the spam problems come from, though.

They block port 25 to prevent open relays on their network (i.e. someone sends a forged email, the SMTP server does no authentication, and just forwards it on to the destination).

Mine doesn't (Roadrunner). I run my own SMTP server off my cable modem. I have no problems getting incoming mail. Outgoing, however, was a pain because so many SMTP servers block mail coming from dynamic IPs. It annoys me to no end. I understand the reasons for doing it, but it annoys me to no end. I had to set up a small satellite server on a static IP that I route all my outgoing mail through.

This leads me to wonder why you run any portion of your mail server from your home if you have access to a small satellite server?

To search your home, a warrant is needed. To search a remote site, less is needed, and you might never know it’s been searched, back-doored and compromised.

Mostly because the small satellite server requires very little storage, cpu, or memory. I have about 100G of mail on my IMAP server (not all in one account: I run email for everyone in my family), and that kind of space isn't cheap in the server rental business (despite the fact that a 2TB drive is $90).

Plus I just like having my data here, and not somewhere where I have no physical access.

Indeed. Chances of a random person accidentally setting up an open email relay of some sort are high.

Although an open email relay would probably be some other violation of the AUP, methinks.

(warning: haven't actually read AUP.)

I actually butted heads with this part of the AUP when I was a teenager.

I was young, naive, and trying to set up my own mail server. Ended up creating an open SMTP relay instead.

Received a phone call within 15 minutes of successfully testing my mail server! They were calling to tell me they suspect a computer in my house has a virus. I chatted with support for a while and we eventually figured out it was my mail server.

They were rather pleasant about it actually, they explained that it doesn't necessarily violate their AUP but it's hard to configure a mail server correctly.

I'd later learn that since my IP address was from their dynamically allocated pool: most popular mail servers would reject my messages as spam anyways.

---

This was with TimeWarner cable about 7 or 8 years ago.

Surely yes, but they probably don't want to go through the trouble of tracking them down one by one- and doing so on a continuing, never-ending basis.

Most likely. But it's trivial to see whether or not someone is running an SMTP server whereas it's more difficult to determine if they're running an open relay.

Wouldn't it be a simple matter of just trying to send an email using the server in question? If you receive the email you just sent, then it's an open relay.

So now you have to have an email account somewhere that allows anything and everything to be sent to it (no spam filtering), and you need a system to send emails and correlate that with received emails. This is all certainly possible and not necessarily that difficult, but compared to seeing if a service is running on port 25 it's about a hojillion times more hassle.

You don't need to send. Send "helo", "mail from" and "rcpt to" commands and most servers that are not open relays will reject the message after the rcpt to. Issue a "data", and most remaining ones will. At which point you can disconnect without sending any e-mails. Open relay testers are dime a dozen.

Actually an email server that provides mail for you is a 'non commercial use', it would be commercial if you were offering other people email accounts on it and charging them for it.

It gets a little bit dicey if you host your blog on a server (btw I just setup Ghost on an Rpi and it makes for a very cute little blog-pliance) and your blog has ads and provides you with an income stream.

Although if your blog has Adwords, maybe they wouldn't mind... :)

I do not think that is an exhaustive list. The only thing it excludes are commercial operations, so I would assume that yes, you can run personal services (even services you share freely with friends or strangers), but that you cannot try to monetize those services. IANAL though.

I think that they might have an issue with you hosting the "Next Facebook" from your house, even if it's not a commercial operation.

You will most likely be not able to host a personal email server from a residential ISP without an IPv4 address tunnel, anyway.

Without a proper reverse DNS record and an IP address not from a residential pool, most properly configured servers will reject emails immediately (in order to combat spam).

I've had no trouble paying a little extra for static IPs, not to mention delegated reverse DNS, over the past 15 years.

Of course, it all depends on the ISP. I've had nothing but denials over the years each time I've tried to request a static IP address, let alone PTR record delegation.

To be sure, I have chosen my ISPs with this requirement over the years.

Or P2P services, which could potentially present a greater threat to Google. Only a small fraction of network users are willing and able to run a personal server, and even those that do aren't capable of competing with Google in terms of hardware.

Decentralized content sharing could remove those obstacles, and a high bandwidth network could facilitate the adoption of P2P services.

I suspect that if the P2P client ran google's ads they wouldn't be opposed.

Google is pretty savvy to P2P, but it does remove their ability to push ads at you. The latter is what would bother them.

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