learning the hard way that self-hosting is hell incarnate when you dont know what youre doing...

Dec 14 · 4 days ago · 👍 norayr

14 Comments ↓

what are you trying to achieve?

gemini capsule? website? email?

btw email is the hardest i think.

xmpp is fairry easy.

Email is hard becaus of the decisions of everyone's blocklists.

It's just gmail that decide blocking everyone thats not gmail or hotmail or yahoo

literally a 51% attack on the email protocol lol

Yeah self hosting email is not to be taken lightly. I would never attempt it. Hosting ssh will fill up your hard drive with logs of failed attempts as every unscrupulous actor hammers your server with their list of compromised usernames and passwords. I've never had a problem with xmpp, just a lot of ports to open to get a decent experience. Matrix was a steeper curve for me with all this python venv stuff but I got there.

Anyways there's a wealth of experience here to help if you need it.

Admiddedly, I would love to get a Rasberry Pi mainly as a way to self host different things, including a personal mirror of my Gemini capsule and my personal website on the https net. But I never self hosted my own email though.

by the way, while trying to selfhost, if you have no real ip, or even if you have, you can also selfhost on yggdrasil ipv6.

I could give that a try, I'm unsure if this'll work for Windows, but I managed to get SyncThing to work for my Gemsync capsule, I just need to do something with the firewall (Gemsync's server is disconnected on my end, so I'm having the Gemsync admin help me out on this)

It's just gmail that decide blocking everyone thats not gmail or hotmail or yahoo literally a 51% attack on the email protocol lol

it was some years ago granted, but when I last tried to self host my email I absolutely could not send an email to outlook.com. Turns out the IP address that I inherited was blacklisted there. The solution I had to end up using was creating an outlook.com email account, setting it up so that their mail server's would deliver mail on my actual email address's behalf, then setting up my mail client to use outlook.com's smtp server when I was sending mail to an outlook.com address.

I never had issues delivering to gmail.

I happen to run a mailserver since about 3 years now. About gmail and co., I also have issues getting mail delivered but my IPs/domains are not at all blacklisted. It's just them.

For the time being, I'm using a third party smarthost to deliver email to those difficult ends, like gmail and hotmail/outlook domains from a few different countries.

Since I mentioned it, the smarthost is named "duocircle" and has a free plan for 1K emails/month. Not that many, maybe, but more than enough for me and the few users I serve, up to this day.

one of my friends was working in the isp i was getting real static ip from, so i asked him to add my domains in their reverse dns.

it is really important for mailservers, you can have dkim/dmark/spf and everything configured properly but if you don't have ptr records other servers won't trust you.

then i had to move to other apartment and my friend does not work there anymore, and real ip depends on geography, i begged but isp changed the ip. they said they can't keep the old ip.

so i lost ptr records. my other friend rents a vps and he is able to configure ptr records and i use his server as relay now.

but to me it is a story about old protocol with lots of unnecessary layers

and solutions to the problems that can be solved in other ways today.

that's why i just don't like email.

xmpp is an amazing protocol.

I mean email didn't used to be that bad. I used to host my own 27 years ago. It was ruined by spammers and scammers taking advantage of wide open SMTP servers. XMPP didn't get enough mass appeal to make it worth it to run spams n scams on it. Anything with mass appeal will fall to this. SMS used to be where you went to talk to people. Most of my SMSs are login codes (very insecure!!!!) and spams/scams. Same as email. Hell, I've gotten Signal spam twice. Never on XMPP nor Matrix.

@darkghost did the same at around the same time period you refer to. Starting having trouble when google hit the scene as emails began to bounce and then later had to have dmarc and spf and dkim. I remember spam assassin being a real bitch in terms of other hosts dectecting your domain as spam and then having to try to contact those hosts to convince them you weren't.