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The Death of Decentralized Email (blog.lopp.net)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

88 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Interesting history and analysis of SMTP's history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 4 months ago (27 children)

You can't successfully use a home email server.

Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won't work)

You can't successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

Bullshit

You can't successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

Bullshit

As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

Bullshit

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can, yes.

Should, maybe.

Enjoy doing, unlikely.

And for sure your home isp has all the email ports blocked upstream.

With all that being said, to call SMTP dead is wildly insane. I do figure it will die someday though. Probably around the same time of universal IPV6 adoption during the year of the linux desktop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My ISP doesn't. It an electric company that offers fiber, so not your typical telecommunications company. Still though, not a single blocked port.

On topic, I tried an email server and it is too much of a pain in the ass IMHO, without the requisite training and experience, but certainly not impossible.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

My most recent ISP does CGNAT. They don't hide it, it's mentioned in their support pages. A quick email is all it takes to switch you over to an open address though.

Anyway I've got a $5/mo server with akami that looks after my email and it's associated domain.

It took about three hours of following a guide to set up DMARC and etc etc and it works unobtrusively, and is about ten times faster than my old ISP IMAP account that I had for about twenty years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a link to the guide by any chance? I might try it again using one of my throw away domains as a test.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It was one of LinuxBabe's guides - this one:

https://www.linuxbabe.com/mail-server/setup-basic-postfix-mail-sever-ubuntu

There is a more recent one that uses a shell script to install all the bits and pieces but I prefer to do it myself so I've got at least some idea of how all the pieces work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

This is very helpful. Thank you!

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