this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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This sentence at the very end makes me very curious. Is this a hint for a Thunderbird mail service or something similar?
On the one hand I would love to have a mail service offered by the Thunderbird team that would also fund Thunderbird development. On the other hand it's probably not a good idea to split the development resources too thin.
I'm curious about this too.
A lot of self-hosted FOSS people draw the line at hosting their own mail servers. Even if Mozilla created a new ~~domain~~ hosting server for handling, the big three could still reject the traffic like they do for people hosting outside the three now, under the guise of spam filtering.
I'd be ecstatic if they did something here, but I'm not really clear on what a solution would look like. On top of them spreading thin as you mentioned
*edited 'domain' service to 'hosting' service
I have my own domain (even if hosted on a relatively small provider) and I don’t have that much of an issue tbh?
I edited the comment, I really meant hosting server, not domain.
Having a custom domain isn't a big deal, it's really where that domain is hosted that creates forwarding issues. Since the majority of email is handled by the 'big three', anything that's hosted outside of that is often flagged as spam or is refused to be delivered. That's allegedly because there are malicious senders also hosted on third party servers (and fair enough, there likely are), but this causes a bit of a potential monopoly that could easily be abused, and there's obvious motivation to push people into a particular service for data collection.
Even if it doesn't happen often, occasional failures can be a huge problem if you're sending critical communication and it isn't reaching target inboxes because of filtering. It's enough of a headache that even most avid self-hosters tend to avoid it.
That is absolutely unreasonable, as the email files don’t actually tell you who the sender is beyond the domain from where it’s sent. The email protocol is SUPER unsafe and really really easy to spoof as someone from the big three
My understanding is that it's a combination of correctly deploying authentication (DMARC, DKIM, and SPF) and the actual IP address of the server that can get you into trouble. If you incorrectly set up authentication, OR if a malicious sender spoofs you (likely because you didn't set up auth correctly), it can get your IP blocklisted. And unless you're monitoring if you're blocklisted, you often don't know that things aren't getting delivered until someone tells you.
And then you're still kind of at the whim of the big players, because they could change or update their authentication standards, and if you're not on top of it you can find yourself in the same boat, even if you're doing everything else right.
It's not impossible, it's just a headache. But if i'm being honest, i'm a bit of a novice so it could be easier to a more trained network administrator.
Just curious what you are using. I have a domain as well, and occasionally consider setting up another email server for it. I also still have some old old accounts that are still linked to my domain email, but I just haven't run an email server in years. Is it something turnkey that I don't need to spend weeks configuring? In fact I might only turn it on long enough to receive emails so that I can change the accounts.
I use Mailcow and it works well. Easy to configure, and it uses Docker so it's self-contained and very easy to move to a new server if you ever need to do that.
I'm using an SMTP relay for outbound emails, though. I didn't want to have to deal with IP reputation issues, especially with Microsoft/Hotmail. I'm hosting my server on a VPS, and spammers in the same subnet can result in the entire subnet getting blocklisted. Configuring a relay is easy in Mailcow's UI, and can be configured per domain.
I am not happy with my provider, currently waiting for the email hosting to expire so that I can maintain just the domain there and eventually user zoho for hosting
Thanks. I will take a look.
Well, there are alternatives. There's /e/ (murena.io now a days) and distroot, and you can use gnupg with others who also use gnupg, and with distroot you can use its own encryption as well. There's tutanota and prrotonmail, which use their own encryption mechanisms but only work with the same providers and not with other providers...
I mean there are already several non big corps providers of email. Distroot also provides xmpp, nextcloud, and several other services, the same as /e/. I can't tell I'd trust more TB than the alternatives, several of them are non profit. But there are options. It's sad before smart phones, some big corps were already dominating the services, and after them, things got even worse. But there have been, and still are, options for refugees. That's not the issue in my mind.
The big issue, is that those big corps do what they want, excluding those not using them. All of them, no exception, place received messages from /e/ to the spam, that if the email even reaches the final user, some times it gets discarded by the service without even getting to the end receiver. Several mail registrations for whatever account, banks, insurance, stores and so on, don't even accept email addresses if not from the big corps. So the huge and toxic influence from big corps doesn't get corrected by another non big corp service. It's like with FLOSS alternatives, or more private alternatives in general, the issue is the power most users give to those big corps. Most users prefer those corps services, at times ignoring the non big corps are not less comfortable, but most of the time they don't even care, even if told there are easy enough alternative they would still select big corps. Then with such power, big corps not only dominate, but also discriminate non big corps users...
I am aware, I am using an alternative service myself for several years now. My point was that having an email service that helps fund Thunderbird would be nice. Furthermore, more alternative that ethically align with my views are always good.