Neo

Very true!

Probably because in the current state it would not reach many people. I like PeerTube as much a the next guy but FUTO has to keep things a bit pragmatic too I imagine.

You’re right, but we’re not talking about “at scale” here if I understood OP correctly. We’re talking about considering self hosting email for those who have the technical know-how to do so and obviously not on a rickety 2010’s desktop PC in your living room on consumer broadband as another commenter hinted at. Anything online “at scale” is always going to be harder than doing it on a small scale.

You may have already read this but I always think back to this blog post about self hosted email:

TLDR;

• Mail is not hard: people keep repeating that because they read it, not because they tried it
• Big Mailer Corps are quite happy with that myth, it keeps their userbase growing
• Big Mailer Corps control a large percentage of the e-mail address space which is good for none of us
• It’s ok that people have their e-mails hosted at Big Mailer Corps as long as there’s enough people outside too

https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/

Yeah, Microsoft are the worst. Even after doing all the proof of work (reverse DNS, DKIM, SPF, …) and registering for their spam prevention postmaster tools equivalent, I still found myself randomly blocked for delivery sometimes.

Amazon SES is good for this too. I use it in combination with postfix for the outbound mail. Granted it feels a bit like cheating on the whole self hosting part, at least for outbound. And I only started doing it in the past year of self hosting for 20 years. MS (Hotmail, Outlook, Office 365) was by far the biggest asshole in randomly denying delivery from my (well maintained reputation wise and well configured) outbound IP before switching to an SES relay. Fuck em, seriously. It’s not just about preventing spam, it’s clearly a strategy towards email dominance. Other big players are guilty of this too though.

I believe the ISPMail tutorials I was following during my rebuild recommended it as the successor to self hosted anti spam. Touting better performance, written in C vs. Perl for spamassassin iirc. The tutorials may have indicated that SA was no longer actively maintained, but that may be a figment of my imagination. Better fact check all of this. But I’ve been very happy with rspamd’s web interface to see what’s going on with the process. There’s a great history view in the dashboard that helps you better understand why a message got flagged as spam. It helped me better fine tune white and blacklists for example. Supposedly it also has a rich module system to enable more advanced filtering techniques like LLM’s and whatnot. But I haven’t looked into that yet. Granted rspamd is also used by ISPs that have massive throughput. I’m definitely not in that category :p

Great plan! We need more independently hosted email. I’ve been self hosting email for 20 years. Still running Postfix and Dovecot, but don’t have all the features you’d like though. I just wanted to chime in that I’ve moved from spamassassin to rspamd. And I’m happy about that. Given your experience in the hosting business I think you’ll like rspamd. One thing I have changed since a few months is have outgoing mail go through Amazon SES. I moved hosting from Linode to Hetzner and that turned out to be not so great for outbound delivery reputation. I didn’t want to migrate back to Linode so I bit the bullet and compromised with SES. That has been really working well, but I admit it is a bit of a step back from fully self hosting.

Do you have more information? Haven’t looked into it for a while. What happened?

Me too! When I’m scrolling in a room reading a backlog it will jump all over the place. I don’t know why but that is super annoying. It’s as if it’s some html / css anchoring going horribly wrong or something. First I thought it was caused by the client, but it happens in Element as well as Fluffy chat. I try to avoid Matrix as much as possible because of that.

The first rule of the Fediverse.

Yeah, fuck those colonists with their colonial powers! 💪

https://forgejo.org/faq/#what-is-the-difference-between-forgejo-and-gitea more specifically https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

I recently did a bare metal migration from Gitea to Forgejo using NixOS, maybe this info is useful if you use SQLite (which I believe is the default): the SQLite database filename for Gitea is gitea.db and for Forgejo it’s forgejo.db so I had to do a rename. Before renaming I ended up with an empty Forgejo instance. Either way I hope you figure it out in the end. Good luck!

I use Obsidian, you have mentioned it and it’s not self hosted, but for me that depends on how you look at it. I use it in a folder that’s synced to Nextcloud, so I consider the data self hosted markdown files. The viewer, i.e. the Obsidian app is not self hosted, but I consider that just a client used to view the data so it doesn’t really bother me.

You’re absolutely right about the perception. You make a good point. I’m not sure OP got that you’re not trying to talk them out of self hosting, but rather bring up the importance of reliability regardless of their setup. Thanks!

In my experience (self hosting mail since 2005) signing up for SNDS does factor in. Although last time I had trouble with delivery to MS, my hosting provider Linode’s support also helped out by contacting MS back channels on my behalf. The biggest problem I (rarely) have is when whole IP blocks end up on a ban list that MS seems to really trust. That said, fuck it, I will keep fighting the fight and self host my mail like a stubborn old git :p

Have a look at https://www.keycloak.org/

I’ve recently switched my entire self hosted infrastructure to NixOS, but only after a few years of evaluation, because it’s quite a paradigm shift but well worth it imho.

Before that I used to stick to a solid base of Debian with some docker containers. There are still a few of those remaining that I have yet to migrate to my NixOS infra (namely mosquitto, gotify, nodered and portainer for managing them).

I’m still on Linode and have been for over a decade. Just very sad to have seen them lose their independence after selling to Akamai. Prices went up immediately and the whole “family of sysadmins working for sysadmins” feeling was gone.