Same here (well, 25-ish years). And while self-hosted email may be declining, it apparently still outnumbers any single email provider: https://labs.ripe.net/images/r_uuIdAmmdbhI1R9Der6slvvH5U=/10...

Especially someone who stands to gain if they only need to get cozy with two email providers to deliver their spam.

(Blog author) runs the email infrastructure measurement project at Live Direct Marketing

Google offers "mail merge in Gmail to send personalized email campaigns, newsletters, and announcements to a wide audience." [1]

Based on how much @gmail.com spam I used get within GMail I can only assume they treat mail from their internal accounts much more favourably then us dirty self hosters.

[1]: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12921167

Thank you for this perspective. I've been hosting my own email for about 25 years and have never had significant problems delivering to any of the large providers. A couple of months ago I migrated from one VPS host to another. I'd been putting this off for a long time, in part because of what I've read on HN about how difficult it is to self-host your mail. I finally took the plunge a couple of months ago, expecting to find the new provider's IP space unusable & having to relay via the old MTA/start relaying via a commercial MTA; but to my surprise, it's been completely smooth sailing! Maybe I've just been lucky with the nature of my setup: a small number of mailboxes and domains used for personal/small business use. Certainly if I was sending bulk mail or significant amounts of transactional mail then I'd use someone else's service.

I follow the standards processes, and while I don't see a push to against self-hosting mail, I do see a push to stop storing cleartext passwords. Which is typically what your MUA uses to access those self-hosted mail servers.

I've been self hosting myself now for a couple of years(after a brief, 20 year hiatus) and it was less difficult than I though it would be.

Don't listen to the naysayers.

This seems like a load bearing issue. Would you like me to put together a plan to put human-written text in your daily routine?

I really wish there was an HN guideline that I could point to which says that you shouldn't complain about LLM writing, in the same way that's there's guidance on site annoyances:

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!

I have people writing emails to me with an LLM now. We've gone from meetings where "this could have been an email" to emails where "this could have been a few carefully chosen words, not a rambling diatribe which would test the most hardcore Tolstoy fan".

Kill me. With a spoon. Slowly.

Are we even sure the actual stuff in the article is real? What if it's just the usual LLM hallucinations

> Is everyone really this lazy now?

Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up.

LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.

Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.

> The domains didn't disappear; they moved.

I stopped reading at this point. I cannot emphasize how much I HATE this AI writing style.

The need is that writing is expensive. An LLM is around a hundred times cheaper than a human, so this kind of article that doesn't provide tons of value just makes sense to write with an LLM.

I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.

Ran into this issue when self-hosting, so I just bumped my existing ProtonMail subscription to a business one which allows for mail forwarding. It's quite easy to set up and I've been pretty happy about deliverability for a year+ now

It feels like the only way to stop this happening reliably, is to get as many people as possible off Google and Microsoft.

I'd argue that self-hosting is the first step. The second step is helping everyone you know get their own domain and host their email for them. If they don't trust you to not read their email on your server, point them to somebody else who offers mail hosting.

The more people we can convince the internet is something anyone can help build outside of the silos, the more likely it is to survive.

I ended up switching to Fastmail a few years ago, but before that I was relaying outgoing email through Amazon SES. It fixed all my deliverability problems. Before that, when sending from my own server, emails might just not show up. Not in recipient's spam folder, not rejected by their server. Accepted and then dropped mysteriously.

If I ever go back to self-hosting email, I would do the same except I would maintain a whitelist of friendly mail servers to which I would send directly. Or maybe just relay emails to Google/Microsoft via SES and send the rest directly.

Use DKIM on a long lived domain, and check that your sending IP is stable and comes from a block with good reputation. This has always worked for me.

I haven’t had this issue. It might be due to the long-standing reputation of my email domain(s) or of the mail server’s IP address, I don’t know. But I know other self-hosters who don’t have that issue either.

I use fastmail which is very good. Like “oh this is how it should feel!” good.

I started self-hosting my email last year, but I use MailPace (other email sending services are available) to avoid being memory-holed.

I don’t self host, I pay zoho to do it. Over never had any suspicion my emails haven’t been received.

I think that is the Crux of the issue.

Email spam has made self hosting untenable.

That would work if most spam wasn't from the cartel. I receive single digit percentage of "spam" from randoms, 95%+ is from Gmail/Google, o365 or mailgun/whatever. Not one of them can either filter their users or actually action abuse reports.

Spam probably isn't as bad as you think it is. It's not the dark old days where 99% of emails are spam.

You should self-host, so you can do the experiment for yourself. You might be surprised. You can always stop self-hosting if you don't like it.

I self host email and surprisingly do not receive any Spam (apart from the occasional cold calling support@ contact@ etc)

I agree Spam is the hardest. Setting up a mailserver is pretty easy today, e.g. with NixOS-simple-mailserver you can do it with a few lines and a few minutes of config in your DNS provider, and maintenance is minimal.

But I self-host email for ~20 years, and I have not managed to get rid of Spam without not also getting false positives.

I first used SpamAssistant, in later years Rspamd, but I feel like they are just not good enough. Also I find Rspamd config pretty incomprehensible.

Hosted email like also does not solve this, e.g. GMail filters way much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam, so I had to turn off the spam filter entirely).

A combination of DNSRBL, SpamAssassin, and using different localparts for each service is working very well for me. Some spam is still getting through, but not enough to feel (heh) spammed, and amazingly I haven’t had any false positives from SpamAssassin in years.

Email can't really change much. The protocol is too old.

It would be better if we came up with new protocols that solve the email messaging problems and then gradually wean ourselves off email rather than trying to "fix" email.

In a sense this is already happening although instead of migrating to open protocols which solve the email problems we're migrating a lot of messaging to walled gardens which solve the problems (e.g. WhatsApp).

It's not in the current providers' interest to help people avoid the current providers' advertisement or avoid paying the providers to host the customers' email.

Seems like AI is in a pretty good position to do that tbh.

Wasn't bitcoin supposedly invented to do that?

Ironic given the amount of crypto spam that exists.

The biggest problem with email spam-wise is that it lacks any sort of user/mailbox authentication. The only useful signal in the meta-data is the origin domain. The protocol assumes the domain owner does some form of access-control and every message coming from the domain is equally trusted. If one has been communicating with alice@foobarizer.com and receives an appendage enlargement ad from bob@foobarizer.com they could be reasonably confident that Bob's account was compromised and communicate that out to Potmaster and Alice to be handled internally.

Of course this assumption is fully invalidated by open-access mail service providers: maintaining communication with xXx_kitty_slayer_xXx@tepidmail.com tells absolutely nothing about sincerity and authenticity of messages from DrJohnSmith@tepidmail.com. Not only there's roughly zero correlation, it could be argued that correlation is slightly negative if one does not expect out-of-the-blue contact attempts. Funnily enough, with the critical mass of non-spam migrating to providers, it becomes sort of positive signal, fueling feedback loop: even if the majority of spam came from gmail, messages from gmail would still be more likely to be non-spam than messages from rncrosoft.com, because most non-spam comes from there too.

On top of that, there's a lot of soft-spam. Companies will happily send out critical contract-related information and unwanted-unasked advertising from the very same domain and even the same address. The big providers are not shying away from selling shielding services to spam agencies.

That "someone" could - in theory - require pgpgpg signatures attached to messages and have origin-based filtering/ranking, but good luck convincing people to set up their gmail/outlook to even generate the signature, let alone publish it reliably/revocably. At the receiver end, your only reasonable bet is filtering/ranking the content. It's probably not a strictly uphill battle, but you definitely need significant amount of volume and tagging before your models become good enough and it stops to the case.

In reality, even if it sounds a bit ironic given above, the best route to fixing this is self hosting, especially in the cases where your messages are needed. The more people try to send mail from their self-hosted instances and insisted that it was the problem of the other end to complain to their service providers if they do not receive the messages, the less hegemony the cartel providers would have. And maybe we could have some sort of client auth for email.

its not really difficult to filter spam off. I spend more time dealing with physical spam in my snailmailbox than my email spamfilter

Last year I started self hosting my email. I found that once you setup the “usual suspects” (DMARC, DKIM, SPF…) outgoing mail works without issues. In fact it works now better than the (small) provider I was using before.

And setting them up properly is not even that difficult nowadays

> what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server

On the other side of the coin, what would happen if google bans you? That's certainly not unheard of.

I have deployed stalwart as my replacement for mailu and iv never had such an easy time setting up mail, i love it.

Why switch then? Need more excitement in your life?

I have been running Postfix for 22 years, from a big corporate installation to my own on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It just does its job.

It’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure.

However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.

And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.

I’ve probably spent less than 10 hours over the last 5 or 6 years on maintenance.

> They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.

And that’s not hard?

Running a modern mail server, a spam filter, a self-hosted webmail, and learning just enough about DNS and networking to get mail through: this is what’s not that hard.

Figuring out how to stay whitelisted, or accept ending up in people’s filters, asking them to whitelist you while your public IP gradually gains trust, is a job.

Nothing will ever ruin email. A private email server, or a federation of mutually-whitelisting ones, is the ultimate social media, and not at all a bad personal information management system too.

Edit: typo

I hardly ever see any spam nowadays, happy fastmail user.

spam filters are effective at dealing with that

No

Interestingly, DNS does have such a record (MB,) just never widely used - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035/#section-3.3.3

I would also be interested in self-hosting but have limited understanding of what would be required to ensure my email does not get flagged as spam.

This very much depends you been U.S. citizen or not been U.S. citizen.

"PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_program

"Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.

By targeting, it is meant that US persons or persons located in the United States may not be the intended targets of the collection. The targeting must have as its object the acquisition of foreign intelligence information, as this is defined by FISA."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Amendments_Act_of_2008

How times change.

I remember when Gmail came around and everyone was more than happy to hand off their email to Google. No spam and ability to send and receive huge (for the time) attachments I think were the main things people wanted.

Not sure if that was before or after everyone was happy to hand off their web browser to Google.

You like using Google and Microsoft products as an end user (even ignoring all the ethical issues with these companies)? That seems surprising to me. I find their products so horrible compared to e.g. Fastmail.

We have to figure out a way to get out of FB social, iOS/Android phone, Google/Microsoft email, AWS/GOOG/MSFT cloud oligopolies. There is no competition and there will be massive rentier capitalism extraction from all these players for the rest of civilization.