Email services - your opinion?
- Thread starter SrsX
- Start date
Run your own server or signup for email service somewhere. My thoughts are what does it matter if you have nothing to hide? Most broadband providers are subjected to CALEA anyway so not a big deal. Keep it clean and you have nothing to worry about.
drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
I care / give shit. Mooonure...
I still am sitting on sidelines about email. Certainly as-is, is busted. Frankly, email needs a massive overhaul.
We need P2P email or just build upon chat type technologies.
Putting email abroad means certainly the NSA is sniffing your stuff on international fiber runs.
Theoretically, way to starve them some is to have multiple inbound servers out there that are geolocated. So mail from abroad gets received abroad. Upon receipt, all crypto on storage. Only access the actual server through multiple nested tunnels that are crypted with various encryption methods.
The whole who cares, I am boring thing just is an excuse not to care. It's like saying I don't care if the police stop me while outdoors and proceed to anally probe me. Why should I care, I am not a drug mule...
I still am sitting on sidelines about email. Certainly as-is, is busted. Frankly, email needs a massive overhaul.
We need P2P email or just build upon chat type technologies.
Putting email abroad means certainly the NSA is sniffing your stuff on international fiber runs.
Theoretically, way to starve them some is to have multiple inbound servers out there that are geolocated. So mail from abroad gets received abroad. Upon receipt, all crypto on storage. Only access the actual server through multiple nested tunnels that are crypted with various encryption methods.
The whole who cares, I am boring thing just is an excuse not to care. It's like saying I don't care if the police stop me while outdoors and proceed to anally probe me. Why should I care, I am not a drug mule...
Pretty much... years ago I had a friend who dropped his gmail account saying he didn't trust them, got and paid for a hushmail account thinking it was much more private and secure, granted they were US based, but he thought being hushmail it was going to ensure his privacy being super secure. I told him even back then there had to be backdoors in it... he didn't believe me, then a year later it comes out they were working with the feds.
Kinda sucks but the only way to have more privacy today is just saying screw it and just stay under the radar along with millions of others out there. Going out of your way today looking for more privacy just seems to draw more unnecessary attention to yourself.
And I agree, its the apathetic who have been gobbling up all the patriotic bullshit that got us into this mess in the first place.
bitmessage (bitmessage.org) looks interesting, and I've been wondering if vps hosts are likely to permit it. bitmessage.ch is bitmessage running on a server.
Certainly all SMTP traffic should be encrypted if possible. The trouble is spam has pretty much killed email unless you're a huge operation with 24/7 staffing, and filtering running on all the traffic. So that centralizes it to places like gmail. Remember it's not just your own server that has to be secure--the other person's does too, and most aren't.
Certainly all SMTP traffic should be encrypted if possible. The trouble is spam has pretty much killed email unless you're a huge operation with 24/7 staffing, and filtering running on all the traffic. So that centralizes it to places like gmail. Remember it's not just your own server that has to be secure--the other person's does too, and most aren't.
We host our own. Zimbra.
nunim
VPS Junkie
I feel it's too difficult/too much of a hassle to host an SMTP server these days. With all the SBL, RBL, IP reputation lists, etc.. provider lists, it's almost impossible to keep all email going where it should. A lot of time it's the customers fault for their mail being rejected but I have seen large IP ranges listed on reputation lists, I know that MIPSpace has a /16 of Singlehop's listed at the moment causing rejects to any mailserver using BarracudaNetworks Firewall.
If you're hosting SMTP on your own VPS, chances are your IP is not in any reputation lists and if you're not sending too much mail, it can take quite a long time to build up a decent Rep. and ensure proper delivery to places like Outlook.com. If you want to run your own inbound it's no problem but I feel it's better to outsource SMTP to an email provider like SendGrid etc..
Personally I run GApps. for all my mail but I'm not too concerned with the NSA, sure they can see all my data but so can Google and they're the ones more likely to use it. It works, it's free (I have an older account) and I never have to worry about my mail ending up in SPAM or being bounced back.
If you're hosting SMTP on your own VPS, chances are your IP is not in any reputation lists and if you're not sending too much mail, it can take quite a long time to build up a decent Rep. and ensure proper delivery to places like Outlook.com. If you want to run your own inbound it's no problem but I feel it's better to outsource SMTP to an email provider like SendGrid etc..
Personally I run GApps. for all my mail but I'm not too concerned with the NSA, sure they can see all my data but so can Google and they're the ones more likely to use it. It works, it's free (I have an older account) and I never have to worry about my mail ending up in SPAM or being bounced back.
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wlanboy
Content Contributer
Second that.
For a private email it is ok. But noone should under estimate the effort to run a mail server.
You can easily do so by running multiple servers. Depending on how elaborate of a setup you want to go for, it could be as simple as using a secondary store-and-forward mail server for handling emails when your primary is unreachable, all the way to replication of emails across multiple servers. Then you'd simply add additional MX records on your domain accordingly.
Not really hard to sort, but at the end of the day, it depends how much legwork you'd like to put into it.
From a stand point of mx spooling you can setup as many spoolers as you need. With VPSes so affordable now days you can spin up 2 to 3 1GB or 2GB spoolers across different providers or one provider with multiple locations.
We like to use Postfix/CentOS combo with Amavis-new/clamd/spamassasin. There is always mailscanner as well which is similar in a way.
Once that is done then simply decide if you want to have one mailbox server or a cluster. You could store your email in database and cluster it that way. The solutions are limitless, however, we'd recommend storing email in DB. Keep in mind you need to secure and tune your DB for heavy load. We recently started deploying mail solutions for clients via Postfix/MySQL.