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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Think about email. A lot of people use Gmail, Hotmail, or other big email providers. However, Oxford University can run its own email server for its own university community. The EFF can run their own email server for their own purposes. Google or Microsoft doesn't get to dictate to Oxford or the EFF how they run their email server; and they can't stand in the way of Oxford and the EFF sending email to one another.
It is not that simple to run your own email server anymore. Big providers like Google will treat emails from your server as spam and you will have a difficult time having the mail properly delivered. So big tech has effectively squeezed out federated email.
Set up DKIM and they'll accept your email. That's just anti-spam / anti-phishing; it's not an attempt to shut down independent email.
The big players do definitely try to shut down independent email. We don't have to let them succeed though, and the way to fight back is to host your own.
Edit: *one way to fight back.
Hmm. If what you were saying was true, then a lot of new Lemmy instance operators would be having problems with email verification.
Lemmy allows using any smtp server to send emails. Can use Googles servers, fastmails servers etc.
It's different from running your own email server. If you run your own, then Google and the others are definently not going to trust it. There are lots of blog posts about the pain of running your own email server.
There are literally no problems running your own server if you comply with anti spam measures.
Most germans are on gmx.net, and they block residential ips. So it's impossible to send them messages. So i had to abandon my efforts.
You shouldn't run email server from a residential IP address. That's one of the conditions how you comply with anti spam measures.
I’ve had hosted email from a service provider for years and never had a problem. I’m not talking anyone big here.
This is truly not meant to be snarky: It sounds like you don't know how email works.
FUD
I have self hosted my email for five years. I'm a hobbyist and it is no problem for me.
Occassionally (very rarely) an email to a new address I've never sent before will end up erroneously in a spam folder. This never happens when I send to a business. Instead of everyone throwing up their hands and saying email is way too hard now, how about we hold the big providers accountable for their obvious bullying?
Because we can't. Who are you going to complain to about it?
Don't get me wrong, would love to give them as much pain as possible over this. But I don't see how we can do anything. If I start my own email server, I'm probably going to miss important emails and end up in lots of troubleshooting things. I'm wish it wasnt so. The ideas of the original internet was amazing but capitalism can't be reasoned with.
It consumes all until there is nothing left.
some of them blacklist large blocks of ip addresses. Lawsuits can go a long way to forcing them to justify and/or stop this. EFF is working on this, so I give them money. The other thing I can do personally is write to legislators and make sure they are aware of the issue. It's not yerribly satisfying, but I hope it helps.
In the meantime, I will not be deterred from self hosting. F*@k google.
If anything anyone could also just pick a mail routing server, pay like $50 a year and have as many emails for as many domains as they want. I got one, I have like 8 domains pointed to it for emails. All I had to do was fill in the blanks for the DNS page for the domain (mx, and the spf+dkim) and all emails I send go to inbox like butter. Unlimited email accounts, takes 15 seconds to make, no phone no name no nothing just email+pass and it exists now.
gmail was nice for a bit, but shit man I don't want to give my life story and phone number every time I want to make an email address.
Keep up the good fight. I'm grateful you are trying. And fuck Google.
Why do big companies always mark you as spam, and why is it always Hotmail?
My experience is that I have to remove myself from spamhouse once every couple of months, because Hotmail decided that my 5 emails to different accounts was spam. TBF, it's better than silently failing which is annoying as hell.
The problem with email is the same is always been: antiquated software.
The email protocol was never designed for an internet with bad actors and bots. It's from the early hopeful days. We absolutely need a better email system - however, it's simple use, the fact anyone can run one, it's simplicity, is what made it so useful.
The difference with Lemmy(et. al.) Is that the protocol is designed in the modern age, and isn't required to also keep up with bad actors for legacy reasons. If Meta decide to join and fill it full of bad actors, Lemmy has a choice email never had. Lemmy can choose to add verification, peer-conversation, trust keys.
It however still has the same basic problem: to be useful for everyone, it has to work with everyone. The discussions and decisions about how that happen are not just technological, but also moral and ideal-based.
Meta, then, in this context, is the first spam email server. How Lemmy/the community/etc respond will be the challenge.
There's nothing wrong with email. It is essential for all business transacted online. It's still, by far, the most useful federated software. All that the "bad actors" can do is send messages that the receiver didn't want, and that's trivial to stop.
That's absolutely not true. I run my own email server with multiple domains and multiple accounts and it's no where close to a difficult IT task.
If anything it's the ISPs that will hassle you for outbound SMTP. There are ways around that but generally blocked by default
You're talking about something completely unrelated to security then. If you want to run services out of your home then you need to buy a business level connection. Or find a VPS service.
None of this will cause you problems with the big names in email as long as you follow the spam procedures.
I was actually agreeing with you, in that running a private mail server is not a difficult endeavor as long as you take those things into account. Most VPS and CSP will block SMTP by default (just recently went through this with AWS, had to specifically request the service) since most everyone doesn't have a clue how to secure mail relays and stay off blacklists.
Google, Live, AOL, Yahoo etc might hassle you for DKIM or SPF, but in my experience the ISP is the first hurdle.
Ah i see. Yeah i went through that process with AWS too. It sucks but it's not a horrible process.
To be fair, the example OP used was that two independent email servers could still send mail to eachother even if they can't send mail to gmail. I do feel like social networking has a little bit of an advantage over email there, because email, to be useful, needs to be able to talk to almost anyone you might need to send an email to, those specific users. If a few big instances defederate small instances in that scenario, you basically have to use the big instances because you will most likely need to talk to specific users who are on those big instances at some point. However, in a social network, you want to be able to talk to enough people to have discussions and content, but it doesn't matter as much if you can talk to any specific user or specific account, so it's much more viable to have a smaller network of independent instances that still functions if cut off from the big ones, as long as they can collectively retain enough users to be interesting.
And this is what people are afraid of with meta joining Mastadon.
Great example. Fedverse sounds like a space that corporations would have no interest in as there is no opportunity to create a monopoly.
That doesn’t really follow. Google doesn’t need to be able to create a monopoly over email to benefit from running Gmail, for example; consumer Gmail is basically a loss-leader for Google Workspaces, the money-making arm of Google Apps.
The only viable way to control the Fediverse is an embrace, extend, and extinguish approach.
Anything less and you become a Fediverse backwater instead of a monopoly.
This sounds exactly like how they would think! Especially the reach critical mass and defederate from everyone else.
they did: see xmpp
What a great read. Thanks for linking that article - I had no idea about most of that stuff.
This is what many expect is the goal of Meta’s forthcoming Thread.
And harvesting data of course.
Could you describe in detail what you're saying here?
Well they hoard data by hosting your emails? They surely feed all that stuff into their AI:s.
Don't quote me on this, because I might be wrong, but I believe consumer Gmail is also used to build their personalized ad model for you, so they can show you ads you're more likely to click on?
I believe they used to target ads based on email content, but they currently state that they don't.