
Life After Gmail: Why I Opted for a Private Email Server - janvdberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-06/you-should-use-a-private-email-server-google-makes-it-hard
======
pfundstein
I can see a lot of what we call "cloud services" today being privatized in the
future. Owning your data is catching on, and it's never been easier to host
your own:

* cloud storage/calendar/contacts sync with the likes of Nextcloud,

* email server and webmail client with the likes of Mailpile,

* group/instant messaging with the likes of Mattermost,

etc.

[https://privacytools.io](https://privacytools.io) is a good place to get
started, albeit slightly more paranoid than most of us.

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CogitoCogito
[I noticed this became increasingly off-topic as I wrote it...but I guess I'll
post it anyway]

One thing that's a bit unfortunate to me is that domains don't practically
seem to have much "resolution" compared to home addresses. Of course there is
a whole hierarchy with countries, states, and even cities, but at end of the
day many people like me simply have a domain [firstname][lastname].com. But
where does that leave all of the other Firstname Lastnames out there? And then
when I actually setup email addresses I can throw in all these different users
(which I do...e.g. ml@ for mailing lists and todo@ for a todo dump), but they
are all pointing at me in the end. Publicly I basically only have one email
address that others use even though i could have *@domain.

I'm honestly not even that clear on exactly what the problem here is. It seems
that basically the point is that a domain originally was meant to map to an
larger organization probably with an administrator, whereas if you want to use
it privately you basically need to treat yourself as that one person
organization. Something feels a bit off, but I don't know quite what it is...

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bob457
I always see people say how great gmail search is, as does the author in this
article.

This befuddles me.

Gmail search often leaves out results I know are there, and sometimes comes up
erroneously empty. I can verify this, because I store my emails offline. They
are indexed by notmuch. I find notmuch to be not only faster than gmail
search, but far more thorough: notmuch gives me hits that gmail skips.

~~~
partomniscient
My guess they got so many performance gains by conceding a bit of data
integrity or search accuracy or replication accuracy or something. Not sure
whether it was accidental or on purpose but it seems a persistent behaviour.

Running the same very low result count returning search queries in other parts
of googles data sprawl sometimes returns different sized outputs. There's more
than one reason they stopped telling you how many search results there were,
my guess is consistent inconsistencies is another.

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HissingMachine
The cost of free is becoming too high. In this particular case the cost of
free was higher than approximately $500 and $99 per year.

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yrro
What are fellow self-hosted email folks doing about spam these days? I've
found that Spamassassin is letting through more and more these days...

~~~
avian
I'm using a custom procmail setup build over the years around Bogofilter [1].
I find it still works well, even though Bogofilter is more or less
unmaintained at this point. I'm only aware of one serious bug in the upstream
distribution [2], but a patch for that exists.

The running yearly average false negative rate for me is currently 6.5%, which
isn't perfect but it's survivable. It's hard to say what false positive rate
is, but over the years I can't remember an instance where I would go fishing
in the spam folder for a mail I knew I should receive (I do have
classification settings very much biased towards false-negative rather than
false-positive)

[1] [http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net](http://bogofilter.sourceforge.net)

[2] [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=733622](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=733622)

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banku_brougham
I just want to say thank you to comments on this thread, this type of
discussion is why i browse HN.

Q: I want to manage my own email, what about people’s solutions can ensure
that outgoing mail is not shunned by the big players?

~~~
tomatocracy
Many spam traps penalise recently registered domains. Wait 90+ days after
registering a domain before you start using as your primary sending email,
and(as others have said) ensure you have SPF and DKIM set up and working.

Also ensure your sending IP addresses are not in known 'residential' blocks
(ie you'll need a VPS at least to use the IP address) and not blacklisted by
previous owners.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/5IhNb](http://archive.is/5IhNb)

