Recently, I’ve been learning more about this subject. Today I came across the Decentralization Scoring System and it slapped me across the face.
Recently, I’ve been learning more about this subject. Today I came across the Decentralization Scoring System and it slapped me across the face.
Is it really self-hosting if someone else controls the data and software?
I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.
Spam protection is hard given SMTP was never designed with it in mind.
I also self-host my email, but I use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with all that stuff. My server sends outbound emails to a company that’s got that all figured out.
Maybe that’s not “true” self hosting, but it’s really no different to people that self-host but put Cloudflare in front of their server, apart from the direction (Cloudflare is for inbound traffic whereas SMTP relaying is for outbound traffic).