Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the ’70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day.
Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension.
↫ Saurabh “Sam” Khawase
The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isn’t helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and that’s it. Running your own mail sever isn’t only a complex endeavour, it’s also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you don’t end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving.
I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but it’s such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.
I pay $10 a month for a mail server host. I can add up to about 300 aliases. If I ever get spam on one of them, I just destroy it and create a new one.
Still, about the only thing I use email for these days is to receive electronic bills and such.
First of all, I am really happy the email still works. Sure it has limitations and complexity, but when I try to figure out alternatives I just see the landscape horrible.
The last few years a lot of ‘independent’ providers are producing email options that work very good, at least to me. Self-hosting is a real drama, but being far from large gatekeepers is not complicate.
To be honest, I am much more concerned about about Whatsapp everywhere for everything.
I’ve been with Fastmail for probably two decades now and they have been fantastic. I feel like email is one of the few means of communication that works everywhere and is not completely under control of a single corporation. I completely depend on it, and it is my primary means of (important) online communication. I can do without Whatsapp and the likes, but I would feel crippled without email.
I’ve been successfully running my own email server for years. Once you get it up, it works fine. But you just can’t afford any mistake, otherwise you will get a blackmailed IP. You can practice at your-favourite-cloud-provider.
1. Spin up a VM or so. Check the reputation of the IP address.
2. If the IP address is OK, make sure DNS is set correctly. Reverse is mandatory. Set up throttling. I don’t let any domain send more than 10-15 messages per hour.
3. Configure everything step-by-step, patiently. Michael W Lucas’ book is an excellent resource, but I managed to set it on my own before, with mailcow.
Both my home providers in Europe (one is a local provider, the other one is O2) offer fixed IPv4 and a fixed block of IPv6 with reverse DNS for 10 EUR per month, so I get redundancy. Start slowly. Create a mailbox for yourself, mail your previous email. If you did everything correctly and your IP has a good reputation, you will most probably not land in spam. If you do, mark as not spam. Let it settle, move your services one by one to your new email in your new server and start mailing out from it.
Now I host my email, email for a few friends and even rent out capacity for 2 eshops of people I know. Email is robust. If you lose power, the sender server will retry reaching you a few times and notify the sending user if message delivery failed. Anyone sending from your server will not manage to connect and the message will sit quietly in the outbox until your server is back online.
Moving out is also easy. I had to put my home lab off for a couple of days, no problem. Spin up a quick VM in the cLoUd, find an IP of good reputation, stop your server, move everything your new VM, repoint DNS, let it settle and start the service again.
So Thom, if you feel like scratching the itch, take the chance and spread the word. We can fight this fight. Now I got email, nextcloud for myself and my friends – we all put some money in for storage and we have a mirror across the ocean with backups. We share our photos there, stay in touch via email. For quick calls, I use Signal, but most of my written communication with my closest friends doesn’t even leave my server. It’s my email, Signal or nothing. And guess what? All my friends and relatives chose to stay in touch with me and swallow the inconvenience.
The first server I put up I was 15. NT4, PPTP, simple FTP, 256/128 DSL and no-ip for DNS. My mom hated the box at the corner of the living room but here I am, almost 40, still hosting my own file servers and more (Windows-free nowadays).
Everyone with the technical skills and the budget has the moral duty of taking back control of at least one aspect of their digital lives, in my opinion.
I posted another comment in a similar vein as yours, but it’s awaiting moderation.
I’ve always liked the idea of technology evolving more decentralized, with P2P and federation such that everyone can run their own hardware if they choose. We could have user-friendly turnkey devices to run daemons for messaging/voip/email/files/multimedia/backups/etc. And these services could be integrated with desktop/laptops/tablets/etc so that they are easy for users to setup and use.
While I believe this is technologically doable, unfortunately for people like us the tech giants who are in the best position to make end to end services a widespread reality for average users aren’t interested in doing so. They would have us all tethered to centralized services they control with data collection, ads, subscriptions, etc. Solutions that liberate us from their grasp are dead to them. 🙁
This is good to read. I self-hosted my email back in the late 90s but jumped off in about 2005 because Spam and blacklisting became more than I could easily handle. Nice to see that it’s still possible.