• archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m curious about this too.

    A lot of self-hosted FOSS people draw the line at hosting their own mail servers. Even if Mozilla created a new domain hosting server for handling, the big three could still reject the traffic like they do for people hosting outside the three now, under the guise of spam filtering.

    I’d be ecstatic if they did something here, but I’m not really clear on what a solution would look like. On top of them spreading thin as you mentioned

    *edited ‘domain’ service to ‘hosting’ service

    • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I have my own domain (even if hosted on a relatively small provider) and I don’t have that much of an issue tbh?

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        I edited the comment, I really meant hosting server, not domain.

        Having a custom domain isn’t a big deal, it’s really where that domain is hosted that creates forwarding issues. Since the majority of email is handled by the ‘big three’, anything that’s hosted outside of that is often flagged as spam or is refused to be delivered. That’s allegedly because there are malicious senders also hosted on third party servers (and fair enough, there likely are), but this causes a bit of a potential monopoly that could easily be abused, and there’s obvious motivation to push people into a particular service for data collection.

        Even if it doesn’t happen often, occasional failures can be a huge problem if you’re sending critical communication and it isn’t reaching target inboxes because of filtering. It’s enough of a headache that even most avid self-hosters tend to avoid it.

        • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          That is absolutely unreasonable, as the email files don’t actually tell you who the sender is beyond the domain from where it’s sent. The email protocol is SUPER unsafe and really really easy to spoof as someone from the big three

          • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            My understanding is that it’s a combination of correctly deploying authentication (DMARC, DKIM, and SPF) and the actual IP address of the server that can get you into trouble. If you incorrectly set up authentication, OR if a malicious sender spoofs you (likely because you didn’t set up auth correctly), it can get your IP blocklisted. And unless you’re monitoring if you’re blocklisted, you often don’t know that things aren’t getting delivered until someone tells you.

            And then you’re still kind of at the whim of the big players, because they could change or update their authentication standards, and if you’re not on top of it you can find yourself in the same boat, even if you’re doing everything else right.

            It’s not impossible, it’s just a headache. But if i’m being honest, i’m a bit of a novice so it could be easier to a more trained network administrator.