I give up.

I tried left and right to try to install an email server so I could degoogle my life.

But therechnical barrier is thick and Google keeps adding more to it. Forget it. I can’t even get thru the installation process much less trying to get my shit off Google.

I figure, I don’t actually have any need for my email addresses. Just like my phone number. I never call anyone. I’m going to discourage my kids from using email at all. I’ll remind everyone I know that I don’t use email at every opportunity I get just like I remind people to not call me and that my phone number is not available.

Between spammers and Google, I just don’t need this headache in my life. My mom is much less technically savvy than the average pet. So Google will just siphon her data and when the megabits are full then you just delete the old stuff.

You don’t need it. No one will spend their life reading your emails when you’re gone or watching your videos or listening to your recordings or viewing your photos. There’s no need to worry about just deleting the pile of shit you’ve accumulated. I’m this done.

  • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
    6·
    9 hours ago

    I worked for years on a large email infrastructure for a job and for me it’s absolutely not worth it either.

    I would prefer to take a subscription on a reputable host.

    Why?

    Because even if I do everything perfectly at setup (TLS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC) that will still be precarious.

    The security of SMTP is a patchwork of protocols added on top of it and a bunch of opaque reputation systems. If anything ever goes wrong with my email my domain’s reputation would fall. And that’s the thing, once your domain reputation goes too low, you can’t fix right away and say “my bad” and recover. Your mail will be silently blocked like Spam until a few days of sending perfectly clean emails. You need time to recover.

    So mail self hosting is accepting that at any time if you make a slight mistake, your communications to other will be almost impossible for days. And again since a lot of it is reputation based you can’t fix the issue and recover immediately.

    The business I was working for had everyday scenarios like that. A client that failed to update its DKIM and didn’t notice right away. When they do their reputation on for example Cisco’s platform is super low and we filter them as spam. And then it took days for them to recover even if they fixed the DKIM just one or two days after their mistake.

    On the other hand I could take a protonmail subscription and use a domain that has so much volume and is tracked so carefully in term of reputation that I know my mails will be received and have all the necessary security done right.

    These reputation systems are inherently difficult for small volume mail domains. There is no other users ln your domain so one mistake is all it takes to start having delivery issues and most importantly silent failed deliveries that you dont know about.

    Is it possible? Yes. Is it necessary? Not really. If you can pay for a privacy respecting host…

    Hence for me it’s not worth it because there are privacy respecting providers so it’s not like I absolutely have to self host it.