Email Hosting
A few months ago, Carlos Fenollosa (the creator of bashblog, the script I use to generate this site) wrote about his decision to quit self-hosting his email after more than twenty years of doing so. He lays out the problems faced by individuals who self-host email and concludes:
One cannot reliably deploy independent email servers...
You cannot set up a home email server.
You cannot set it up on a VPS.
You cannot set it up on your own datacenter.
Fenollosa’s post generated significant discussion at Lobste.rs in which Fastmail’s Rob Mueller offers some very thoughtful reflections on the state of email today. Because many of the problems faced by Fenollosa are driven by the pervasiveness of spam (as Fenollosa himself recognizes) Mueller elaborates on the problem of spam. Spam is big business and driven by big money.
There’s different ways to count it, but there’s capital-B Billions lost to this shit every year. And with that comes small-country-sized amounts of resources to throw at making sure the spam gets through...
People sending spam can and do spend good money...; they’ll pay for the top-tier accounts...
That is the email environment in which we operate today.
Tags: email