Does it or is this part of the push to keep people from hosting their own email services? I've self-hosted email for about 35 years now and see no reason to stop, it hardly ever needs maintenance and my mail tends to arrive even at hostile destinations (Micros..., Ggl, ...). Don't listen to those who fight against decentralisation, their agenda does not match yours.
Especially someone who stands to gain if they only need to get cozy with two email providers to deliver their spam.
(Blog author) runs the email infrastructure measurement project at Live Direct Marketing
Google offers "mail merge in Gmail to send personalized email campaigns, newsletters, and announcements to a wide audience." [1]
Based on how much @gmail.com spam I used get within GMail I can only assume they treat mail from their internal accounts much more favourably then us dirty self hosters.
Thank you for this perspective. I've been hosting my own email for about 25 years and have never had significant problems delivering to any of the large providers. A couple of months ago I migrated from one VPS host to another. I'd been putting this off for a long time, in part because of what I've read on HN about how difficult it is to self-host your mail. I finally took the plunge a couple of months ago, expecting to find the new provider's IP space unusable & having to relay via the old MTA/start relaying via a commercial MTA; but to my surprise, it's been completely smooth sailing! Maybe I've just been lucky with the nature of my setup: a small number of mailboxes and domains used for personal/small business use. Certainly if I was sending bulk mail or significant amounts of transactional mail then I'd use someone else's service.
I've been self hosting for ~15 years and maybe have deliverability problems once every 3-4 years at most. Just had one this morning, in fact. Once in a blue moon I end up on one of the very aggressive spam blocklists (this time Spamhaus) and it's usually just a matter of following their delisting process.
Can you formulate that question more precisely if this doesn't answer you?
* I am still using the same domains that I've always hosted mail for
* Since I am sending from new IP addresses, but want to retain the ability to send from the old MTA until it is decomissioned, the new MTA uses a different HELO identifier, and the dependencies for that are all in place (forward and reverse DNS addresses and updated SPF records)
* The new DNS records are still in the same administrative domain as the old ones
I follow the standards processes, and while I don't see a push to against self-hosting mail, I do see a push to stop storing cleartext passwords. Which is typically what your MUA uses to access those self-hosted mail servers.
I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.
I really wish there was an HN guideline that I could point to which says that you shouldn't complain about LLM writing, in the same way that's there's guidance on site annoyances:
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!
Why do you give up so easily? Human culture and the already low quality bar of writing should be allowed to fall even further because you are annoyed by those that want to protect it?
Why should your opinion be worth more than those who would like to retain a semblance of meaning in what we use to convey ideas? LLM writing is sheer trash. It comes off like a coke-addled car salesman who is making a pitch to VCs about his latest scientific discovery that will 200x their investment.
Poorly written LLM content is NOT a tangential annoyance. If this is too much, maybe you should simulate HN using
Comments are for humans but I don't think there is any reason for HN to police the submissions as a policy. If any article lacks credibility or merit to the extent that one can't even finish reading it then just ignore it and move on. Vote for something else. If "LLM aversion" is your rationale, so be it.
Personally, I usually check the comments before deciding to read something so I appreciate that others have saved me the trouble of reading this article in particular. If the author doesn't care enough to use human time to write it then I am not going to use human time to read it.
This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.
LLM-generated content is not allowed in HN comments, but it doesn't mention submitting links to LLM-generated content. This is the only mention in the guidelines: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."
I LOVE reading LLM content. I find that they tend to present things in a way that keeps my attention - something I have struggled with my whole life. I also use LLMs to assist with managing my own thoughts and helping make things coherent overall.
Sure, there is a LOT of slop out there, but the promotion of quality content is what crowd-sourced curation like HN tends towards. Much of the LLM assisted content here has a high signal to noise ratio, and is clearly a lot more involved than simply prompting "write an article on X" - despite what the haters say.
If the "author" didn't feel like taking the time to write the text why should I take the time to read it? LLMs are great for summarizing, if you are going to slop 100% of a document make it a summary and save us all the time.
I have people writing emails to me with an LLM now. We've gone from meetings where "this could have been an email" to emails where "this could have been a few carefully chosen words, not a rambling diatribe which would test the most hardcore Tolstoy fan".
Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up.
LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.
The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it. I too can just prompt “What’s the rate of self hosted email?”. If an article is signaling that its value is zero, then everyone should just move on as it’s not providing anything to anyone. Effort is the economies main signal of value, good boots that last cost more in the classic example. The only time it’s not zero is when there’s a shared understanding between those consuming the output - a company wanting your llm code, friends making funny images for an inside joke to share, etc. And some people grouped may be specifically interested in AI output - people sharing music on Suno. But in my experience no one cares about your AI generated song, image, article, app if it appears to just be my own prompt away from me having it too. Give a significant other an AI image printed out for an anniversary gift - see how excited they are about it. Versus getting an artist or photographer to do the same. As Claude might say, it’s not laziness, it’s effort.
> The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it.
I think if this post had not gone the AI-generated-text-route, some people here would easily have considered it interesting for its content, even if it was entirely AI generated.
That’s the worst part if they had just spent 10 minutes editing it it would’ve been fine but either they couldn’t even put in 10 minutes of effort into the article (bad) or they can’t tell that it’s written obviously like an LLM (also bad). Neither outcome makes me want to read the article more.
And soon, I'll be lazy and use an LLM to do the reading for me. Eventually the LLMs will train on the state of the world and decide to be lazy also, and the "writer's" LLM prompt will just be shared with the "reader": nobody actually needed all those words anyway! Maybe someday we'll get rid of the links on HN and we can just share and consume headlines.
When you start digging in you realize that (like most things) there are multiple different definitions. LLMs are very good at putting together a lot of words that are spell correctly with grammatically correct sentences (better than me - though I'm particularly bad at this). However people often want to add other things like "correct" (the facts are right...), or some notion of not using too many words. LLMs tend to not be as good at those.
The ability for people to communicate is paramount. Without the ability to communicate there is no progress. We might as well be deaf, dumb and perhaps blind.
Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants.
Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.
> Dictionary-based classification has a ceiling, and I want to be honest about where it is.
I stopped here, anytime an author (or likely AI) feels the need to tell me they're being honest or "genuine" I don't need to read any further.
I'll assume honesty but the minute you explicitly tell me, you've probably got an angle that I'm too dumb to see, but I'm not dumb enough to keep reading.
To me, what makes it hateful is that it is EVERYWHERE. Reddit is full of it, LinkedIn is full of it, the web is full of it. Shit, even Facebook has it now.
It's kind of sad. I compare it to when Memes started becoming popular as communication tools on the internet (mid 2000s from what i recall): Instead of writing text to convey the idea they wanted, people just pasted a meme (my face when ... whatever).
Now with AI, everyone write everything in the same way.
The need is that writing is expensive. An LLM is around a hundred times cheaper than a human, so this kind of article that doesn't provide tons of value just makes sense to write with an LLM.
That's the thing, good writing is expensive, massively so, much more than people think.
Letting the machine do the writing however shows us that many people have no idea why writing is expensive, nor do they respect that perhaps it needs to be expensive. Communication is incredibly hard, very few master it. I'd even go so far as to say that clear, precise and readable communication is so hard that we do not have sufficient training data to build an LLM that can do it.
Letting a person write article, like this one, doesn't necessarily improve the quality, but it does show us that some thought and effort have at least been put into it. There was a cost and you deemed that cost worth it for conveying your message. Without the cost there's nothing stopping you from wasting peoples time.
That might apply to some things, but there is little to no value in this article, so the economics are the same as the spam - cheap to spew garbage while providing no value and wasting the readers time. It's not something that should be encouraged. RIPE should know better.
There is the headline. In the typical case someone can write a comment (sometimes off the headline, sometimes have read the article) and it quickly becomes obvious that person is more knowledgeable that whoever wrote the article in the first place. Thus in many cases reading the comments is more valuable than the article.
I wish there were a way to self-host without my emails constantly getting stuck in other people's spam folders. And it made me really paranoid about email, too -- like I'd send emails, and I'd never know if the other end received them or not, unless they replied. Without a reply, I would always wonder whether the message got a look, or disappeared without a trace.
The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?
Ran into this issue when self-hosting, so I just bumped my existing ProtonMail subscription to a business one which allows for mail forwarding. It's quite easy to set up and I've been pretty happy about deliverability for a year+ now
It feels like the only way to stop this happening reliably, is to get as many people as possible off Google and Microsoft.
I'd argue that self-hosting is the first step. The second step is helping everyone you know get their own domain and host their email for them. If they don't trust you to not read their email on your server, point them to somebody else who offers mail hosting.
The more people we can convince the internet is something anyone can help build outside of the silos, the more likely it is to survive.
I ended up switching to Fastmail a few years ago, but before that I was relaying outgoing email through Amazon SES. It fixed all my deliverability problems. Before that, when sending from my own server, emails might just not show up. Not in recipient's spam folder, not rejected by their server. Accepted and then dropped mysteriously.
If I ever go back to self-hosting email, I would do the same except I would maintain a whitelist of friendly mail servers to which I would send directly. Or maybe just relay emails to Google/Microsoft via SES and send the rest directly.
I haven’t had this issue. It might be due to the long-standing reputation of my email domain(s) or of the mail server’s IP address, I don’t know. But I know other self-hosters who don’t have that issue either.
Have you tried requesting it? As a former developer there, I would expect you to get a response of “sorry, we didn’t know about that because none of us use it and no one has requested it before, fix incoming” or “yeah, unfortunately in our current architecture it’s not possible to do this because of [some specific reason]”.
It happens on zoho. I ran my business email on zoho. Multiple instances where people on Gmail had my messages go to spam. I have the same issue with proton mail.
If someone can solve the spam problem in email without just manually whitelisting specific providers that heavily monitor their users, then they can completely reverse the direction of this problem. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely someone could do that.
That would work if most spam wasn't from the cartel. I receive single digit percentage of "spam" from randoms, 95%+ is from Gmail/Google, o365 or mailgun/whatever. Not one of them can either filter their users or actually action abuse reports.
I enforce strict spec and behaviour compliance, as well as policies (SPF, dkim, etc). Aside from a very small number of well known spam/abuse sources, it's largely from legitimate mail accounts on Gmail/outlook etc. or idiot msps.
I wish that was true for all cases. My uni email is 99.9% spam and everything comes from official accounts sending irrelevant stuff to everyone and their grandma
I set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, not on any public blacklists (confirmed through https://multirbl.valli.org/), whitelisted by DNSWL.org at medium trust level, never sent any bulk email, and I had constant deliverability issues with Outlook and Gmail. Both of our experiences might be true, but yours does not invalidate mine. Simply setting up SPF and DKIM is not sufficient to ensure deliverability.
I had both setup previously and constantly ended up in my recipients spam. When I'm trying to sort my life admin with local council/government/landlord/utilities, it's one thing to have a 'cool' custom email, but it's another to say "oh yeah, sorry, it's probably in your spam".
Haven't had an issue since I moved to 365. Costs a little more but so much less hassle. I don't like it but I also need people to actually receive my emails.
I agree Spam is the hardest. Setting up a mailserver is pretty easy today, e.g. with NixOS-simple-mailserver you can do it with a few lines and a few minutes of config in your DNS provider, and maintenance is minimal.
But I self-host email for ~20 years, and I have not managed to get rid of Spam without not also getting false positives.
I first used SpamAssistant, in later years Rspamd, but I feel like they are just not good enough. Also I find Rspamd config pretty incomprehensible.
Hosted email like also does not solve this, e.g. GMail filters way much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam, so I had to turn off the spam filter entirely).
A combination of DNSRBL, SpamAssassin, and using different localparts for each service is working very well for me. Some spam is still getting through, but not enough to feel (heh) spammed, and amazingly I haven’t had any false positives from SpamAssassin in years.
Email can't really change much. The protocol is too old.
It would be better if we came up with new protocols that solve the email messaging problems and then gradually wean ourselves off email rather than trying to "fix" email.
In a sense this is already happening although instead of migrating to open protocols which solve the email problems we're migrating a lot of messaging to walled gardens which solve the problems (e.g. WhatsApp).
I guess that was google wave and yea it was a horrorshow.
I had hoped that something useful would come out of blockchain technology that would allow for a better messaging protocol that was spam resistant, e2e encrypted and decentralized by design but I didnt see anything.
>Email can't really change much. The protocol is too old. It would be better if we came up with new protocols that solve the email messaging problems and then gradually wean ourselves off email rather than trying to "fix" email.
It's not in the current providers' interest to help people avoid the current providers' advertisement or avoid paying the providers to host the customers' email.
You mean filtering? That could get extremely expensive computationally, though. Tools like Rspamd support LLM-based filtering, but traditional Bayesian filtering is vastly cheaper and more computationally efficient. Hm, maybe LLMs can be used as an additional signal for ambiguous messages rather than as the primary filter.
If you are thinking using AI to classify messages, the scale of email spam is so massive that using conventional techniques won't work. It won't make sense energetically speaking IMO.
I think techniques like HashCash by Adam Back should be revisited.
The biggest problem with email spam-wise is that it lacks any sort of user/mailbox authentication. The only useful signal in the meta-data is the origin domain. The protocol assumes the domain owner does some form of access-control and every message coming from the domain is equally trusted. If one has been communicating with alice@foobarizer.com and receives an appendage enlargement ad from bob@foobarizer.com they could be reasonably confident that Bob's account was compromised and communicate that out to Potmaster and Alice to be handled internally.
Of course this assumption is fully invalidated by open-access mail service providers: maintaining communication with xXx_kitty_slayer_xXx@tepidmail.com tells absolutely nothing about sincerity and authenticity of messages from DrJohnSmith@tepidmail.com. Not only there's roughly zero correlation, it could be argued that correlation is slightly negative if one does not expect out-of-the-blue contact attempts. Funnily enough, with the critical mass of non-spam migrating to providers, it becomes sort of positive signal, fueling feedback loop: even if the majority of spam came from gmail, messages from gmail would still be more likely to be non-spam than messages from rncrosoft.com, because most non-spam comes from there too.
On top of that, there's a lot of soft-spam. Companies will happily send out critical contract-related information and unwanted-unasked advertising from the very same domain and even the same address. The big providers are not shying away from selling shielding services to spam agencies.
That "someone" could - in theory - require pgpgpg signatures attached to messages and have origin-based filtering/ranking, but good luck convincing people to set up their gmail/outlook to even generate the signature, let alone publish it reliably/revocably. At the receiver end, your only reasonable bet is filtering/ranking the content. It's probably not a strictly uphill battle, but you definitely need significant amount of volume and tagging before your models become good enough and it stops to the case.
In reality, even if it sounds a bit ironic given above, the best route to fixing this is self hosting, especially in the cases where your messages are needed. The more people try to send mail from their self-hosted instances and insisted that it was the problem of the other end to complain to their service providers if they do not receive the messages, the less hegemony the cartel providers would have. And maybe we could have some sort of client auth for email.
> DMARC: adopted everywhere, enforced nowhere in particular
Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be)
I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress.
I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.
I've been running my own email server with exim and dovecot for 20ish years, I like the freedom it gives me but I have to say it's a significant investment. Not so much keeping things up to date but instead making sure that my emails are actually delivered. I've eventually switched to using fastmail just for sending emails and even with that, I don't get perfect delivery.
Last year I started self hosting my email. I found that once you setup the “usual suspects” (DMARC, DKIM, SPF…) outgoing mail works without issues. In fact it works now better than the (small) provider I was using before.
And setting them up properly is not even that difficult nowadays
Whenever HN discusses self-hosting email, half the people with self-hosting experience say they never had any issues and the other half says they had so many issues they had to give it up.
I self-hosted for years and I did all the standard things you're supposed to do, but I had tremendous problems with Gmail and Outlook. Other providers usually went through without issue.
I guess there is a certain amount of luck in this, probably related to the provider, or the range that your IP reside into. (I guess google and microsoft keep their own blacklists, regardless of what public blacklists say). I wonder if the best course of action in that case is to just spin up a new server on a different provider and try again.
FWIW, in my case, I am running the server on Hetzner, even though is supposed to have a bad reputation, but I have been using its IP for more than 10 years for other things (web server, personal services etc) so I guess that helps
Hard to tell. My server's IP was not on any public blacklists (confirmed by https://multirbl.valli.org/) and it was whitelisted on DNSWL.org at medium trust level.
I've been using GMail roughly since it existed I think, and have thought on and off over the years about self-hosting. The notion scares me every time because with it comes thoughts of what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server, or even if there was an outage at the "wrong time". And then there's also the idea of updating the 1 million+1 services, etc that I used it to sign up for. As much as I'm not a fan of a decent amount of what they've been doing, they're however a stable entity which offers a very reliable service for essentially free. Very likely that many others also think along those lines.
The only thing I think can compete with that is some kind of decentralized solution, also something I've thought about a bit. Like a Keyoxide-based[0] - or similar - setup that makes it virtually impossible for one to lose their online identity (since lost keys can be rotated out once one has - access to - enough proofs), and then that identity can be used - without fear - to route associated data, etc. Of course adoption of what could become an adjacent or new standard would be the next hurdle to overcome...
True, something else I've considered. But the reported incidents are few and far between, and the stories always have some trigger. I have been taking small steps to move away, though it's yet another service where "stuff" could happen: since DuckDuckGo introduced their proxy email service I got one and have been using it for my more recent sign-ups. So if something does happen to the GMail or I hit some switch-over threshold, I can point it elsewhere, though everything before would be lost.
If Google bans you they at least will not hand out your email address to someone else. If your domain expires and someone else registers it that’s essentially what’s going to happen.
And on the other side, projects like stalwart email ( http://stalw.art/ ) and mox ( http://xmox.nl/ ) makes it so much easier to build an e-mailsystem on your server.
20 years of running the classic postfix + dovecot stack for about 10 business domains. I’ve recently been testing out stalwart, with just one company domain, which is nice but seems quite fragile, 4 times now it’s killed itself doing some self updates. If it wasn’t for Claude assistance I probably would have given up on it by now. It is quite feature rich though, but its spam detection is not great, too much ham flagged as spam, not enough spam flagged as spam. 2FA is a nice bonus but for some unknown reason it breaks itself every few weeks and I gotta turn it back off again. If I could get stalwart stable I would migrate all my domains to it.
The hardest thing in setting up your emails server is to keep your messages out of spam folders. Even if you are completely legit company that sends out ONLY human-written personal emails, you will get tagged as spam first.
I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders.
Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.
Mail self hosting is not an easy process to maintain.. If you do manage to get whitelisted you need to ensure you're on top of maintaining it, let alone some larger provider like Google just deciding they don't like you. I do empathise with wanting to self host, I just always found the cost of effort to do so really didn't offer enough benefits versus a good provider like proton for example. It sucks but maybe a fight that's too far gone to win.
It’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure.
However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.
And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.
I’ve probably spent less than 10 hours over the last 5 or 6 years on maintenance.
> However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.
>And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.
This is what keeps me away from self-hosting it, though. As long as there's some possibility that my ability to deliver email could get nuked, all because someone else made a mistake, it's not worth it to me, especially since using / sending email is mandatory for doing most things. I guess I'm just not really willing to take that sort of risk
Like many others, I gave up on self hosting email when I realized Gmail and Outlook would always mark me as spam, if I even got delivered. DMARC and DKIM did nothing, I think the datacenter IP was just blacklisted. Ostensibly there are ways to get it unblacklisted but man what a pain the ass for the whole process.
The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.
> They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.
And that’s not hard?
Running a modern mail server, a spam filter, a self-hosted webmail, and learning just enough about DNS and networking to get mail through: this is what’s not that hard.
Figuring out how to stay whitelisted, or accept ending up in people’s filters, asking them to whitelist you while your public IP gradually gains trust, is a job.
That's pretty much what I mean. Implementing the authenticity measures is very easy, making sure the e-mails get delivered to peoples inboxes without getting marked as spam is hard.
I just wish these big parties would give you a more formal way to make clear you're not a spammer.
On the other hand, I'm working on a prototype to completely throw away conventional email. Creating a system where you can simply spin your own physical mail box and node, and reach others at their unique address.
Nothing will ever ruin email. A private email server, or a federation of mutually-whitelisting ones, is the ultimate social media, and not at all a bad personal information management system too.
My self-hosted email filters too little spam, while GMail etc filter too much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam).
Does GMail silently filter spam now? I get maybe 5 new messages in my spam folder per month for the past couple of years and I'm not sure if Google is just dropping the most blatant spam or if my primary address is somehow not on any lists.
This is the counter example to "protocols and interop solve enshittification". No, they don't. Email is the model protocol: perfectly interoperable, perfectly decentralizable. And yet it is centralizing in the hands of a few organizations who then wield enough market power to bend everyone else to their will. It's still enshittifying. If email hasn't resisted enshittification, then interoperable protocols are not the solution for it. And yet, pretty much all of the pro-social, anti-enshittification effort in tech is being directed into protocols and interop.
I switched to M365 as my provider a few years back as my emails kept being flagged as spam.
I've done it for decades, but I don't know much beyond the basics of email hosting tbh, however my understanding is that these days email coming from self-hosted servers carries a much higher spam/junk risk and so often automatically marked as spam.
Maybe there are ways to avoid this happening, but when a few clients all reported that they were not receiving my emails I didn't have much of a choice but to switch.
I self-hosted for a while in the early 2000s. It was a hassle. My box got hacked -- I'm sure I missed a security update or something -- and while I didn't lose any data because of my obsessive backup paranoia, it was enough of a Thing that I just punted.
I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).
Hosting my own server with mailinabox. low traffic, but keeping their random subscriptions, newsletters and occasional single purpose address. Haven't had any issues so far.
I run my own mail server, and I am very concerned about its reputation and deliverability. I've run my own Linux server full time since at least 2017, obviously well before LLM's, but only recently put up a mail server. I don't usually run any agents on the server, such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, or Grok Build, all of which I have subscriptions for but don't run on this server. Instead, I manually administer the server using ssh, while getting interactive help from ChatGPT in a chat window.
It was complicated to get security, DNSSEC, DKIM, DMARC right this way. I did it just under a year ago, around September 15, 2025.
I tried to follow and understand what I was doing, and keep good records on it. It was a complicated process, but everything was up and working at the end and I received email my server sent me. It felt good to be able use this simple script to send myself email:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import smtplib
from email.message import EmailMessage
msg = EmailMessage()
msg["From"] = "(user's from address)"
msg["To"] = "(my gmail address)"
msg["Subject"] = "(a test subject)"
msg.set_content("(a test body)")
with smtplib.SMTP("127.0.0.1", 25, timeout=30) as smtp:
smtp.send_message(msg)
print("Message submitted successfully to local Postfix.")
and have it show up instantly in my gmail within seconds. This is powerful. (I've removed the details from this comment.)
I understand that as my server's reputation grows, it becomes very powerful to be able to email anyone without any intermediary except potential spam filters. I am very careful about what I put on my server.
Nevertheless, I had a recent experience that was a little sad for me. I wanted to forward some mail to my gmail address automatically, and used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 on medium thinking time to help me with the administration to do this. (I find extra high and pro thinking times are excessively long.)
I was very disappointed with the results, which included a very badly written regex for authentication. I'll write up my experience in an experience report. It was a big disappointment for me.
The burden on administrating one's own email is already very large, and it is disappointing that we can't really rely on frontier models to help with it.
This very much depends you been U.S. citizen or not been U.S. citizen.
"PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms."
"Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.
By targeting, it is meant that US persons or persons located in the United States may not be the intended targets of the collection. The targeting must have as its object the acquisition of foreign intelligence information, as this is defined by FISA."
I remember when Gmail came around and everyone was more than happy to hand off their email to Google. No spam and ability to send and receive huge (for the time) attachments I think were the main things people wanted.
Not sure if that was before or after everyone was happy to hand off their web browser to Google.
The alternatives to Gmail, at the time, were either Hotmail, or email provided by your ISP who charged money for additional email accounts. Those were the options.
You like using Google and Microsoft products as an end user (even ignoring all the ethical issues with these companies)? That seems surprising to me. I find their products so horrible compared to e.g. Fastmail.
We have to figure out a way to get out of FB social, iOS/Android phone, Google/Microsoft email, AWS/GOOG/MSFT cloud oligopolies. There is no competition and there will be massive rentier capitalism extraction from all these players for the rest of civilization.
TBH, I blame IT leadership. The easy choice is Google or Microsoft. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is now "No one ever got fired for subbing to Office." Someone needs to bite the bullet and stitch together an alternative array of services. They've cultivated their own monoculture by hitting the easy-button and forking over for Office365, etc.
Which if we're being honest, Microsoft and Google products are rarely best-in-class at any one thing that they do. Teams, SharePoint, Google Docs, someone somewhere is doing those things much better. Those competitors just don't necessarily have a whole ecosystem that makes it a big Easy Button for corporate IT to smash. And they sometimes charge as much by themselves as Office365 costs in whole. But I know one problem my own employers IT team struggles with a bit is putting out the constant fire of different teams deciding the Microsoft tool we pay for sucks and going rogue and trying to subscribe to something else. Dropbox was a big one, but Teams and Planner alternatives come up a lot too.
Not pretending to have all the answers but it doesn't seem to be a completely intractable problem.
It starts by just avoiding them as much as possible. E.g. self-host email. If you encounter a system that refuses to receive your email, I give you permission to use your old Gmail account with that system, while using your self hosted account for everything you can.
If your email is Google or Microsoft, there are other people with self-hosted email who feel pressured to use their Google or Microsoft accounts to send email to you.
Does it or is this part of the push to keep people from hosting their own email services? I've self-hosted email for about 35 years now and see no reason to stop, it hardly ever needs maintenance and my mail tends to arrive even at hostile destinations (Micros..., Ggl, ...). Don't listen to those who fight against decentralisation, their agenda does not match yours.
Same here (well, 25-ish years). And while self-hosted email may be declining, it apparently still outnumbers any single email provider: https://labs.ripe.net/images/r_uuIdAmmdbhI1R9Der6slvvH5U=/10...
Especially someone who stands to gain if they only need to get cozy with two email providers to deliver their spam.
(Blog author) runs the email infrastructure measurement project at Live Direct Marketing
Google offers "mail merge in Gmail to send personalized email campaigns, newsletters, and announcements to a wide audience." [1]
Based on how much @gmail.com spam I used get within GMail I can only assume they treat mail from their internal accounts much more favourably then us dirty self hosters.
[1]: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12921167
Thank you for this perspective. I've been hosting my own email for about 25 years and have never had significant problems delivering to any of the large providers. A couple of months ago I migrated from one VPS host to another. I'd been putting this off for a long time, in part because of what I've read on HN about how difficult it is to self-host your mail. I finally took the plunge a couple of months ago, expecting to find the new provider's IP space unusable & having to relay via the old MTA/start relaying via a commercial MTA; but to my surprise, it's been completely smooth sailing! Maybe I've just been lucky with the nature of my setup: a small number of mailboxes and domains used for personal/small business use. Certainly if I was sending bulk mail or significant amounts of transactional mail then I'd use someone else's service.
I've been self hosting for ~15 years and maybe have deliverability problems once every 3-4 years at most. Just had one this morning, in fact. Once in a blue moon I end up on one of the very aggressive spam blocklists (this time Spamhaus) and it's usually just a matter of following their delisting process.
Did you change domains?
Can you formulate that question more precisely if this doesn't answer you?
* I am still using the same domains that I've always hosted mail for * Since I am sending from new IP addresses, but want to retain the ability to send from the old MTA until it is decomissioned, the new MTA uses a different HELO identifier, and the dependencies for that are all in place (forward and reverse DNS addresses and updated SPF records) * The new DNS records are still in the same administrative domain as the old ones
I follow the standards processes, and while I don't see a push to against self-hosting mail, I do see a push to stop storing cleartext passwords. Which is typically what your MUA uses to access those self-hosted mail servers.
I've been self hosting myself now for a couple of years(after a brief, 20 year hiatus) and it was less difficult than I though it would be.
Don't listen to the naysayers.
I'm sure it's a good article but there is no need for it to be written by an LLM... Is everyone really this lazy now? I don't think I've read anything written by a human for at least a full month.
This seems like a load bearing issue. Would you like me to put together a plan to put human-written text in your daily routine?
Oh you.
I really wish there was an HN guideline that I could point to which says that you shouldn't complain about LLM writing, in the same way that's there's guidance on site annoyances:
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
LLM-written content is now too common to be interesting and complaining about it does not make it stop, it just derails comment sections. The reptitive complaints are getting as annoying as the LLM-written content!
Why do you give up so easily? Human culture and the already low quality bar of writing should be allowed to fall even further because you are annoyed by those that want to protect it?
Why should your opinion be worth more than those who would like to retain a semblance of meaning in what we use to convey ideas? LLM writing is sheer trash. It comes off like a coke-addled car salesman who is making a pitch to VCs about his latest scientific discovery that will 200x their investment.
Poorly written LLM content is NOT a tangential annoyance. If this is too much, maybe you should simulate HN using
Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442
Wait isn’t there actually the opposite HN guideline? In that LLM generated content is not allowed here?
Comments are for humans but I don't think there is any reason for HN to police the submissions as a policy. If any article lacks credibility or merit to the extent that one can't even finish reading it then just ignore it and move on. Vote for something else. If "LLM aversion" is your rationale, so be it.
Personally, I usually check the comments before deciding to read something so I appreciate that others have saved me the trouble of reading this article in particular. If the author doesn't care enough to use human time to write it then I am not going to use human time to read it.
Wow. That's outsourcing a lot of thought, overriding your individual interpretation. I guess it's pretty common here.
This also applies to reading restaurant reviews before visiting. Or for that matter, reading any published book you outsource judgement to the publishing house (what books they pick up). Or, if you are easily convinced by jargon: Exploration has a non-zero opportunity cost.
LLM-generated content is not allowed in HN comments, but it doesn't mention submitting links to LLM-generated content. This is the only mention in the guidelines: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."
I really wish there was an HN guideline that banned AI generated content outright. Until then all we can do is flag slop.
Indeed.
I LOVE reading LLM content. I find that they tend to present things in a way that keeps my attention - something I have struggled with my whole life. I also use LLMs to assist with managing my own thoughts and helping make things coherent overall.
Sure, there is a LOT of slop out there, but the promotion of quality content is what crowd-sourced curation like HN tends towards. Much of the LLM assisted content here has a high signal to noise ratio, and is clearly a lot more involved than simply prompting "write an article on X" - despite what the haters say.
If the "author" didn't feel like taking the time to write the text why should I take the time to read it? LLMs are great for summarizing, if you are going to slop 100% of a document make it a summary and save us all the time.
Fine, don't read it, but also don't comment about not having read it!
This is a breathtakingly dumb idea
Thanks for the constructive feedback.
I have people writing emails to me with an LLM now. We've gone from meetings where "this could have been an email" to emails where "this could have been a few carefully chosen words, not a rambling diatribe which would test the most hardcore Tolstoy fan".
Kill me. With a spoon. Slowly.
You’re supposed to use an AI on your end to get the original few words back, so the providers get paid twice for the same email as is their right
As a cheap ass I just delete it. They DM me later to ask why I haven't responded to their email, to which the response is "did you write it?".
Are we even sure the actual stuff in the article is real? What if it's just the usual LLM hallucinations
> Is everyone really this lazy now?
Everyone should aim to be this lazy. Everyone is trying to maximize their time. This is what software has always done. It helps people be lazy in some respect, and then, so far, we have always found new stuff to do with the time we freed up.
LLMs got decent at writing, and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
Of course, this is contingent on your current goal: If you want to get better at writing, you should do the writing, just like you want to do the math, if you want to learn multiplication. Writing is fine as a tool just to get information across. It needn't be more than that for everyone.
The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it. I too can just prompt “What’s the rate of self hosted email?”. If an article is signaling that its value is zero, then everyone should just move on as it’s not providing anything to anyone. Effort is the economies main signal of value, good boots that last cost more in the classic example. The only time it’s not zero is when there’s a shared understanding between those consuming the output - a company wanting your llm code, friends making funny images for an inside joke to share, etc. And some people grouped may be specifically interested in AI output - people sharing music on Suno. But in my experience no one cares about your AI generated song, image, article, app if it appears to just be my own prompt away from me having it too. Give a significant other an AI image printed out for an anniversary gift - see how excited they are about it. Versus getting an artist or photographer to do the same. As Claude might say, it’s not laziness, it’s effort.
> The problem is LLM output’s value is intrinsically zero because there is no scarcity to it.
I think if this post had not gone the AI-generated-text-route, some people here would easily have considered it interesting for its content, even if it was entirely AI generated.
That’s the worst part if they had just spent 10 minutes editing it it would’ve been fine but either they couldn’t even put in 10 minutes of effort into the article (bad) or they can’t tell that it’s written obviously like an LLM (also bad). Neither outcome makes me want to read the article more.
And soon, I'll be lazy and use an LLM to do the reading for me. Eventually the LLMs will train on the state of the world and decide to be lazy also, and the "writer's" LLM prompt will just be shared with the "reader": nobody actually needed all those words anyway! Maybe someday we'll get rid of the links on HN and we can just share and consume headlines.
>LLMs got decent at writing,
Judging by people's response, that doesn't seem to be the case.
> and before long they will be better at write-ups than the average human writer and we won't look back.
I'll read articles written by them if and when that happens, but not before.
What does "decent at writing mean"?
When you start digging in you realize that (like most things) there are multiple different definitions. LLMs are very good at putting together a lot of words that are spell correctly with grammatically correct sentences (better than me - though I'm particularly bad at this). However people often want to add other things like "correct" (the facts are right...), or some notion of not using too many words. LLMs tend to not be as good at those.
Friends of mine say that internal reports from their workplaces are often worse.
Nobody expects anyone to read those anyway.
Efficiency and lazyness are two very distinct things. As is quality and quantity.
Isn't that a variant of utilitarianism basically? The only things worth doing are the ones which allows us to do less.
The ability for people to communicate is paramount. Without the ability to communicate there is no progress. We might as well be deaf, dumb and perhaps blind.
Delegating this task to automation serves to undermine all the masters and indeed strengthen the servants.
Short term this offload is good for people; long term it’ll lead to mental rot where people are hard pressed to put their ideas forward and give up in exasperation when they don’t have the assistance of their servants. Their ability to even make the proper requests to the servants may deteriorate enough that their existence may come to rely on the benevolence of their servants.
> The domains didn't disappear; they moved.
I stopped reading at this point. I cannot emphasize how much I HATE this AI writing style.
> Dictionary-based classification has a ceiling, and I want to be honest about where it is.
I stopped here, anytime an author (or likely AI) feels the need to tell me they're being honest or "genuine" I don't need to read any further.
I'll assume honesty but the minute you explicitly tell me, you've probably got an angle that I'm too dumb to see, but I'm not dumb enough to keep reading.
Wait, what makes it AI and hateful, the `;` there?!
Is this in the same vein as using — em dashes?
Are people with minimal regard to typography and style doomed to lower their standards because the masses can't even?
To me, what makes it hateful is that it is EVERYWHERE. Reddit is full of it, LinkedIn is full of it, the web is full of it. Shit, even Facebook has it now.
It's kind of sad. I compare it to when Memes started becoming popular as communication tools on the internet (mid 2000s from what i recall): Instead of writing text to convey the idea they wanted, people just pasted a meme (my face when ... whatever).
Now with AI, everyone write everything in the same way.
It's the semicolon and the phrasing together. I can't explain but after you use AI a little you just notice the way it 'writes'.
The need is that writing is expensive. An LLM is around a hundred times cheaper than a human, so this kind of article that doesn't provide tons of value just makes sense to write with an LLM.
I hate LLM writing, but the economics checks out.
> The need is that writing is expensive.
That's the thing, good writing is expensive, massively so, much more than people think.
Letting the machine do the writing however shows us that many people have no idea why writing is expensive, nor do they respect that perhaps it needs to be expensive. Communication is incredibly hard, very few master it. I'd even go so far as to say that clear, precise and readable communication is so hard that we do not have sufficient training data to build an LLM that can do it.
Letting a person write article, like this one, doesn't necessarily improve the quality, but it does show us that some thought and effort have at least been put into it. There was a cost and you deemed that cost worth it for conveying your message. Without the cost there's nothing stopping you from wasting peoples time.
That might apply to some things, but there is little to no value in this article, so the economics are the same as the spam - cheap to spew garbage while providing no value and wasting the readers time. It's not something that should be encouraged. RIPE should know better.
How about not writing the article at all then?
Because people will read it if you write it, hence us being here.
Meh. I read the comments on HN, rarely the articles /(semi-)s
What would we comment on if there were no article?
There is the headline. In the typical case someone can write a comment (sometimes off the headline, sometimes have read the article) and it quickly becomes obvious that person is more knowledgeable that whoever wrote the article in the first place. Thus in many cases reading the comments is more valuable than the article.
I wish there were a way to self-host without my emails constantly getting stuck in other people's spam folders. And it made me really paranoid about email, too -- like I'd send emails, and I'd never know if the other end received them or not, unless they replied. Without a reply, I would always wonder whether the message got a look, or disappeared without a trace.
The only way around this seems to be hosting with Google, Microsoft, or maybe Proton. Any other ideas?
Ran into this issue when self-hosting, so I just bumped my existing ProtonMail subscription to a business one which allows for mail forwarding. It's quite easy to set up and I've been pretty happy about deliverability for a year+ now
It feels like the only way to stop this happening reliably, is to get as many people as possible off Google and Microsoft.
I'd argue that self-hosting is the first step. The second step is helping everyone you know get their own domain and host their email for them. If they don't trust you to not read their email on your server, point them to somebody else who offers mail hosting.
The more people we can convince the internet is something anyone can help build outside of the silos, the more likely it is to survive.
I ended up switching to Fastmail a few years ago, but before that I was relaying outgoing email through Amazon SES. It fixed all my deliverability problems. Before that, when sending from my own server, emails might just not show up. Not in recipient's spam folder, not rejected by their server. Accepted and then dropped mysteriously.
If I ever go back to self-hosting email, I would do the same except I would maintain a whitelist of friendly mail servers to which I would send directly. Or maybe just relay emails to Google/Microsoft via SES and send the rest directly.
> through Amazon SES. It fixed all my deliverability problems
How do you know? I have seen blocks of ip addrs blocklisted from AWS due to others abusing nearby ip addrs
Use DKIM on a long lived domain, and check that your sending IP is stable and comes from a block with good reputation. This has always worked for me.
I haven’t had this issue. It might be due to the long-standing reputation of my email domain(s) or of the mail server’s IP address, I don’t know. But I know other self-hosters who don’t have that issue either.
I use fastmail which is very good. Like “oh this is how it should feel!” good.
I only have one minor complaint about Fastmail after 5 years. I can’t do a full-page screenshot of a long email on my iPhone.
Have you tried requesting it? As a former developer there, I would expect you to get a response of “sorry, we didn’t know about that because none of us use it and no one has requested it before, fix incoming” or “yeah, unfortunately in our current architecture it’s not possible to do this because of [some specific reason]”.
I started self-hosting my email last year, but I use MailPace (other email sending services are available) to avoid being memory-holed.
I don’t self host, I pay zoho to do it. Over never had any suspicion my emails haven’t been received.
It happens on zoho. I ran my business email on zoho. Multiple instances where people on Gmail had my messages go to spam. I have the same issue with proton mail.
I think that is the Crux of the issue.
Email spam has made self hosting untenable.
If someone can solve the spam problem in email without just manually whitelisting specific providers that heavily monitor their users, then they can completely reverse the direction of this problem. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely someone could do that.
That would work if most spam wasn't from the cartel. I receive single digit percentage of "spam" from randoms, 95%+ is from Gmail/Google, o365 or mailgun/whatever. Not one of them can either filter their users or actually action abuse reports.
The reason for you only seeing spam from the larger providers is that they are filtering out everyone else.
They should also deal with the individual accounts etc, but thats the difficult problem.
I enforce strict spec and behaviour compliance, as well as policies (SPF, dkim, etc). Aside from a very small number of well known spam/abuse sources, it's largely from legitimate mail accounts on Gmail/outlook etc. or idiot msps.
Spam probably isn't as bad as you think it is. It's not the dark old days where 99% of emails are spam.
You should self-host, so you can do the experiment for yourself. You might be surprised. You can always stop self-hosting if you don't like it.
I wish that was true for all cases. My uni email is 99.9% spam and everything comes from official accounts sending irrelevant stuff to everyone and their grandma
Recent estimates show it's down closer to 50% of all emails now. Which is obviously still outrageous.
I self host email and surprisingly do not receive any Spam (apart from the occasional cold calling support@ contact@ etc)
It's not about receiving spam, it's about legitimate messages you send getting filtered as spam.
If you set up SPF/DKIM, this rarely happens. I self host and my email works just fine. I also rarely see spam.
I set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, not on any public blacklists (confirmed through https://multirbl.valli.org/), whitelisted by DNSWL.org at medium trust level, never sent any bulk email, and I had constant deliverability issues with Outlook and Gmail. Both of our experiences might be true, but yours does not invalidate mine. Simply setting up SPF and DKIM is not sufficient to ensure deliverability.
I had both setup previously and constantly ended up in my recipients spam. When I'm trying to sort my life admin with local council/government/landlord/utilities, it's one thing to have a 'cool' custom email, but it's another to say "oh yeah, sorry, it's probably in your spam".
Haven't had an issue since I moved to 365. Costs a little more but so much less hassle. I don't like it but I also need people to actually receive my emails.
It still happens to me from time to time, and Postmaster tools don't help either (honestly what more do you want from me Google!)
I'm still refusing to give up the good fight.
I agree Spam is the hardest. Setting up a mailserver is pretty easy today, e.g. with NixOS-simple-mailserver you can do it with a few lines and a few minutes of config in your DNS provider, and maintenance is minimal.
But I self-host email for ~20 years, and I have not managed to get rid of Spam without not also getting false positives.
I first used SpamAssistant, in later years Rspamd, but I feel like they are just not good enough. Also I find Rspamd config pretty incomprehensible.
Hosted email like also does not solve this, e.g. GMail filters way much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam, so I had to turn off the spam filter entirely).
A combination of DNSRBL, SpamAssassin, and using different localparts for each service is working very well for me. Some spam is still getting through, but not enough to feel (heh) spammed, and amazingly I haven’t had any false positives from SpamAssassin in years.
Email can't really change much. The protocol is too old.
It would be better if we came up with new protocols that solve the email messaging problems and then gradually wean ourselves off email rather than trying to "fix" email.
In a sense this is already happening although instead of migrating to open protocols which solve the email problems we're migrating a lot of messaging to walled gardens which solve the problems (e.g. WhatsApp).
I can only imagine the Google/MS monetized horror that would be an e-mail replacement.
I guess that was google wave and yea it was a horrorshow.
I had hoped that something useful would come out of blockchain technology that would allow for a better messaging protocol that was spam resistant, e2e encrypted and decentralized by design but I didnt see anything.
>Email can't really change much. The protocol is too old. It would be better if we came up with new protocols that solve the email messaging problems and then gradually wean ourselves off email rather than trying to "fix" email.
I completely agree with this.
It's not in the current providers' interest to help people avoid the current providers' advertisement or avoid paying the providers to host the customers' email.
Seems like AI is in a pretty good position to do that tbh.
You mean filtering? That could get extremely expensive computationally, though. Tools like Rspamd support LLM-based filtering, but traditional Bayesian filtering is vastly cheaper and more computationally efficient. Hm, maybe LLMs can be used as an additional signal for ambiguous messages rather than as the primary filter.
If you are thinking using AI to classify messages, the scale of email spam is so massive that using conventional techniques won't work. It won't make sense energetically speaking IMO.
I think techniques like HashCash by Adam Back should be revisited.
Wasn't bitcoin supposedly invented to do that?
Ironic given the amount of crypto spam that exists.
The biggest problem with email spam-wise is that it lacks any sort of user/mailbox authentication. The only useful signal in the meta-data is the origin domain. The protocol assumes the domain owner does some form of access-control and every message coming from the domain is equally trusted. If one has been communicating with alice@foobarizer.com and receives an appendage enlargement ad from bob@foobarizer.com they could be reasonably confident that Bob's account was compromised and communicate that out to Potmaster and Alice to be handled internally.
Of course this assumption is fully invalidated by open-access mail service providers: maintaining communication with xXx_kitty_slayer_xXx@tepidmail.com tells absolutely nothing about sincerity and authenticity of messages from DrJohnSmith@tepidmail.com. Not only there's roughly zero correlation, it could be argued that correlation is slightly negative if one does not expect out-of-the-blue contact attempts. Funnily enough, with the critical mass of non-spam migrating to providers, it becomes sort of positive signal, fueling feedback loop: even if the majority of spam came from gmail, messages from gmail would still be more likely to be non-spam than messages from rncrosoft.com, because most non-spam comes from there too.
On top of that, there's a lot of soft-spam. Companies will happily send out critical contract-related information and unwanted-unasked advertising from the very same domain and even the same address. The big providers are not shying away from selling shielding services to spam agencies.
That "someone" could - in theory - require pgpgpg signatures attached to messages and have origin-based filtering/ranking, but good luck convincing people to set up their gmail/outlook to even generate the signature, let alone publish it reliably/revocably. At the receiver end, your only reasonable bet is filtering/ranking the content. It's probably not a strictly uphill battle, but you definitely need significant amount of volume and tagging before your models become good enough and it stops to the case.
In reality, even if it sounds a bit ironic given above, the best route to fixing this is self hosting, especially in the cases where your messages are needed. The more people try to send mail from their self-hosted instances and insisted that it was the problem of the other end to complain to their service providers if they do not receive the messages, the less hegemony the cartel providers would have. And maybe we could have some sort of client auth for email.
its not really difficult to filter spam off. I spend more time dealing with physical spam in my snailmailbox than my email spamfilter
> DMARC: adopted everywhere, enforced nowhere in particular
Unfortunately this only talks about what DMARC policies are published by domains. I was hoping they will go into some analysis of how many mailboxes actually hard-enforce DMARC rules on ingress (as in, respect the DMARC policy as published by the sender's domain, p=reject or whatever else it might be)
I have been hesitant to enforce DMARC rules on my server. Partly because maintaining it was a pain (see opendmarc - maybe better with rspamd now), but also because on my test runs I saw plenty of legitimate incoming mail that simply would get rejected if I were to enforce DMARC on ingress.
I suspect big players like gmail have some kind of soft enforcement/reputation/machine learning approach to DMARC, but this is way too much work for a small time admin like me.
I've been running my own email server with exim and dovecot for 20ish years, I like the freedom it gives me but I have to say it's a significant investment. Not so much keeping things up to date but instead making sure that my emails are actually delivered. I've eventually switched to using fastmail just for sending emails and even with that, I don't get perfect delivery.
Last year I started self hosting my email. I found that once you setup the “usual suspects” (DMARC, DKIM, SPF…) outgoing mail works without issues. In fact it works now better than the (small) provider I was using before.
And setting them up properly is not even that difficult nowadays
Whenever HN discusses self-hosting email, half the people with self-hosting experience say they never had any issues and the other half says they had so many issues they had to give it up.
I self-hosted for years and I did all the standard things you're supposed to do, but I had tremendous problems with Gmail and Outlook. Other providers usually went through without issue.
I guess there is a certain amount of luck in this, probably related to the provider, or the range that your IP reside into. (I guess google and microsoft keep their own blacklists, regardless of what public blacklists say). I wonder if the best course of action in that case is to just spin up a new server on a different provider and try again.
FWIW, in my case, I am running the server on Hetzner, even though is supposed to have a bad reputation, but I have been using its IP for more than 10 years for other things (web server, personal services etc) so I guess that helps
How much of this is just down to your mail server being randomly assigned an IP address with dubious history or not?
Hard to tell. My server's IP was not on any public blacklists (confirmed by https://multirbl.valli.org/) and it was whitelisted on DNSWL.org at medium trust level.
I've been using GMail roughly since it existed I think, and have thought on and off over the years about self-hosting. The notion scares me every time because with it comes thoughts of what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server, or even if there was an outage at the "wrong time". And then there's also the idea of updating the 1 million+1 services, etc that I used it to sign up for. As much as I'm not a fan of a decent amount of what they've been doing, they're however a stable entity which offers a very reliable service for essentially free. Very likely that many others also think along those lines.
The only thing I think can compete with that is some kind of decentralized solution, also something I've thought about a bit. Like a Keyoxide-based[0] - or similar - setup that makes it virtually impossible for one to lose their online identity (since lost keys can be rotated out once one has - access to - enough proofs), and then that identity can be used - without fear - to route associated data, etc. Of course adoption of what could become an adjacent or new standard would be the next hurdle to overcome...
[0] https://keyoxide.org/
> what would happen if I were to lose the domain name or server
On the other side of the coin, what would happen if google bans you? That's certainly not unheard of.
True, something else I've considered. But the reported incidents are few and far between, and the stories always have some trigger. I have been taking small steps to move away, though it's yet another service where "stuff" could happen: since DuckDuckGo introduced their proxy email service I got one and have been using it for my more recent sign-ups. So if something does happen to the GMail or I hit some switch-over threshold, I can point it elsewhere, though everything before would be lost.
If Google bans you they at least will not hand out your email address to someone else. If your domain expires and someone else registers it that’s essentially what’s going to happen.
And on the other side, projects like stalwart email ( http://stalw.art/ ) and mox ( http://xmox.nl/ ) makes it so much easier to build an e-mailsystem on your server.
I have deployed stalwart as my replacement for mailu and iv never had such an easy time setting up mail, i love it.
20 years of running the classic postfix + dovecot stack for about 10 business domains. I’ve recently been testing out stalwart, with just one company domain, which is nice but seems quite fragile, 4 times now it’s killed itself doing some self updates. If it wasn’t for Claude assistance I probably would have given up on it by now. It is quite feature rich though, but its spam detection is not great, too much ham flagged as spam, not enough spam flagged as spam. 2FA is a nice bonus but for some unknown reason it breaks itself every few weeks and I gotta turn it back off again. If I could get stalwart stable I would migrate all my domains to it.
Why switch then? Need more excitement in your life?
I have been running Postfix for 22 years, from a big corporate installation to my own on a Raspberry Pi Zero. It just does its job.
2FA is a big one. We need it to please the insurance companies.
Hosting a personal, low volume mail server works as well as ever. If you know what you're doing.
I've written about it five years ago, still applies: https://schumacher.sh/2021/05/10/running-a-private-mail-serv...
At this point, self-hosting email is as much a practical convenience as it is a political statement. Or maybe I'm just stubborn.
The hardest thing in setting up your emails server is to keep your messages out of spam folders. Even if you are completely legit company that sends out ONLY human-written personal emails, you will get tagged as spam first.
I've self-hosted for about 2 months, and promptly switched to iCloud. Just because I've been spending too much time calling people and telling them to check their spam folders.
Recently our business moved to another domain. We had a guy who has spent over a month "warming up" traffic, so our new domain won't be tagged as spam by default.
Mail self hosting is not an easy process to maintain.. If you do manage to get whitelisted you need to ensure you're on top of maintaining it, let alone some larger provider like Google just deciding they don't like you. I do empathise with wanting to self host, I just always found the cost of effort to do so really didn't offer enough benefits versus a good provider like proton for example. It sucks but maybe a fight that's too far gone to win.
It’s not that bad, but it does require some effort. I self-host. I spend far more time using and enjoying email than I do maintaining the infrastructure.
However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.
And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.
I’ve probably spent less than 10 hours over the last 5 or 6 years on maintenance.
> However you do have to live with the occasional blacklist when you host on a VPS like I do. Some idiot in your IP range may get blacklisted for spam and then you get caught in it. It’s generally temporary.
>And there are some corporate policies that will flat out reject emails from you which is fun.
This is what keeps me away from self-hosting it, though. As long as there's some possibility that my ability to deliver email could get nuked, all because someone else made a mistake, it's not worth it to me, especially since using / sending email is mandatory for doing most things. I guess I'm just not really willing to take that sort of risk
Like many others, I gave up on self hosting email when I realized Gmail and Outlook would always mark me as spam, if I even got delivered. DMARC and DKIM did nothing, I think the datacenter IP was just blacklisted. Ostensibly there are ways to get it unblacklisted but man what a pain the ass for the whole process.
Self hosting is not that hard actually.
The problem lies with the big e-mail providers marking your e-mail as spam, even if you have everything configured right (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc.) and you're not on any blacklists. They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.
> They use their mysterious opaque algo to determine that your e-mail is spam and you have no idea what you could do to not get in peoples junk boxes.
And that’s not hard?
Running a modern mail server, a spam filter, a self-hosted webmail, and learning just enough about DNS and networking to get mail through: this is what’s not that hard.
Figuring out how to stay whitelisted, or accept ending up in people’s filters, asking them to whitelist you while your public IP gradually gains trust, is a job.
That's pretty much what I mean. Implementing the authenticity measures is very easy, making sure the e-mails get delivered to peoples inboxes without getting marked as spam is hard.
I just wish these big parties would give you a more formal way to make clear you're not a spammer.
On the other hand, I'm working on a prototype to completely throw away conventional email. Creating a system where you can simply spin your own physical mail box and node, and reach others at their unique address.
https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmail
Spam ruined email. It's really as simple as that.
Nothing will ever ruin email. A private email server, or a federation of mutually-whitelisting ones, is the ultimate social media, and not at all a bad personal information management system too.
Edit: typo
I hardly ever see any spam nowadays, happy fastmail user.
spam filters are effective at dealing with that
Not in my experience.
My self-hosted email filters too little spam, while GMail etc filter too much (e.g. important company correspondence leading to orders almost being lost because they landed in our GMail spam).
Does GMail silently filter spam now? I get maybe 5 new messages in my spam folder per month for the past couple of years and I'm not sure if Google is just dropping the most blatant spam or if my primary address is somehow not on any lists.
It works both ways right? If you self-host you are seen as the spam.
Interesting topic. I wonder if the AI was given notes to base the article on, or if it was given the data and also made the full analysis itself.
To be fair, hosting your own email server is just a pain in the ass.
No
This is the counter example to "protocols and interop solve enshittification". No, they don't. Email is the model protocol: perfectly interoperable, perfectly decentralizable. And yet it is centralizing in the hands of a few organizations who then wield enough market power to bend everyone else to their will. It's still enshittifying. If email hasn't resisted enshittification, then interoperable protocols are not the solution for it. And yet, pretty much all of the pro-social, anti-enshittification effort in tech is being directed into protocols and interop.
Stopped reading at "The MX record says where the mailbox lives."
Interestingly, DNS does have such a record (MB,) just never widely used - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035/#section-3.3.3
I switched to M365 as my provider a few years back as my emails kept being flagged as spam.
I've done it for decades, but I don't know much beyond the basics of email hosting tbh, however my understanding is that these days email coming from self-hosted servers carries a much higher spam/junk risk and so often automatically marked as spam.
Maybe there are ways to avoid this happening, but when a few clients all reported that they were not receiving my emails I didn't have much of a choice but to switch.
I would also be interested in self-hosting but have limited understanding of what would be required to ensure my email does not get flagged as spam.
Recently went self hosted. Not going back ever again.
Also had a couple of ui pages on our app to have full email functionality.
This also means custom integration into our existing ecosystem.
I self-hosted for a while in the early 2000s. It was a hassle. My box got hacked -- I'm sure I missed a security update or something -- and while I didn't lose any data because of my obsessive backup paranoia, it was enough of a Thing that I just punted.
I used Gmail for Domains for a hot minute, but never really liked it very much. Soon I found Fastmail, and I've been using them ever since (so about 13 years now).
Hosting my own server with mailinabox. low traffic, but keeping their random subscriptions, newsletters and occasional single purpose address. Haven't had any issues so far.
I run my own mail server, and I am very concerned about its reputation and deliverability. I've run my own Linux server full time since at least 2017, obviously well before LLM's, but only recently put up a mail server. I don't usually run any agents on the server, such as Claude Code, ChatGPT Codex, or Grok Build, all of which I have subscriptions for but don't run on this server. Instead, I manually administer the server using ssh, while getting interactive help from ChatGPT in a chat window.
It was complicated to get security, DNSSEC, DKIM, DMARC right this way. I did it just under a year ago, around September 15, 2025.
I tried to follow and understand what I was doing, and keep good records on it. It was a complicated process, but everything was up and working at the end and I received email my server sent me. It felt good to be able use this simple script to send myself email:
and have it show up instantly in my gmail within seconds. This is powerful. (I've removed the details from this comment.)I understand that as my server's reputation grows, it becomes very powerful to be able to email anyone without any intermediary except potential spam filters. I am very careful about what I put on my server.
Nevertheless, I had a recent experience that was a little sad for me. I wanted to forward some mail to my gmail address automatically, and used ChatGPT Sol 5.6 on medium thinking time to help me with the administration to do this. (I find extra high and pro thinking times are excessively long.)
I was very disappointed with the results, which included a very badly written regex for authentication. I'll write up my experience in an experience report. It was a big disappointment for me.
The burden on administrating one's own email is already very large, and it is disappointing that we can't really rely on frontier models to help with it.
I see no upsides to a Google/Microsoft duopoly in email. Except for those already-far-too-powerful corporations.
EDIT: "I see no upsides to X" means "X is NOT good". (Responses suggest that this was not clear.)
This very much depends you been U.S. citizen or not been U.S. citizen.
"PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_program
"Section 702 permits the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to jointly authorize targeting of non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.
By targeting, it is meant that US persons or persons located in the United States may not be the intended targets of the collection. The targeting must have as its object the acquisition of foreign intelligence information, as this is defined by FISA."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FISA_Amendments_Act_of_2008
How times change.
I remember when Gmail came around and everyone was more than happy to hand off their email to Google. No spam and ability to send and receive huge (for the time) attachments I think were the main things people wanted.
Not sure if that was before or after everyone was happy to hand off their web browser to Google.
The alternatives to Gmail, at the time, were either Hotmail, or email provided by your ISP who charged money for additional email accounts. Those were the options.
And Google, at the time, was cool.
You like using Google and Microsoft products as an end user (even ignoring all the ethical issues with these companies)? That seems surprising to me. I find their products so horrible compared to e.g. Fastmail.
> You like using ... ?
NO, and I avoid both of 'em as much as I can. (Note clarifying edit to my initial comment above.)
We have to figure out a way to get out of FB social, iOS/Android phone, Google/Microsoft email, AWS/GOOG/MSFT cloud oligopolies. There is no competition and there will be massive rentier capitalism extraction from all these players for the rest of civilization.
There's competition, but no one is interested.
TBH, I blame IT leadership. The easy choice is Google or Microsoft. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is now "No one ever got fired for subbing to Office." Someone needs to bite the bullet and stitch together an alternative array of services. They've cultivated their own monoculture by hitting the easy-button and forking over for Office365, etc.
Which if we're being honest, Microsoft and Google products are rarely best-in-class at any one thing that they do. Teams, SharePoint, Google Docs, someone somewhere is doing those things much better. Those competitors just don't necessarily have a whole ecosystem that makes it a big Easy Button for corporate IT to smash. And they sometimes charge as much by themselves as Office365 costs in whole. But I know one problem my own employers IT team struggles with a bit is putting out the constant fire of different teams deciding the Microsoft tool we pay for sucks and going rogue and trying to subscribe to something else. Dropbox was a big one, but Teams and Planner alternatives come up a lot too.
Not pretending to have all the answers but it doesn't seem to be a completely intractable problem.
It starts by just avoiding them as much as possible. E.g. self-host email. If you encounter a system that refuses to receive your email, I give you permission to use your old Gmail account with that system, while using your self hosted account for everything you can.
If your email is Google or Microsoft, there are other people with self-hosted email who feel pressured to use their Google or Microsoft accounts to send email to you.