We should have a better system than email.
- email protocol is atrocious. This leads to few options for clients and nearly no library to work with. I’d like to setup a box with a limit for unread mails and a API to publicly show the current number of unread mail. That would enable me to put a box out there for anyone to contact me and have a feedback about the likelihood of an answer. This is nearly impossible right now.
- email protocol was created before spamming became a thing. There is no mechanism to deal with that. Everything is ad-hoc/workaround. Any modern messaging systens have either a way to ask permission to send messages first or some report/block system. We could also have a trust system to score nodes of the network.
A better system is way overdue in my opinion.
Yes!
Agree completely.
In my eyes the features that make email successful are the decentralization, that it is not a product of a company, the wide client support and that can be used offline.
The successor should have equivalent features.
Do you have a recommendation on the least horrible big email company to use for a personal domain? I’m using Proton, but I’m mildly annoyed that they don’t provide native IMAP - you have to install their Proton Mail Bridge app.
Disroot has custom domain option if you pay : https://disroot.org/en/services/email If your account request gets approved you will have XMPP, Nextcloud and email account. Approval can take some time as Disroot is volunteer based. You can interact with them via the XMPP Community chat, which is also bridged to IRC and Matrix I believe.
I switched to posteo.net for that reason.
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Can’t think of any that don’t cost money, but if you don’t mind paying, give mailbox.org a look. They support standard IMAP protocol and custom domains. Other providers that I know of come with caveats. Posteo.de, the one I use, is great and cheaper than mailbox.org, but no custom domains. Tutanota is free, but doesn’t have IMAP support, but they do have custom domains if you opt for the paid plan.
There might be more, but these are the ones I know of.
I’ve used posteo and mailbox.org so far which worked quite well so far and are pretty feature rich (especially the latter one). I also often heard goods things about fastmail but have no experience with it on my own.
No privacy option per se, but OVH gives you a 5GB email (and 10mb php webspace) with every domain for free. Works with the usual e2ee email clients.
On a side note: they also provide build in dyndns (sadly IPv4 only for now), which makes this offer quite convenient for self-hosting from a home ISP.
Isn’t IPv6 static by default, and doesn’t require NAT? Although I would expect ISPs to screw with that.
it’s generally not static… you get a massive amount of routable ips usually
I’ve been using whatever my web host feeds me for a few years now, but pretty soon I suspect I’m going to have to start using Proton as well. I only noticed recently that that’s an actual service they provide, and I’m not aware of any other companies that do it well outside the gates of big tech. I haven’t heard of anything particularly evil they’ve done and I really hope that doesn’t change
What are the shortcomings of the Proton Mail Bridge app?
It requires the paid version. It isn’t available for Android. And it just shouldn’t be required - email clients use POP3 or IMAP - those are the standards. I respect that Proton is trying to improve privacy with this app, but I wish they offered the option to use the established protocols too.
I use paid Protonmail but never the bridge app since I have no need for it. It make sense for business to hide some features behind a paywall. Almost all do. The reason they don’t need it for Android is because they already offer an app for it. That’s not the case for Desktop. Bridging 😉 to your next point of the other protocols; In tech you often can’t have all 3 - security, privacy, convenience, often 2 of 3. They created a service focused on privacy and security resulting convenience left behind in third place. That’s their business model, that’s what you get and the reason why you use them. If its too inconvenient then their service is probably not for you. They deemed those “established protocols” not compatible with their vision so they needed a workaround to keep your stuff secure and private. Otherwise whats the point if they are going to have such a blatant weak point of failure. If not you then many others will be complaining of the vulnerability that undue the whole point of using their services.
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I don’t know if it’s because I’m from Europe or something else but I’ve been hosting my emails for over 10 years and never really had issues like those discribed in the article.
The only issues I had was when I had to send a lot of emails in a shirt time (invites for a wedding, and it was on a newly created dedicated domain, don’t know if that made it worse).
Also when I was hosting at home, but since I moved to a dedicated server everything has been fine.
That being said I agree that we are being victims of a disgusting racket and that something should be done to make sure everyone is doing their job so that we leave a fair chance to competition. There are rules to regulate other things, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be the case for email and interoperability in general.
Very interesting article and analysis, it’s a shame we reached this state though…
nice, i have heard basically the same thing from friends.
but have also read fairly consistent reports of similar issues as described in the article.
out of interest are you able to confirm successful delivery to the usual suspects, eg. gmail or google/microsoft hosted mail etc?
Most of my contacts have a gmail account.and I don’t have any issue. I used to go through my DNS provider’s SMTP back when I was hosting at home specially for Microsoft but not anymore.
Would it still be feasible to self-host behind a proxy of some sort? So other’s never see your home server but you nonetheless have your mailbox in your living room.
I’m mostly thinking about services like AnonAddy and SimpleLogin.
The problem is that the moment that actual spammers are able to use that proxy too (or any IP within the range of it), then it’s likely it’ll be banned as well.
Mailcow + sendgrid free tier has been working for s few years now. You dont even have to give them a credit card. I let them deal with the IP blacklisting problem.
