An example of why I hate the web

[sarn]

On Tuesday, 3 March 2020 at 20:20:25 UTC, matheus wrote:
> 2 questions:

Not H. S. Teoh, but I also run a mailserver.

> 1) Don't you have any problems with spam filters from other 
> services?

Google was okay as long as I ticked enough boxes here:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en

Microsoft (and a few other services) put more weight on IP 
reputation.  At first I'd sometimes get a rejection email back 
when I sent an email to an address managed by them, but the 
rejection email had a link to some site where I could jump 
through some CAPTCHA hoops to allow my email to get sent.  
Servers seem to trust me now but I can't remember how long it 
took.

Don't bother running a mailserver on an IP with a trashed 
reputation (e.g., IPs from AWS EC2 or one of the cheap cloud 
providers).  Some providers (like Google Cloud) block email 
ports, anyway.

> Yes that's true, this model is really broken, but the problem 
> is, having your own e-mail service may be target as spam for 
> other services and need to be 24/7.

Spam isn't as much of a problem as I expected.  I've had about 
two outright spam emails in nearly five years on my main server.  
Most spam I get is from people who get my business card and 
"helpfully" sign me up to their newsletters, or people emailing 
me because of my blog and asking me to link to unrelated websites 
they have.  Stuff that I'd get with a bigger service, anyway, and 
is easy to deal with.  I guess it's just not economical to spam 
some nerd's private mailserver with ads.

Reliability is a more important problem.  Email's pretty robust 
thanks to mail queues and retries, so a mailserver doesn't need 
to be up 24/7, but the fact is if it goes down it stays down 
until you fix it.  It's rare but can happen at a bad time.  I pay 
an uptime service to alert me if my mailserver goes down (same as 
everything else I run).