[vox-tech] How many people run their own mail server?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Mandel (tech_dev at wildintellect.com):

> I only pay less than $20/year for 5 boxes (several GB each) with webmail
> access and imap. The bus number is greater than 1, especially when I'm
> travelling and relying on email for certain things. If the network went
> out, or hardware failed in some way, I'd be down for the rest of the trip.
> 
> It would cost me more than that just to get a static IP or a vps.

It costs me only trivially more for a static IP above and beyond what I
need to pay to get reliable household broadband, the latter of which for
my household is a necessary expense for the family's collective usage.
('Reliable' is a qualifier bottom-feeders to rule out the likes of SBC and 
Comcast.)  So, that trivial surcharge beyond what must be paid anyway is
totally worth it to have a stable and permanent Internet presence immune
to vendor bullshit and similar headaches.

> It wouldn't surprise me if my service is blocking some of the more
> notorious known spammers. With Thunderbird adaptive filtering (I think
> it's bayesian based), it gets 99% of the spam, and I can retrain it on
> things that are ham. Having used it since it came out (early to mid
> 2000s) I've been quite happy.

I'm glad you're happy.  You have no control, no ability to check via
logfile, and almost zero visibility even into what the vendor MTA
policies and practices are.  In my experience, vendor MTA policies are
deliberately very lax because they're likely to get very angry customer
complaints about false-positive blocking (blocking of desired mail), but
very unlikely to get angry  complaints about false-negative blocking
(failure to block undesired mail).  Vendors characteristically are
extremely light on spam-blcoking in order to aim for a comfortable
mediocrity that is market-acceptable rather than good.   Also, light
checking means _much_ lower load on their infrastructure, as doing a
good job requires throwing significant RAM and CPU at the problem.

Any LDA or MUA-level blocking (such as you express happiness with) is
inherently handicapped in the information available to it and in what
remedies it can impose compared to SMTP-time measures performed at the
MTA to check and take actions _prior_ to accepting the mail.  Your
filtering cannot say '45x - try again if you aren't a spambot' (a highly
successful varietyy of teergrubing), it cannot say '55x - frak off,
spammer', it cannot say '55x - if you're a real MTA and not a spambot
you need to accept mail to the postmaster mailbox', etc.  All of these
are part of very useful antispam techniques (among many similar ones),
none of which are possible in a late-applied (LDA- or MUA-level)
filtering model.  IMO, the best that can be said of that model, where
the only thing you can do is 1. this is definitely spam that's already
been accepted so I'm going to remove it or 2.  this is probably spam so
I'll stash it in a folder the user will seldom if ever look at, is that
it's better than nothing.  Barely.

> I think running your own servers is great, and I think there's a role
> for running your own mail server when:
> 1. You want to know how to do it
> 2. It happens to be a skill you might pull out for employment

Yeah, I hear that a lot.  This is the time-honoured 'Servers are too
complex/too much trouble for anyone but a sysadmin' technopeasant
argument.  As I said, I had the good fortune to have never heard from
such people when, as a staff accountant with no history in IT, I started
doing it because it sounded interesting and nobody had yet told me I
shouldn't -- and it continues to pretty much run itself.

Ever since then, I hear from those people regularly, and find them very
amusing.


> 3. You find it fun

Maybe.  But more to the point, it's just satisfying to be in charge and
be pretty much immune to entire categories of vendor bullshit.

On reflection, the notion of it being 'fun' oddly misses the mark.  It's
really just infrastructure that tends to fade to the background of one's
consciousness, much as the telephone in your kitchen does.  (Author
Bruce Sterling made the point that you can tell a truly successful
technology, such as telephone service, by the fact that its users get
accustomed to it and seldom notice it unless it suddenly vanishes or
fails.  See _The Hacker Crackdown_, chpater 1.)


> 4. You're prepared to handle the possible outage scenarios

Yeah, the nice thing about having configured an MTA once is that you
know you can do it again if you ever need to.  And doing it under the
MTA four-day retry period is no challenge at all.