Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

  • You can’t successfully use a home email server.

    Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)

    You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

    Bullshit

    You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

    Bullshit

    As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

    Bullshit

    • You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own Datacenter

      Calling complete BS on that. I work in a medium size company and we do just that. Don’t know what he’s thinking.

    •  makeasnek   ( @makeasnek@lemmy.ml ) OP
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      2 months ago

      Sure, you can run one, good luck getting even a halfway decent delivery rate to mailboxes at any major mail provider. Even if they never receive a spam message from your server, your server is an “unknown” which counts against you. And if one person in your small company of 10 or 100 or even 1000 people gets their e-mail hacked and sends spam? Prepare for the rest of them to get punished for it. Running an SMTP server is a nightmare which is why, over time, more and more of the economy has just shifted their SMTP servers to organizations who professionally run SMTP servers instead of having their own.

      • I work as a Sysadmin for a web host who sells VPS’s. I’ve helped many people setup domains on their server to cover SPF, DKIM and DMARC passes on a daily basis. Most use these for personal or business level mail delivery without issue.

        Are there hurdles to overcome? Sure. But it’s not exactly hard as long as you have a IP that’s isnt a poor reputation (which as an ISP we help delist and improve). But it’s not impossible.

        Its more “convenient” to use a third party mail provider just as Office365 since you pass on all that setup and responsibility onto their framework, but it’s not hard to setup a decent level of mail service yourself.

      •  digdilem   ( @digdilem@lemmy.ml ) 
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        52 months ago

        You’re spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of “gmail silently drops my email”)

        Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that’s where much of the world’s spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.

    • Can, yes.

      Should, maybe.

      Enjoy doing, unlikely.

      And for sure your home isp has all the email ports blocked upstream.

      With all that being said, to call SMTP dead is wildly insane. I do figure it will die someday though. Probably around the same time of universal IPV6 adoption during the year of the linux desktop.