The best thing I can do for Fastmail employees is increase my spend. I’m currently only on a basic Business Account but i’m actively seeking to De-Redmond and De-Google my home so the Outlook and Gmail accounts that we use now for free have to be replaced. I’m at a point where the Spam filtering and other functionality of Fastmail is becoming worth the 100+ investment in a year so that I don’t have to log into my child’s outlook account and see that Microsoft has been sending them adult material in the form of daily news.
Also Google’s reliance on forcing me to authenticate via the Gmail/Youtube app causes issues whenever my wife needs to change her password and is not at home and available. I don’t feel more secure I feel like i’m forced to keep Googles apps on my phone.
I would have said that paying for email when you can get it for free is crazy 5 years ago. Today my peace is being affected by the sloppy software of Fortune 50 Tech dataminers.
The last email server I managed was behind a managed firewall and a Barracuda Email Protection server, was backed up to a tape library, and all messages were mirrored to an archive server and kept for seven years. Just checking logs took two cups of coffee.
Before I retired they decided to outsource email to Google.
The more I look at Hacker News, the more I’m finding that self-hosted mail servers are being blocked by Google and Microsoft and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it at this point.
I think it depends on how you define “self-hosted.” You can spin up a server at Linode or another commercial hosting provider and run a mail server as long as things are properly configured and you jump through the hoops of SPF/DKIM/etc.
You’re not going to be allowed to fire up a mail server on your dynamic-IP Mac Mini in your back office though.
As far as we know, Fastmail hasn’t fired people specifically for union-organizing. Something happened, and the optics are possibly sketchy - but there’s an accusation on one side, and an explanation from Fastmail that’s plausible.
Apple has been sued and lost over attempting to prevent union organizing:
and it’s not like it’s an isolated issue:
There’s literally more evidence against Apple than there is against Fastmail.
Very much part of the reason I am on Fastmail now. I was sticking with Google out of inertia and convenience. They took away the convenience when they declared free own-domain accounts were going away. I did the smart thing and broke out of my account a good 2 months before I had to… only to find that a month before their deadline they said “Nah, you can stay.” That really #$%&ed me off. I resurrected an old free Gmail account, bought a simple mailbox from Hover and bounced mail from Hover to Google. That has been suboptimal from day one, so the writing has been on the wall for a while.
I didn’t say Fastmail and Apple were doing the exact same thing. I said Apple, like Fastmail, is acting in ways that are anti-union. Quite a fair comparison, I think, even if their tactics are different.
From what I was seeing, the mail servers in question were pc’s purposed as such, in people’s homes. Everyone thought they had configured SPF/DKIM/DMARC correctly (FWIW).
Yeah, that’s an IP allocation issue. If you have a server someplace like Linode, those IPs are noted in the allocation database as being commercial IPs. If you have an IP from a cable modem provider, those IPs are noted in the allocation database as being ISP-provided IPs. People have discovered that ISP-allocated IP addresses were horrendous sources of spam, so they blacklist them.
That doesn’t mean that the commercial IPs are free and clear - but it means that trying to do it out of your basement is a largely-doomed enterprise from the get-go. You could receive email to that server, but you’d need a different provider for sending.
self-hosted mail servers are being blocked by Google and Microsoft and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it
I can be tricky to setup a mail server these days, but it’s far from impossible. You need a server with a clean IP address and to setup all the various DNS records correctly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). I’m a moderator over and r/selfhosted and increasingly we’re seeing people successfully host their own mail.
There seems to be a consistent group of people who are very insistent that “it’s impossible” but that doesn’t seem to be matched with reality. It can be frustrating, and sometimes the big mail providers are hard to deal with, but more and more people are doing it successfully.
There’s also the possibility of a hybrid approach. Host your own server for storing (IMAP/JMAP) and receiving (SMTP) email. But use a third party SMTP service for sending email.
This means you control the archive of all your mail (which is what most of us care about) and get the benefits of a commercial provider who deals with any deliverability hassles.
Self hosted email and other services are feasible for anyone who is willing to try it. Linode/hetzner/similar, linux, virtualmin gpl, some patience and attentiveness are all it really takes. Virtualmin is a very helpful tool in this regard. Self hosting is also an interesting and enjoyable pastime. But even if you didn’t want to go as far as being your own VPS admin, you could very well find a reputable web host (e.g. Zen in the UK) and have the same result + support.
I’m happy with Fastmail, just so you know. It’s good, though, to get good information on the web so others can see there’s hope if they want their own email server.
This is absolutely what I’d suggest to somebody interested in going this route. Self-hosting isn’t exactly rocket science as long as you’re using a commercial provider that doesn’t block incoming SMTP at their firewall, but it’s more hassle than most people probably want.
Outsourcing the SMTP to a third-party really does eliminate the vast majority of the headaches.
