FWIW I've personally setup an email server hosted on a consumer internet connection with a static IP. After setting up all the SPF and DKIM records properly, I could successfully deliver mail to Gmail just fine. So I think this is a bit overstated.
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Have you been using it consistently? From what I've heard, it's hard to not get blocked by any mail provider in the long run and spend a lot of work in making sure it stays this way since some block lists may just block you because you are in the same IP range as other etc.
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I used it a bunch. But for a special purpose so it didn't get tested with a lot of email providers.
Anyway, I brought it up because the article is so pessimistic you'd think that even my example would not work, which simply is not true.
Also Bitcoin dev Matt Corallo hosts his own email too last I checked. AFAIK he hasn't had too many issues with sending. But he has his own IP address space so...
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I was reading this expecting it to lead to a solution for e-mail spam.
I suspect it didn't because there's no solution to e-mail spam, at least not with the SMTP protocol as it exists today.
I recently started using Tutanota. Their spam filter is worthless, and doesn't learn jack shit. Notifications messages from a monitoring service that I do want to see get placed in the Spam folder, and at the same time my Inbox is filled with super obvious spam that keeps arriving, even after I've marked as Spam numerous nearly identical prior ones. But I refuse to go back to Google or any of the other 4 services that Lopp is referring to.
e-mail is still broken, 50+ years since the first spam / abuse occurred.
I'm hoping that if I just ignore all e-mails, e-mail as a communication medium will go away.
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My bro used to rant about this and I always figured he was messing something up... guess not..
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Excellent article.
I love that the entire BTC blockchain fits on a tiny 1TB disk on my desk - no VPS or cloud storage provider needed.
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Running email off a smaller webhosting company in Norway without noticable delivery problems, contrary to the article.
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His point is from an American perspective, and probably deals with his frustrations trying to set up large scale self-managed/hosted email processes for various work he's had. I'm pretty sure someone posted an earlier version of this same article that had even more dev-ops details of his frustrations.
Europe (EU and individual European countries) in general are known for more stringent regulations and protections over anything internet related. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying if you haven't had his issues running similar scale email processes for business, it's probably a jurisdictional difference...
I mean... not to be flippant, but what does "SMTP is an open protocol" mean in China or Russia or in the West, given some pressing intelligence/national security concern is pressing? I imagine the capture he talks about was planned and seen as a mutual good by competing despotisms around the world...
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Original article by Lopp:
By the time I left a decade later, that number was over 100 million emails per day.
I guess that's the main difference, I just have a few personal accounts, not sending any spam - sorry, marketing emails like his former employer.
So it appears the juggernauts have pulled up the ladder after themselves to make it hard on the competition. A kind of protocol-level instead of legal capture. But if you send less than 10 emails per day on average, you'll probably be fine, for now.
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The golden time of decentralized email also were never a real golden time - it was shit, technical difficulties and spam and centralized domain distribution. Not to say that our nowadays centralized mail system was better .. but Email has never been glorious, neither then nor now.
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The Death of Decentralization in SMTP | Plan ₿ Forum 2022 | Lugano
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