Emails and Decentralized Protocols

Articles

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years, I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.

• Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which do not follow net neutrality principles.
• Google has half a billion results for "my email goes directly to spam
• email servers run bayesian filtering algorithms, which protect you, and most spam doesn't reach your inbox.
• Big Tech deliberately nerfs email deliverability.
• if you want to build services on top of the email, you have to pay for an email-sending API which others in the industry have blessed. One of them.

Self-Hosted email is the hardest it's ever been, but also the easiest.

• Deliverability may be troubled, but running your email server has never been easier. Struggling with postfix and dovecot configuration, semantics, and architecture isn't the only way to start using the email you control.
• You don't have to postfix + dovecot in 2022.
• An excellent recommendation from the original discussion on Hacker News was to use ImprovMX as an outgoing email server.

Others

• Alexander Obenauer. My career began with Reimagining Emails and finding ways to build that vision on top of the existing email protocols.