Emails and Decentralized Protocols
Articlesโ
After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years, I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.โ
- 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.โ
- Deliverability may be troubled, but running your email server has never been easier. Struggling with
postfixanddovecotconfiguration, semantics, and architecture isn't the only way to start using the email you control. - You don't have to
postfix+dovecotin 2022. - An excellent recommendation from the original discussion on Hacker News was to use ImprovMX as an outgoing email server.
Othersโ
- Alexander Obenauer. My career began with Reimagining Emails and finding ways to build that vision on top of the existing email protocols.