[ale] Why Run your own email server?

Dustin Priest dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com
Thu Sep 29 13:41:42 EDT 2016


Speaking of SSL and mail transmission... Anyone here tried running 
Darkmail yet? It's coming from Ladar Levison of Lavabit and, according 
to the specifications, does end-to-end encryption that includes 
metadata. Supposedly it's "back" compatible with SMTP as well. I've not 
looked at it in a while but it caught my interest after all the legal 
drama surrounding Lavabit and the Snowden leaks.

On 9/29/2016 1:21 PM, George P. Burdell wrote:
> Anybody who has actually run their own mail servers for a while knows 
> how much of a tremendous chore it is just to keep your mail from being 
> blacklisted.   Most major providers will, if one person acts up in 
> your datacenter and you're not at some enormous facility with a name 
> brand, simply ban the entire netblock.   They don't care about 
> collateral damage.   I even get mail server admins who block my Google 
> Business email ... and that's a PAYING space, and ergo one of the 
> least polluted netblocks for spam on the entire internet.
>
> Oh yea, you can still do your own mail server.  But why on Earth would 
> you want to?   How much money is your time worth?   How valuable are 
> your emails?   How much does it cost you if an important one doesn't 
> make it?   And I say that as a card carrying member of the EFF who has 
> more than a passing distaste for the surveillance state we have 
> become.   The NSA didn't kill private email servers ... spam did.
>
> It also doesn't help that pretty much every stand alone mail client is 
> varying degrees of unsatisfactory (at least for my multi-account 
> needs).   Opera Mail was PERFECT.  And they killed it.
>
> And we'll assume for the sake of argument that spam filtering isn't a 
> problem and there are tremendous mail clients available.    That 
> doesn't fix that the overwhelming majority of email traffic goes over 
> in clear text, and the NSA will almost certainly see and record it in 
> transit with their strategy of putting snooping stations just upstream 
> (up-pipe?) from major people of interest like Google.   If one day all 
> email is traversing over SSL, Alex's idea will be the simplest way to 
> defend your privacy without signing up for the headache of running 
> your own mail server.
>
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Alex Carver 
> <agcarver+ale at acarver.net <mailto:agcarver+ale at acarver.net>> wrote:
>
>     On 2016-09-29 02:30, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
>     > Even client/lawyer communications aren't safe from DHS prying:
>     >
>     >
>     http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20160927-feds-we-can-read-all-your-email-and-you-ll-never-know
>     <http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20160927-feds-we-can-read-all-your-email-and-you-ll-never-know>
>
>     Yes, this is why I run my own server and download my free email
>     services
>     (gmail, etc.) to my local hard drive on a regular basis (deleting the
>     server side copies after download).
>
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