Quote of the week [LWN.net]

For the longest time, the distributed nature of email was what made it possible for Linux development to remain truly decentralized, but email in 2019 is radically different from email in 2009. Running an independent email server that reliably sends and receives email is becoming more and more difficult now that most of email traffic goes through 5-6 major companies -- you must do SPF, DKIM, ARC/DMARC, TLS, and who knows what next, just to be reliably accepted by Gmail (maybe). And even if someone uses one of those major email providers doesn't mean the patches won't end up in someone's spam folder, show up a week late, or arrive mangled.

— Konstantin Ryabitsev

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Quote of the week

Posted Jun 8, 2019 12:23 UTC (Sat) by Gladrim (subscriber, #45751) [Link] (4 responses)

> you must do SPF, DKIM, ARC/DMARC, TLS, and who knows what next, just to be reliably accepted by Gmail (maybe).

*none* of these are required for email to be reliably accepted by Gmail.

Running a reliable mail service really is not that difficult. No more difficult than anything we do in tech. Considerably less so than some.

Quote of the week

Posted Jun 9, 2019 3:54 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

>*none* of these are required for email to be reliably accepted by Gmail.

True. My mail server implements ¾ of those correctly, and GMail instead rejects it for being of too low a caste.

Quote of the week

Posted Jun 9, 2019 5:55 UTC (Sun) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

You just discovered the difference between necessary and sufficient!

Quote of the week

Posted Jun 10, 2019 1:52 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

I do SPF and TLS, plus GMail's postmaster verification, and GMail seems to take any email I send it.

Quote of the week

Posted Jun 12, 2019 11:54 UTC (Wed) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

I also do SPF and TLS, and I don't even know what GMail's postmaster verification is, and I don't have problems sending to GMail from my own servers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Quote of the week

Posted Jun 10, 2019 23:34 UTC (Mon) by masneyb (subscriber, #7413) [Link]

Two tips for those that run their own email servers:

- Send a test email to check-auth@verifier.port25.com and it'll report back on the status of SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, spamassassin, etc on your email setup.

- Consider registering your mail relay server with https://www.dnswl.org/ to help with the reputation of your server.

Brian