Who is this book for?

Posted Nov 20, 2024 0:21 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Who is this book for? by dowdle
Parent article: Book review: Run Your Own Mail Server

I think this is a good book to help create a pipeline of competent admins outside of a few large corporations and service providers. Who is supposed to be hired as the next generation of admins for those corporations and service providers if very few people ever learn or have experience with email on a small scale, people whose only experience is the internal training at that organization, or similar peer institutions, which creates blind spots that become outside of the possible solution space as the system needs to change over time. I think there is a large cohort of technical experts who started by running small scale personal servers and desktops using Linux/Unix that gave them a breadth of experience that isn't had by people who only know Python and Kubernetes. Keeping a community of postmasters, hostmasters and webmasters alive, by showing technically minded people that they _can_ do this stuff themselves if they have the time and interest, its not something _only_ for Gmail/O365, is a good thing IMHO, not just because it might lead to cushy jobs but because users keep the software and standards alive too.

Who is this book for?

Posted Nov 20, 2024 4:29 UTC (Wed) by buck (subscriber, #55985) [Link] (4 responses)

Touché

Without getting too conspiracy-minded, if nobody is maintaining SMTP services as a least common denominator for password recovery, communications from financial services companies, pizza order delivery receipt sending, etc., aside from the big providers who make their profits elsewhere, then we are not far from reverting to the world of Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL, with no links between our messaging providers and their online communities except what they maybe deign to allow us, perhaps for an interchange fee, and only as long as they can't more directly monetize our online time by keeping our packets in their networks.

That said, I myself am going to have to depend on other people keeping the vision alive, because I am not up to the challenge of not only getting a mail domain on-line, SPF and DKIM (or is it DMAC?) correctly configured, kept off IP block lists, etc., but then having to keep up with the continuing evolution of the tradecraft required to keep mail flowing with as much of the junk as possible being winnowed.

Though, for all the success that free SMTP exchange may have staying around and being vital longer term, i am not ultimately that hopeful. Not unless the administrators who continue in the trade band together like the network operators do and figure out how to keep settlement-free peering alive just because they feel it is the right thing to do. But I just don't see that being sustainable in this case and wonder what the cost of contacting each other that we currently take for granted as being marginally 0 is going to be once the email baseline is no longer there to undercut any provider's designs on charging us to communicate. Brings back memories of toll calling.

OK, maybe this is a wee bit conspiracy-minded.

Who is this book for?

Posted Nov 20, 2024 14:21 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (3 responses)

I had a half-formed thought before that keeping organizations invested in SMTP allows small independent services to exist, like a personal domain, but if MS and Google agreed and coordinated with the top 100 (maybe even top 20) email services they could define a new private protocol between themselves, that might have great technical and security benefits, which would be too difficult for small personal servers to effectively use, even if it is officially "open". In some ways that reminds me of Mastodon/ActivityPub vs Bluesky/AT where you can host your own personal Mastodon instance just like email (but then have to deal with substantial administrivia and performance issues such that paid hosting services exist to help automate server management) or Bluesky where you can in theory host your own data but the indexing/search/feed/app services have a huge footprint that can really only be provided by a big tech company, it's infeasible/impossible to host the app on your own. I could see email moving to an AT-like situation.

Who is this book for?

Posted Nov 20, 2024 19:30 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> I had a half-formed thought before that keeping organizations invested in SMTP allows small independent services to exist, like a personal domain, but if MS and Google agreed and coordinated with the top 100 (maybe even top 20) email services

email is one service that needs to work with all kinds of clients. Corporations that run in-house email servers will be pissed if you stop receiving their emails.

> where you can in theory host your own data but the indexing/search/feed/app services have a huge footprint

No, they're not. I'm self-hosting them on my system. Granted, the setup right now is a pain, but if you just want to follow people and let others follow you, then even an RPi can host it.

If you want to ingest the whole firehose, then it's a different story.

Who is this book for?

Posted Nov 22, 2024 15:08 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

>> but if MS and Google agreed and coordinated with the top 100 (maybe even top 20) email services

> email is one service that needs to work with all kinds of clients. Corporations that run in-house email servers will be pissed if you stop receiving their emails.

I don't think a change like that would be instant, but just like the large providers deprecating username/passwords in favor of OAuth or insisting on TLS, if they published a new mail submission and mail transfer protocol the smaller services would update or outsource if they want to keep talking to their customers and suppliers on MS/Google email, and the incentive is for the hosting providers to make outsourcing the easier option, even if that is by making self-hosting more complicated and expensive (costs a larger provider can absorb but a smaller one may not).

>> where you can in theory host your own data [on Bluesky/AT] but the indexing/search/feed/app services have a huge footprint

> No, they're not. I'm self-hosting them on my system. Granted, the setup right now is a pain, but if you just want to follow people and let others follow you, then even an RPi can host it.
> If you want to ingest the whole firehose, then it's a different story.

I think we are in agreement, you can self-host the data (bluesky-pds) on an RPi but you can't easily self-host the feed generator/relay/app/moderation provided by the Bluesky app, even with the code on the bluesky-social github you don't have a full independent service without relying on bsky.app infrastructure, it's designed by people whose relevant experience is managing a firehose of data processing using VC capital, it might not scale down in the way that personal email as described in RYOMS can. At least that's my understanding, I'm not an expert in AT, but I have read a few whitepapers about its design.

Who is this book for?

Posted Nov 22, 2024 22:02 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> I don't think a change like that would be instant, but just like the large providers deprecating username/passwords in favor of OAuth or insisting on TLS, if they published a new mail submission and mail transfer protocol the smaller services would update or outsource if they want to keep talking to their customers and suppliers on MS/Google email

This is not similar. Very few companies use OAuth exclusively, most support logins/passwords.

> I think we are in agreement, you can self-host the data (bluesky-pds) on an RPi but you can't easily self-host the feed generator/relay/app/moderation provided by the Bluesky app

Uhm. You can, it's not even complicated technically. The fundamental issue is that if you want to do moderation, then you actually have to do moderation.