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1. Embed this notice
   David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) (david_chisnall@infosec.exchange)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 00:37:35 JST David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

   • Molly White

   @molly0xfff Ah, thanks. Odd design decision for Ghost, I wonder why they don't just need a standard sendmail interface or SMTP relay.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 00:37:34 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Molly White

     @david_chisnall @molly0xfff It's probably not hard to change this yourself in the source if you're self-hosting. Seems really odd that it's not done right upstream though. If you're not a spammer, mail sending should not cost *anything* - you can just send from the same vps that's hosting your site.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 00:44:54 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • DNA schedule

     @ryanprior I've run my own mailserver continuously for over half of my life, so yes. 🙃

     Personally, I'm hard in the "don't pay the protection racket" camp. The expensive delivery services *are providing service to spammers*, and using the money they rake in to keep themselves off slimy pay-to-get-removed lists.

     I'd rather pay libel lawyers to go after the lists if it came to that.

   • Embed this notice
     DNA schedule (ryanprior@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 00:44:55 JST DNA schedule

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias not sure how much you know about email deliverability, but in general it's not this simple. Email servers that send a lot of good non spammy email are treated as reputable and its emails will be more deliverable. Servers that send low traffic overall are treated as suspect, even if there's no spam reports, and a single report can sink you. For a self hosted paid newsletter, sending email from your own vps for free is likely to expose you to a lot of risk.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 01:23:34 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • DNA schedule

     @ryanprior Yes, I think that's completely fair. I'd like to see a lot more transparency about the whole topic.

     I'd also like to see a world where it's sending through a service that also serves spammers, rather than self-hosting, that gets your mail flagged as likely-spam.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     DNA schedule (ryanprior@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 01:23:35 JST DNA schedule

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias this is a reasonable stance! However, in a thread about affordability of infrastructure for a paid newsletter, it's worth calling out the potential hidden costs of establishing email reputation and keeping a lawyer on retainer in case of delivery list ransom. I think we want people to be clear-eyed about those risks if they're staking their publishing income.

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 01:50:49 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule
     @dalias @ryanprior Heh well for what it's worth, on my self-hosted setup using rspamd as spam filter, Sendgrid has been sending me so much spam even the legitimate emails relayed by them goes in the Junk folder.
     So depending on who your subscribers are (like universities are typically self-hosted for email), paying the email racketeers might not be worth it.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 01:52:12 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • DNA schedule

     @lanodan @ryanprior Yeah, I'm always skeptical of the claims that paying the racketeers makes your email go through smoothly. That's certainly what they'd like you to think, but I'm not sure there's any good data backing this up.

   • Embed this notice
     DNA schedule (ryanprior@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 01:56:54 JST DNA schedule

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @lanodan all the research I've read on deliverability comes from interested parties, I'd love to discover publications from independent researchers or labs.

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 04:08:20 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule
     • hidden
     @hidden @ryanprior @dalias I guess you confused Hetzner for another one (or maybe it's their web hosting part?) because on the VPS side of things they don't block/filter port 25. In fact my primary email server is on a Hetzner VPS.
     
     But well it makes sense for cloud hosters to typically block port 25 because the whole point of cloud is to be able to come and leave ~instantly, which could be easily exploited for bait&switch spam (which I'd say is more and more legacy now, GMail is a very big spammer).
   • Embed this notice
     hidden (hidden@androiddev.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 04:08:21 JST hidden

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule

     @ryanprior @dalias @lanodan To add to the discussion:

     Even if you are willing to run your own mail server, you're often stopped by hosting companies since they don't want to risk their IP address pool with poor reputation. Thus they'll often refer to you to sendgrid or others for sending (you can still receive but not send).

     I've seen this restriction on Digital Ocean and Hetzner.

   • Embed this notice
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 04:44:25 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule
     • hidden
     @hidden @dalias @ryanprior I guess they updated the policy since ~2018 and mine is grandfathered in, but seems very reasonable to me.
   • Embed this notice
     hidden (hidden@androiddev.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 04:44:26 JST hidden

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule

     @lanodan @dalias @ryanprior I have VPS on Hetzner, but https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/servers/faq/#why-can-i-not-send-any-mails-from-my-server

   • Embed this notice
     Autolycus 🏴‍☠️ (autolycus@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 05:37:58 JST Autolycus 🏴‍☠️

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule

     @ryanprior @dalias The problem I have with most of these e-mail delivery services is that they're just using the same AWS SMTP that any other schmuck any sign up for and then charging absurd amounts because they have a website that acts as a middleman.

   • Embed this notice
     DNA schedule (ryanprior@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 05:37:59 JST DNA schedule

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias apologies if this is 'splaining, but in my experience a lot of people who say some variation of "just send your own outbound email, you don't need to pay a company" don't realize the risk their advice carries.

     Rich Felker repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 05:38:41 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • DNA schedule
     • hidden

     @hidden @ryanprior @lanodan Some of the worst hosts...

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 05:40:53 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • DNA schedule
     • hidden

     @hidden @lanodan @ryanprior Sounds like they'll unblock on request. That's how my initial setup with Vultr was, IIRC.

   • Embed this notice
     hidden (hidden@androiddev.social)'s status on Saturday, 12-Apr-2025 05:40:54 JST hidden

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     • Rich Felker
     • DNA schedule

     @lanodan @dalias @ryanprior Yes... It was after 2018.

     I completely understand their decision. And it seems more VPS sellers have the same restriction.

     I just wanted to add that this is another clutch to self hosting mail server.