Imagine the scenario where you have to bribe (disguised as a subscription) each megatech company to respect your privacy. How many times and how much will you be willing to pay for something that should be your fundamental right?
Given Meta’s history, no one should misinterpret their intentions. They should be outright banned for these egregious transgressions.
My point is that it is not correct that only gmail works.
Proton Mail and Fastmail are two such examples
I had Proton and Fastmail in mind when I wrote that reply - along with some others like Migadu. But the point remains - you need to be a large scale mail provider like any of them to bargain your way into deliverability. Self hosting is completely left out - a far cry from the actual federated design of emails.
It is a lot of work and fairly costly to get correctly setup and a real pain to maintain.
That is not necessarily true these days. There are a lot of turnkey bundles like mailinabox, mailu and mailcow that are easy to deploy, maintain and update. There are even projects that aim to combine all the necessary services into a single binary server - like maddy and stalwart. They provide everything necessary for running a mail server and ensuring deliverability. But they still don’t get delivered on those large service providers.
There is very little reason to do it too
Paid services that don’t sell you out is much better than big free ones that squeeze you for data. But I don’t consider having our data on someone else’s server as ideal. The ideal thing is that every home should have a cheap server with net/web applications that can be deployed with the ease of installing a desktop application. But we are going the wrong way. And those big monolithic abusive service providers are the biggest hurdle to achieving that.
‘It works for me’ isn’t an answer and that doesn’t make it overblown. This is a well known problem for years.
I applaud your intention. But there really is such a thing as peer pressure. The reason why only Gmail/GSuite and Hotmail/365mail is left is because these two ensured that mail wasn’t deliverable from independent email servers. And the fact that a vast majority was on them helped them convert a federated messaging medium into more-or-less centralized service. Even today, there are a lot of people around who knows the harm in using Chrome, but then goes ahead and say - “I would have switched to Firefox, if only some-random-useless-website worked on it”. It’s always possible for people to harass the company/institution to support Firefox. But they would rather make up excuses to stay on Chrome than do something about it. The same happens to every Google service as well - especially Gmail.
A lot of stupid techno wannabes will think that this is cool and ruin it for everyone else. We need that laughing man tech from Ghost in a Shell.
It’s true that most people won’t know or care. But the only ones who can make a difference are the ones who understand the situation. We shouldn’t assume that nobody will listen to us. If we tell a hundred people, perhaps 5 will listen - and even that’s a pessimistic assumption. Even such small changes add up in the long run. The last nail on the coffin of our freedom will be the silence of those with the wisdom to recognize its erosion.
Google has also started delaying the approval of revisions of privacy-related addons. This is an all out war against user privacy. Everyone, please stop using or promoting this Trojan malware called chrome or anything based on it.
These companies dig up everything from a prospective employee’s past, starting from childhood. Things that you said come back to bite you, even if you got wiser and changed your stance. But companies get to pull shit like this without consequences.
There should be a public blacklist database with every company and their dirty infractions like these. That way, at least very competent and desirable candidates can avoid them and look for better jobs.
I don’t have anything to hide
Great! Then I guess they don’t mind giving you their bank password, credit card pin, details of all the medicines they take, information from the work they do, their detailed weekly activity schedule, their browser history, their investment portfolio and assets, etc, etc… I’m salivating at the thought of the hundreds of different ways in which I can make money with all that info!
Email hosting is hard for two reasons. The first is that there are too many parts to configure - MTA, MDA, DKIM, RDNS, spam filter, webmail, etc. The viable solution is to use a turnkey solution like mailinabox, mailcow or mailu.
The second problem is deliverability. At the minimum, you will have to ‘warm up’ the server. You will have to send a few dozen mails to others and ask them to mark as not-spam. Even then, a lot of other factors come into play - like the IP address block (for example, mails from AWS always gets blocked), domain name and even the top-level domain - they all influence the spam filter score.
Meanwhile, deliverability with Google and Microsoft (incl google workspace and ms 365) are lost causes. Google sends your mail to the spam folder irrespective of your spamassasin score. They provide no viable solution to this. MS on the other hand just drops mail silently. This isn’t a bug. Both of them are trying to destroy the federated nature of email and consolidate all email business to themselves.
Meanwhile, the big players like fastmail and migadu get better treatment. Especially, migadu is a good choice if you want unlimited aliases.
Finally, talking about aliases. Most services (except migadu) offer only a few aliases. That limitation is not there for selfhosted email. An alternative to aliases is to use + addresses (eg: mybox+bank@mydomain.com). The advantage of this method is that you can make up multiple addresses on the fly (without registering) using a single alias/address. You can use this in combination with a filter like sieve (server-side) or notmuch (client-side) to sort and filter incoming mail.
I’m sure that this won’t stop the idiots who argue in support of using Discord as a support channel for FOSS projects.