[simias]

He has a point though. Right now if you have an android smartphone, use gmail and google search you're telling google basically everything you do, where you are, what you have an interest in and the people you know.

Each of these services in isolation can know a great deal about you but being able to correlate the data makes it so much worse.

That's why I try to avoid putting all of my eggs in the same basket, I have an android phone but I use duckduckgo for search, my own server for email and firefox for browsing the web. If Mozilla, my server host or ddg decides to betray me (or gets hacked) at least they only have access to a slice of my life.

[DanielBMarkham]

That's why I try to avoid putting all of my eggs in the same basket

This is what I had been trying up until six or seven years ago. At that point it just got too complex to build and maintain.

With ISPs selling our location and traffic data, I think there's no engineering your way around the problem now. Perhaps the best we can do is damage mitigation.

[devrandomguy]

Can you recommend a good source of info about running a personal email server? I have heard that it is extremely difficult to get mainstream email providers to accept email from unrecognized sources, but if that is not the case, or if there is a good method for dealing with that madness, then I am very much interested in managing my own email.

[simias]

I just use dovecot, postfix and spamassassin. It did take me many hours and a lot of googling to configure it but it's very low maintenance after that.

I don't have any problem getting my emails accepted by gmail and friends.

The trick is to use an IP range that's not "fishy" (that basically precludes hosting email on your home connection, everybody expects spam from those and they're blacklisted everywhere). Then use DKIM, SMTPS, DMARC, SPF and be very careful not to allow any kind of open relay for spammers and you should be mostly fine, at least in my experience.

There are many websites online that offer to test your email setup for obvious flaws (open relay, missing headers etc...), for instance https://www.mail-tester.com/ and https://mxtoolbox.com/diagnostic.aspx . You should also check if some blacklists have your IP or domain blacklisted for some reason, and then request a delisting (after making sure that you're actually not sending spam because of a bad config): https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

It's definitely not plug-and-play but it's pretty interesting if you don't mind system admin. You also have a lot of flexibility if you want to filter and automate your emails in any way. I was also pleasantly surprised by the efficiency of spamassassin, properly trained there are very few false negatives and almost no false positives.

[BenjiWiebe]

I didn't find it hard at all. Don't expect for it to work on a residential IP address though. I have dovecot and postfix running on a linode.

[saint_fiasco]

If they were all different companies, eventually consumer data would be commoditized and they would sell that data to each other anyway.