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by grrdotcloud 1063 days ago
Twenty some years later I am still on the same domain.

I initially ran my own email server. Spam filtering was easy.

Then things got more complicated.

Now I only use email for corporations to send me bills.

To the person just entering the world and getting exposed to computers and the internet I can almost understand the perspective.

There are a lot of silly things that exist because of necessity and systems being built over time.

Why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?

Like every tax system in government and system architecture, if we knew now how it would be implemented in used, we would do things differently.

There is a loss when oral history is removed from a culture. The stories of why are gone.

There is a warning, do not move the ancient landmarks. Do not tear down an old fence. After learning this I now ask, why is it this way?
1 comments
jeroenhd 1063 days ago
What got so complicated? Things like reverse PTR and SPF are trivial. DKIM is a bother to set up but you do it once during an annoyed afternoon and never need to look at it again. DMARC is as easy to set up as DKIM.

> why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?

If only there was something that could take words like "grdotcloud gmail com" that we could use to deliver mail!

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grrdotcloud 1063 days ago
From my apartment with DSL it wasn't exactly easy. Those TLAs didn't exist twenty years ago.
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FooBarWidget 1063 days ago
Yes you do all that plus spamassasin, and then still your outgoing emails don't arrive, and your incoming emails still contain spam.
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jeroenhd 1063 days ago
That's not my experience. MS Outlook seems to have it's off days, but email usually arrives just fine. That's even on Contabo's network, which is listed on that one "your ISP doesn't do enough to stop spam" blacklist Microsoft annoyingly refers to.

I don't see any spam in my inbox either, the little spam I do receive ends up in the spam box where it belongs.

Whatever mail setup Mailcow defaults to has worked great for me. Mailcow and mail-in-a-box have made the classic email setup very painless.

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