we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self
What’s your alternative to the fake privacy company? I’m assuming the correct thing would be: if your threat model does not include governments, self hosted email, or if it does include governments, probably don’t use email.
Self hosted email is its own can of worms. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone outside of experienced IT people. You’ll end up blacklisted before you send your first email if you do anything wrong (and there’s a lot that can go wrong), and it doesn’t solve any security problems email has.
Anything sent over email just isn’t private. That goes for Proton customers when they send or receive anything from a non-Proton address too. The one thing privacy email providers can actually do is keep your inbox from being scanned by LLMs and advertisers. That doesn’t prevent the inboxes and outboxes of your contacts from being scanned, though.
If you use email, the best thing you can do is be mindful of what kinds of information you send through it. Use aliases via services like simple login or anonaddy when possible. Having a leaked email is a security vulnerability. Once bad actors have your email, they now have half of what they need to breach multiple accounts.
have been that sysadmin setting up a company email server. postfix is trivial to set up, absolutely the easiest experience. following that, though, was weeks of supplicant emails to MS to beg them please not to block us. My recommendation was never do this again, use a third-party outgoing email vendor, email is lost.
MS will send your mail straight to spam if you do not set up your domain keys and DMARC in DNS correctly and do not have a reject or quarantine RUA or the email(s) in your RUA bounce.
Sometimes you may get temporarily sent to spam if your IP is in a /28 of a known spammer IP.
That’s about it.
Self hosting on a bulletproof vps that actually deletes their logs and has a proven track record like buyvm is my preferred solution. I used this guide. It’s not perfect, it doesn’t set up encryption, and is a bit dated, but it’s an okay starting point. I didn’t bother setting up rspamd. You can also technically avoid setting up dovecot if you don’t want to use IMAP/POP3, but really limits your selection of mail clients to basically mailx and friends. This setup will let you mail to major mail providers, but be wary of what TLD you buy, my .work TLD means I get autospammed. :(
that’s…extremely off the beaten path, and incredibly very not how most people use / experience email
for the viewers at home: treat this as extremely niche through outright bad advice to follow if you ever want to try set up your own mail
(e: there are more than a few parts of it that are also laughably insufficient for what it aims to do, but this isn’t the place and it’s saturday on top; free tech support comes on other days)
smtpd.conf(5), pf.conf(5), and openssl(1) manpages and friends are your best resources for setting this up, I just provided that guide as examples as setting all this up can be daunting with just the manuals and no other context. The short guide provided in that blog is not going to teach you firewalling, filtering your maildir; and there’s definitely stuff missing, like restarting daemons after certs expire, and setting up your outbound dkimsign filter (was not available at the time of writing)
