this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It's probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn't apologize at all). Allegedly they're trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it's not working well enough lol

A good problem to have although long term we're going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.

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[–] eodc@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you were to set up your own SMTP server and try to deliver mail, you essentially cannot reliably email any of the larger providers, because they’ve taken steps to mitigate spam and issues which also makes it impossible to handle your own email anymore, even if the intent wasn’t explicitly to break self-hosting.

But this isn't true either? I can easily spin up a SMTP server on a homelab, create an MX record, and email my friends with Gmail accounts as if I was emailing from my Protonmail or Gmail account.

I appreciate you acknowledging your bias against central providers, but to be honest I think it's leading to some incorrect conclusions. This discussion is also kind of getting derailed, but I'd be happy to continue debating about it.

Interesting; my general experience (and that of customers I spent time working with doing support for various cloud providers) was that you could, theoretically do so, but 'sending the email to a provider' and 'the provider accepts it and delivers it' were not always the same thing.

Microsoft was especially bad in that it would accept the message, and give you the standard SMTP 'message accepted' response but then silently just drop it in the backend, never to be seen again. Didn't go to spam, didn't land in a filter just... vanished.

Google, at least, had the decency to tell you when it was going to reject your email, but still.

It was always the same dance: you need a PTR, an SPF record, DKIM, etc. but at the end of the day, Google and Microsoft absolutely gatekeep what gets delivered to their platform, so if it's critical that your email shows up reliably every time, you have to move into the "ecosystem" of ESPs and all the hoops that are involved there if you want your message to go to the 'big providers'.