this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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I don't think the SPF / DKIM / DMARC stuff is overly complex nor the core of the problem.
In my case it was recipients with bonkers microsoft exchange servers that just had weird ideas about who should be sending them emails.
For example, one thing that tripped me up forever ago was grey listing. Apparently the receiving server just wouldn't acknowledge the sending server for an arbitrary period of time, say 12 hours or so. Spam senders would usually give up long before then, while a legit server would keep trying because it's legitimately trying to deliver an actual email.
So my email-in-a-box type self hosted set up was fine really. Compliant you might say. But to send emails to this one in a thousand recipient I had to investigate what was going on and reconfigure things to ensure their server would interact with mine.
Another thing that can happen is that spammers just put your email address in the "from" field and fire off a few million emails. Obviously the DKIM signatures and SPF won't match but it still just makes your future legitimate emails look spammy. Having the credibility of a larger organisation goes a long way in this type of instance.
It's not the core of the issue, but the average joe that is a hobbyist self-hoster it will be.
IMO, the core issue is that there is no standard whatsoever. People just do whatever the hell they want with these records, pretty much. Microsoft and Google do it differently than each other, even.
The only solution for me is that we move on from email as a society.
Yeah.
Sadly I think email will be with us for the foreseeable future. It's broken, sure... but it's just so fundamental to the web.
An alternative would need to be ubiquitous, and that seems unachievable.
Indeed, you are not wrong. Such is the state of many, many things.
I admit it's easy enough to say, "let's get rid of it", but without a solution it's meaningless to say and is just an ideology.