I believe first question you need to answer is: what is your threat model? Are you afraid of losing all your mails (backups)? Losing control over your email address? What are you going to do if you can't login to your mailbox tommorow? How much do you mind if someone else gain access to your old mails? Computer criminalists, government, rouge google admin, google scanning your emails content for targeted advertising (privacy / security)? Are delays in delivering mail acceptable? (there are more questions) backups: getmail or imapsync and backup them like files control over mail address: buy your own domain, setup on your own server or something like google apps privacy / security: computer criminalists: good unique password, 2-factor authentication, use only trusted devices, don't do anything stupid privacy / security: government and google: use gpg to encrypt / sign your mails or setup your own server (with luks; remember, government can just steal your server from datacenter and there is nothing you can do about it) I think your own domain + backups + google apps is pretty good setup. Secure, reliable, cheap and you can switch to other hosting without changing your email address. If you don't trust google or government (well, you shouldn't :P) then setup your own email box. 2012/10/11 Menachem Moystoviz <moystovi@g.jct.ac.il>:

Recently, my paranoia levels have been ratcheted up by reading about companies' treatment of their users, along with an increasing awareness of my powerlessness with respect to most content providers. I therefore curbed most online activity and have attempted to host those services I used on my own server, in most cases living without when I didn't succeed.

Two months ago, I attempted to install postfix and dovecot on my Arch box in order to be able to host my own mail. Naively I thought that all I needed was the right software and a dynamic DNS address. In other words, I thought it would be as simple as setting up a web server.

Use cheap vps with static ip, it will be much easier. I doubt anyone keeps their mail server in home with dynamic ip. -- Krzysztof Warzecha

Menachem Moystoviz, Thu 2012-10-11 @ 13:23:32+0200:

Which do you suggest? Do you have an alternative?

I use Postfix + Dovecot on an Arch Linux Linode VPS and I'm pretty happy with it.

2) Hard to maintain, can crash at any moment, will drive me to early grave

It is a bit of a pain to initially configure, but after spending a couple hours getting it set up, I've almost never had to touch the configuration, except when I added SpamAssassin and, later, procmail to the stack.

I do a combination of #1 and #2.

I have a (cheap!) web hosting account (with Dreamhost) which also provides me with an email address on their mail system. I have the DNS entries for my domain point to Dreamhost, so any mail for my domain gets delivered there.

But I only use Dreamhost as a mail drop-off point - I don't store my mail there. I have a cron job that runs fetchmail every few minutes which pulls the mail down to my home server, where I'm running dovecot, exim, and squirrelmail (webmail), and I access my mail there. (As well as make periodic backups of all the mail stored there.)

For outgoing mail I do the same in reverse. I have exim on my home server set up to relay any outgoing mail up to dreamhost's SMTP server. That gets me around the issue of not being able to send mail from a dynamic IP.

HTH,

DR

That sounds more or less like what I intended to do before asking for advice here... Thanks. Gesh

Problem - as a high school graduate, I don't exactly have a steady source of income. I could try to find income sources, but I'm not aware of what cheap VPSs exist. in the wiki, you can find some vps provider providing arch. check their prizes, some are below 10€/month. as i'm in germany, i use netcup (maybe not an option for you). its pretty cheap.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/VPS

On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Menachem Moystoviz wrote:

Recently, my paranoia levels have been ratcheted up by reading about companies' treatment of their users, along with an increasing awareness of my powerlessness with respect to most content providers. I therefore curbed most online activity and have attempted to host those services I used on my own server, in most cases living without when I didn't succeed.

Two months ago, I attempted to install postfix and dovecot on my Arch box in order to be able to host my own mail. Naively I thought that all I needed was the right software and a dynamic DNS address. In other words, I thought it would be as simple as setting up a web server.

Naturally, I found out that most anti-spam software is leery of mail from dynamic DNS hosts who do not have rDNS and PTR records set up, that they preferred DKIM mail, etc.

Seeing as these involve even more effort, I thought to ask the enlightened members of the Arch community which solution they would suggest me to use, because I trust you to have made intelligent decisions in this matter and believe you understand this outlook. Also, I've seen many users with email addresses issued by their own domain, which leads me to believe some of you may have gone through this before.

The alternatives I'm aware of are: 1) Do what most people do, and just sign up for webmail, paranoia demanding me to download all email every day. Possibly alias the domain by routing everything through postfix first. 2) Host my own server, paranoia demanding multiple redundant backups. 3) No email - Knuth style

Pros: 1) Very reliable, better support, and non-crazy 2) Gain vast amounts of power over my email 3) Less distraction, no effort at all

Cons: 1) Less control, more black box. Is aliasing even possible? Too many providers - which to choose? 2) Hard to maintain, can crash at any moment, will drive me to early grave 3) Harder to keep in touch with people this way, harder to check what's going on

Which do you suggest? Do you have an alternative?

Thanks in advance,

Gesh

I took the fourth way - I gave up. Acclimated myself to the idea that no, all of my email won't be reliably archived, and it will be neither private nor particularly reliable, and stuck with acme webmail. (Gmail in this case, as you can see.) It's still preferable to no email whatsoever, and I fetch email with fetchmail, read it with alpine, and save those bits that I know need saving. Barring that, I found this to be a good guide: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/04/so-youd-like-to-send-some-email-thr..., although it's obviously targeted towards those automating the sending of massive volumes of email. -- Scott Lawrence Linux jagadai 3.5.4-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Sep 15 08:12:04 CEST 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux

On Thursday 11 Oct 2012 18:18:10 Menachem Moystoviz wrote:

Basically, the suggestion I'm seeing here is: go, work, get a VPS - can probably get one for cheap - and setup Arch on it. Sounds good. Will only have to figure out how to get money...

seen this on G+ today. no idea if it can help you, but it might, depending on many different things... http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Money-Fast -- phani.

On Thursday 11 October 2012 13:23:32 Menachem Moystoviz wrote:

The alternatives I'm aware of are: 2) Host my own server, paranoia demanding multiple redundant backups.

Pros: 2) Gain vast amounts of power over my email

Cons: 2) Hard to maintain, can crash at any moment, will drive me to early grave

Which do you suggest? Do you have an alternative?

Not sure about my level of enlightenment, but here's my solution that has worked well for a year now. I wouldn't say that is's very hard to maintain once you get it running, which was the part that took by far most of the time. I have a VPS running on Linode [www.linode.com], but naturally any VPS provider will do as long as you get full access to the machine. Then I have a .eu domain to have a name for the server. As for the OS the server is running Debian stable. Debian was the choice because there is a very through guide on setting up your own email server at: http://workaround.org/ispmail/squeeze That is a long document, but very good reading. If you end up going this path do read the whole thing first to get an idea what you're about to do. Of course running your own service needs backing up. Linode provides quite a cheap backup service of their own, which propably would be the easiest. However, as I'm already using SpiderOak [www.spideroak.com] for whom security and privacy are main selling points, with a little bit of scripting, I simply started using their service on my server as well. Anyways, that's the outline of my currrent setup that has been reliable for a year now. I did not have previous experience on setting up mail servers, so it took some time to set it up, but was all in all a good learning experience...and most definitely fun. -- Vesa Muhonen <vesa.muhonen@iki.fi>

Aye, but I have the following concerns regarding hosting the server myself: - Only have one server - no redundancy or reliability - No source of income -> no possibility of VPS AFAIK - DKIM, PTR, SPF, rDNS all require money and static IP (more money)

Easydns is cheap for spf but charges per year and offer email redundancy when down. I'm not sure DKIM and SPF will help as those that block dsl connections are unlikely to be that savvy and likely drop the connection at the ip layer. I'd be interested in evidence/references to the contrary though. The RFCs say as long as your connection is down for less than 4 hours any mail shall be queued, though hotmail only waits an hour!!. In any case, any important mail will usually (some automated mail may be an exception?) be phoned through or resent due to failure notices. -- _______________________________________________________________________ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) _______________________________________________________________________

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 06:18:10PM +0200, Menachem Moystoviz wrote:

Basically, the suggestion I'm seeing here is: go, work, get a VPS - can probably get one for cheap - and setup Arch on it. Sounds good. Will only have to figure out how to get money...

Gesh

Yes, and then spend the rest of your nights worrying about the security and stability of your own server. Seems like a lovely waste of time and money for someone who, by their own word, has little of each to spend. Really, just add two-factor auth to a gmail account and be done with it. Google has no interest in singular people. Moreover, Googlers who take an interest in data or logs belonging to singular people find themselves no longer working at Google. d

Reading through the responses, I find that my previous evaluation of my options was correct. The most reliable and easiest solution, by far, would be to set up a standard account, and to download a copy of all emails. The only problems with this are the lack of control and privacy. My other option is to host my own mail server, either at home or on a VPS (which would cost more), which means much lowered reliability, a couple of days' worth of time setting up a rudimentary system, and sleepless nights wondering whether it was being compromised or used to relay spam. Benefits: control and semi-ascertained privacy. Therefore, I think I should go with the first route, possibly searching for ways to ensure end-to-end encryption and to make the email address's domain my own. However, to those who support using a VPS or hosting at home - how do you deal with the lessened reliability, costs and headache? Is it as bad as I think it is, or is it possibly a fruitful and useful endeavor? Thank you all, Gesh

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 02:13:54PM -0400, Dave Reisner wrote:

Really, just add two-factor auth to a gmail account and be done with it. Google has no interest in singular people.

It should be noted that Gmail's two-factor authentication provides no extra security if you're planning on using it with a mail client. You will have to set up an "application specific password", which is a fixed-length alphanumeric password given to you by Google. Despite the name, it is simply another password that can be used to log in via IMAP/POP through any client (`openssl s_connect`, etc), without the out-of-band verification.

Moreover, Googlers who take an interest in data or logs belonging to singular people find themselves no longer working at Google.

This is true, but if you were really very paranoid, you would notice that you don't have any control over how long Google keeps "deleted" email on the server, and that any unencrypted emails on a server can be obtained by governments with relative ease. If you control the server and mailserver, you can encrypt your drive and also have all incoming email encrypted with your public key, so that your mail isn't just sitting around on a box for the taking. Neither of these things would stop a truly determined government-level attacker (unencrypted mail is still vulnerable in-flight for instance), but it would be useful if you have not yet been identified as someone of interest. guns

On 10/11/2012 07:35 PM, Menachem Moystoviz wrote:

Therefore, I think I should go with the first route, possibly searching for ways to ensure end-to-end encryption and to make the email address's domain my own.

Both are easy to do. Fetchmail supports SSL encryption on your connection to the hosting company's POP server. And it's quite easy to point your DNS entries to a hosting company's servers. HTH, DR

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 07:49:00PM -0500, sungpae@gmail.com wrote:

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 02:13:54PM -0400, Dave Reisner wrote:

...

Really, just add two-factor auth to a gmail account and be done with it. Google has no interest in singular people.

It should be noted that Gmail's two-factor authentication provides no extra security if you're planning on using it with a mail client. You will have to set up an "application specific password", which is a fixed-length alphanumeric password given to you by Google. Despite the name, it is simply another password that can be used to log in via IMAP/POP through any client (`openssl s_connect`, etc), without the out-of-band verification.

Sure, what I had in mind was actually to take advantage of it. Disable POP/IMAP access and use OTP with webmail. This is true two factor auth and *does* provide added security.

...

Moreover, Googlers who take an interest in data or logs belonging to singular people find themselves no longer working at Google.

This is true, but if you were really very paranoid, you would notice

No, if you were really very paranoid, you'd realize that you just need to stay off the Internet.

that you don't have any control over how long Google keeps "deleted" email on the server, and that any unencrypted emails on a server can be obtained by governments with relative ease.

Well, I happen to know the retention policies, so this doesn't apply to me. I'll further point out that Google in particular is extremely transparent about what they give out to the government: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/ I'm not sure what you're trying to imply about unencrypted email and government bodies, but it sounds rather silly. Perhaps I don't drink enough koolaid.

If you control the server and mailserver, you can encrypt your drive and also have all incoming email encrypted with your public key, so that your mail isn't just sitting around on a box for the taking.

Receive encrypted email? How are you going to ensure that this always happens? I suppose you could simply deny anyone who isn't relaying over TLS (and just accept that you're going to miss out on a lot mail), but how do you control the sender's environment? There's equally many things on the sender's side (assuming they're vulnerable) that could potentially implicate you in whatever it is you're trying to hide. To expand on this, how do you control what happens to a message that you forward or write? You need to equally paranoid friends.

Neither of these things would stop a truly determined government-level attacker (unencrypted mail is still vulnerable in-flight for instance), but it would be useful if you have not yet been identified as someone of interest.

Again, if you're really going to be paranoid, just stay off the Internet. What we have here is an OP who's merely "waking up" to the realization that the definition of freedom is a bit different between meatspace and cyberspace. d

>From the responses I've received, I gather the following:
- Crypto is only going to get me so far, unless I can coerce all
incoming email to use TLS
- Until I have a steady income, my best bet is to use Google Apps for my domain
  and to download all incoming mail - probably deleting it from
Google's servers while I'm doing it
- Once I have a steady income, I can afford to pay for a VPS, on which
it will be more likely
  that a mail server set up on it will be able to send and receive mail

I really appreciate the help you guys gave. Thank you.

Gesh

P.S. I'm aware of the fact that, given a determined enough attacker
with enough resources, anything is hackable.
     However, this does not, in my opinion, absolve us from our
responsibility to try and secure our systems
     to the extent of our abilities

On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Kevin Chadwick <ma1l1ists@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

...

My other option is to host my own mail server, either at home or on a VPS (which would cost more), which means much lowered reliability, which means much lowered reliability

Sending to you directly as this mail was rejected by the list!!! That's a pity, this mail is informative, however the mods might disagree with the tone you used with respect to Yahoo and Microsoft. Not that I disagree that it is an objectionable practice to misinform one's customers. It's just that saying it the way you said it could insult some people.

That's debateable, DOS sure, but you have much greater control and speed of access with a local mail server and past mail will still be accessible during any attack. I wasn't referring to DOS/DDOS-style reliability. In my mind, reliability ~= uptime > 99.999% Of course, you're correct in noting that the fact that a VPS is, by definition, distant from me, means that in case of a network outage or DOS attack, email is inaccessible and therefore a server at home is better in this respect.

For other parts of the thread, it's worth noting that Google is the only one of the largest three providers that offers encryption between MTAs though it's SSL is also incompatible with some/possibly many servers and falls back to plain text. You can only check that on your own server of course. So basically, you're saying that when I send email through Google's SMTP services, they try their best to keep the connections secure? Shouldn't that be, you know, standard?

The fact Yahoo and Microsoft offer ssl to pop clients without telling them they don't offer SSL between MTAs for performance reasons is actually quite disgusting. If this is true, then it is definitely an objectionable practice, and should be widely published. It would be like an electrical company claiming they provide energy from clean, renewable sources, when the greenhouse gasses emitted by constructing the power plant exceed those emitted by a similarly scaled coal plant over its entire lifetime

Basically, as far as I can see, my options - my own server at home, a VPS or Webmail - are ordered on several related scales of varying degrees of abstraction, responsibility, required trust, ease of implementation and guaranteed quality of implementation. In sum, this means that my best option now, given my limited budget, is to start out with Google Apps for my own subdomain (gesh.uni.cx, provided by freedns.afraid.org), and from there, as my budget and time will allow, upgrade first to a VPS and from there to a server at home. Unless someone offers a better path, this is the path I see for myself. Thank you all for your time and help. Gesh Now, to find a GPG server on which to host my public key (and to figure out how to generate one) and to find a good backup solution (my siblings use Crashplan, and therefore I could backup onto their boxes. However, I've heard good stuff about SpiderOak... Maybe I should use a combined Crashplan-SpiderOak solution? Decisions, decisions, ...)

...

...

That's debateable, DOS sure, but you have much greater control and speed of access with a local mail server and past mail will still be accessible during any attack. I wasn't referring to DOS/DDOS-style reliability. In my mind, reliability ~= uptime > 99.999% Of course, you're correct in noting that the fact that a VPS is, by definition, distant from me, means that in case of a network outage or DOS attack, email is inaccessible and therefore a server at home is better in this respect.

So to access your emails when your server is being DDOS'd, you need to sit at home where you are virtually cut off from the Internet. Clearly, in this respect, a VPS is much better as its connection will withstand much larger DDOS attacks than your home DSL.

So in essence, what you're proposing is to only upgrade from VPS to private hosting when the resiliency of my private server is good enough - i.e. not most naive setups? It does make sense, and would make backups more urgent and important. However, at this point these discussions are starting to get academical, as it would take at least a year, if not five, for me to have enough spare time to work. Many thanks, Gesh

On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Gaetan Bisson <bisson@archlinux.org> wrote:

[2012-10-14 10:19:10 +0200] Menachem Moystoviz:

...

So in essence, what you're proposing is to only upgrade from VPS to private hosting when the resiliency of my private server is good enough - i.e. not most naive setups? It does make sense, and would make backups more urgent and important.

Backups are a must regardless of your setup. Next comes the question of reliability: how much downtime are you willing to trade for convenience?

Here is what I do: I nearly exclusively use my official email addresses (professional, university alumni, Arch Linux) because there are people who will notice and fix any issue 24/7, and I care deeply that every email sent to me reaches its destination; whenever I feel like reading emails, I pull them from those accounts onto my machine (and send a copy to gmail automatically - I only use them as a backup service); I read my emails comfortably using mutt and have a unison regularly synchronize the (encrypted) copy of my emails I have on all my machines.

I also run postfix on my home server but only use it to run a couple of silly mailing lists that I am perfectly willing to lose for a few weeks if it so happens that I am travelling and my server breaks down. I would not trust a private VPS more, nor any server that has a single admin.

Cheers.

-- Gaetan

So basically, your setup is something like: Use corporate mail, pulling email onto your machine each time you read it, plus some backups and your own mail server for hobbyist stuff? Sounds quite similar to what I had in mind. Thanks. Gesh