I currently have one Yahoo email box that I really hate using and a new Protonmail email box that I like using now.
The yahoo email box is so thoroughly hammered with daily downloads of junk that I only use it when I am in need of sending or receiving a document and have no other way. I open it four or five times a year. A few weeks ago someone sent me a document that I needed and I had to wait for a few thousand messages to download first, before I could get the document. Getting control of an email box like that takes so much time that it is nearly impossible to maintain. Just blocking everyone takes more time than I have.
This weekend I got my Protonmail account and software working with a few tweaks that aren’t typical but that will make it very easy to manage my in-box now. Typically with most email programs, you have to block users one at a time after they’ve already wasted some of your time. And new time wasters show up to vex you literally every day with new junk mail from new email addresses. But the protonmail software has filters that let you write the filter youself in a language called sieve. It’s a text-base interpretive language that you can paste your code right in to a protonmail filter. So I wrote a script to literally block everyone, except for specific email addresses that I specify that I want to allow in. Because the language is text based, I can manage my contacts lists in Excel now and run a VBA macro to generate the sieve code every time I want to add more people who will have access to send messages to me. Actually, it’s also very easy to update the sieve code directly in protonmail when I only want to add one or two email addresses. So now, I can check my in-box without trepidation, knowing that the only messages that I will have there came by individuals who I specified myself. So with Proton you can either write several pieces of filter codes to implement one or more filters, or just block everyone and then allow specific email addresses to contact you over time as needed. The individual filters come with toggle switches in the interface. So its easy to turn them on and off. You can either send the unwanted messages to the Trash folder or other folders, or just delete them so you never even see them.
Anyone else here find a better way to manage your in-box?
I really love Posteo as their name is easy to spell, and they are fairly well known in the community.
Posteo does charge a monthly rate, but it is incredibly small, and it helps keeps them free from advertisements. It also helps them ensure they are able to continue operating long into the future. I pay a bit more than the starting price at 1.80 €.
I am in total agreement with the idea of paid email services. Any time something is free, you’re (as in your information is) the product. With a paid email service, you have the right to expect your privacy in exchange for what you have paid for the service. That is at least a good start.
In my mind, the biggest issue with all email service right now is that others (typically commercial entities) ruin everything unless you take strong countermeasures to stop them. Every “Special Offer" or “Newsletter" that ends up in my in-box unsolicited, is a failure on my part to enforce my own boundaries. On those rare occasions that I do open my Yahoo email, after the initial download of hundreds or even thousands of unwanted messages completes, then every few minutes or so, another new message comes in. Each of those messages are new incidents of harassment occurring in real time. None of them are from anyone I want to hear from. My email address has been sold so many times that it’s scarcely mine anymore. Everytime I have to focus on one message long enough to block the sender, I lose because the next week that same advertiser will send me another message from a different email address anyway. I’ve given up on blocking individual senders because if I did that as a full time job, I probably still couldn’t keep up. I refuse to block whole domains because maybe someone who I want to get a message from will innocently send their message from a mostly corrupt domain. I don’t want to spend energy figuring out who the good and bad domains are and which ones are good in different degrees. I just label everything I don’t want as bad and have now started blocking everyone except those who I know I want to hear from. It’ll just take some time now to build my whitelist after blocking everyone who is not on my whitelist.
The problem with Librem 1 email is that there is still few if any protections against junk mails. Purism (or someone) should start a global registry of email addresses. Give every email address that passes through their domain a credit rating of sorts, based on their behavior on the emails server: 1.) Unknown - high risk, 2.) High Volume - high risk, 3.) Medium Volume - Business, 4.) Low Volume Established Business, 5.) Low Volume - Private Individual. 6.) Long History - Legitimate. Then add an interface to a new email program that allows the email account holder to add or remove check marks to those categories. With no check mark, those respective messages will all be blocked. Then have a whitelist that overrides the checkmark settings so you can add your friends manually, who have less established email accounts. This would put an end to junk emailing. Purism could build and distribute their own email client software that does this filtering. Purism needs to be bold. Do something disruptive to the global economy by killing the junk email industry.
Why don’t they do it? If only Purism did this for only their own customers, then at least Purism’s customers would be happy and maybe that could eventually bring about the death of the junk emailing business. And for the people who really like junk emails, they are always free to check all of those boxes so as to not block any email senders. If enough email providers do this, then the value of a purchased email address will drop to zero. If Purism were to do this, then I would feel good about paying a monthly fee for for that service.
Three suggestions, and possibly none will apply to you.
Run your own mail server and domain. That way, you have far more control over the crap coming in.
I use Thunderbird mail handling rules (Tools / Message Filters) to hive off stuff that is not spam for later reading i.e. I did legitimately sign up to receive it, but it is low priority to actually read and I don’t want it to clog up my inbox - and presumably a mail handling rule could be used just to delete the email immediately after downloading.
Use lots of email addresses / lots of mailboxes. So that not everything is just hammering one inbox. (So, for example, I might give out a personal email address to friends and family to use and never give that out to any of the numerous web sites and companies that I deal with.)
Really only the second suggestion can be used retrospectively to clean up a great mess.
I am actually curious about this—I used to run my mailserver on OpenBSD Amsterdam (Mischa is a wonderful person and I would highly recommend them for anything).
But, I was recently told that self-hosting your mail is not feasible anymore and that your mail will likely go to spam or have issues with moderation.
Is this a true statment? I am debating bringing my server back online.
Thank you so much for any personal experience you may have here.
I don’t know about “likely” but there is certainly a non-zero probability of that happening.
The reality is that you need the expertise and you need to put in the time to monitor and manage.
It is also true that with the increasing centralisation of email among the Big Tech companies (primarily Google and Microsoft, in this context) it is becoming more difficult.
Running your own server is not a cost-free option in terms of reclaiming your inbox. You will have to put in time and effort. (The upside for me is that an incredible amount of spam is never even delivered to my inbox, and I get explicit control over exactly how spam is managed, and I can trivially have as many email addresses as I want.)
Running your own server at home is likely infeasible. Your IP address will be detected as being in an implausible range and/or will be in a blacklisted range and/or will likely fail certain validation. In addition, if running your own mail server, you ought to have two servers at least (a primary and a secondary), not on the same IP address, not even on the same internet connection - and of course you need a static IP address on each internet connection. That will also be somewhat challenging at home.
So realistically you will want to run your own server on a VPS (or, if you are made of money, a real server co-located in a commercial data centre). So that also makes it not a cost-free option.
I guess if you wanted to put it to the test … register a new domain, self-host it at home for email, then try to send and receive emails with the 800 Pound Gorillas.
The FUD around running your own mail server is just that in my experience.
The only service I have ever had outbound delivery issues with is certain Charter communications (RoadRunner) service personal email addresses.
I actually went back to hosting my own email SMTP bridgehead server specifically to bring the pain to spammers and complicit delivery services (cough, SpamGrid, cough) using OpenBSDss spamd. I crank up the stuttering settings to 11 and tie up their spam SMTP connections for several hours in some cases. Minimum 30 minutes.