The problem starts here. Not many people who are not tech savvy even know what a custom domain is. Let alone having an email with a custom domain.
> You can't get banned from email
Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do. Tech is just one of the tools they are using to get their tasks done. We cannot expect people to spend time understanding everything about tech. It is not surprising that it took a commercial company with aggressive behaviour when it comes to controlling users data to put BSD on regular non-tech consumer desktops. And why Microsoft Windows succeeded in being on regular consumers desktop OS whereas commercial Linux-based OS struggled; and the company that successful put Linux on mobile devices also has quite a record when it comes to users data.
We techies can talk a lot about decentralisation and owning data. But the regular non-tech users really don't care. They just want simple things done quickly using tech and get on with their lives.
Recently I saw videos from multiple news channels on how to use Mastodon. They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?
> Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
And, from the other end, ask people who actually self-host e-mail - not just own the domain, but also run their own mail server. The anti-spam measures of major e-mail providers are, in practice, banning insufficiently determined self-hosters from e-mail.
come on. its not "that bad". i knew when i started, that outlook and gmail were going to be a problem but i made calls, i had people recieve email on those providers which would go into spam and i would call them to mark as not spam. one time i accidentally sent a bunch of emails with attachments to gmail and got spam. called some people, tomorrow everything was fine.
I've been doing for 2 years now. Mailinabox. occasionally using a one line terminal command to update the system but other than that, smooth sailing.
my only gripe. domain buying/administration should NOT BE THAT HARD for beginners.... its 2023 almost and setting up a domain is very difficult for new users...
i excensively use email alises and filters, something not possible in gmail or others (yahoo mail has that for free) and just that has made the whole thing worthwhile for me.
email aliases are charged an arm and a leg compared to other features but in your own systems, its great
It really is "that bad". I've been running mailservers for decades now. It really is.
It is impossible to use a VPS from any sizable or affordable VPS servers. The IP blocks from digital-ocean, linode, AWS, OVH, etc all are, have been, or will be randomly put on blacklists. Not the blacklists that you can apply for to be deregistered from. It's sheer impossible to have mail from a mailserver on any such host delivered to hotmail, gmail or such.
It is impossible to run a server at home. "domestic" IP addresses are treated similar to those of affordable VPS providers.
It is expensive to get a clean and proper IP address. It takes years of serious volume to give an address any authority. It takes only one mistake by any of the thousand typists at hotmail or gmail to undo this investment. Without any way to recover from it. None of these large mailproviders have any incentive to improve this: an "engineer" at their end making a "mistake" actually benefits them.
I've ran a mailinabox for as long as the project exists. But I'm sunsetting it moved everything to tutanota (but don't like the service so will move to an alternative in january). I just gave up: the monopolies have won.
ok. that looks nice but.... you need to be on icloud+, which limits who can use this.... does cloudflare have an api so that someone like mailinabox could add that to the install script and do all this? or like for mastodon who wants to give users this same functionality? it could be tied to your cloudflare account so you could migrate from one provider or the next?
I don't think there's such an API at the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if it's in the pipeline. I'm very far removed from the Registrar team so I'm not sure what their future plans are.
This is a topical distinction if your email address gets banned from sending to gmail. Unless you want to keep changing IP addresses and email addresses to get around it. Gmail/Microsoft host a significant portion of the internets email.
I'm a techie and I know how to setup my own email and custom domain, and even then I can't be bothered.
I also know how to bake my own bread, but I'd rather get it from the store.
Completely self-run email is a bad user experience, just like making my own bread. Most people here forget that people want convenience over anything else.
> What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do.
I'll go stronger than that: if your theory is that people should want to be their own sysadmin, and people who don't want to be a sysadmin don't deserve [a thing] then your theory is bad and you should feel bad.
Getting locked out of Gmail is not the same as getting banned. One is losing access to a specific account. If you get banned from Twitter or Reddit you are ostensibly not allowed to just create a new screen name.
> They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?
I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.
> I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.
If someone could figure out a way to provide internet to consumers so that they didn’t have to deal with ISPs/carriers they’d capture a huge market overnight.
I don't disagree (though it's hypothetical enough it's hard to reason about). The fact remains that the concept isn't unnavigable to the vast majority of the public.
> I would point out that the concept is really no different from how ISPs work, and yet the public seems to have wrangled with that one.
Geographic locality helps. At any given location, the choice of ISPs will be severely limited. If my experience in a major European city scales, there will be between one to three ISPs able to service your areas, plus a few more niche/specialized ones. The actual choice is usually made based on ads, or asking a tech-savvy acquaintance for help.
The problem starts here. Not many people who are not tech savvy even know what a custom domain is. Let alone having an email with a custom domain.
> You can't get banned from email
Ask people who get locked out of their gmail account.
What we techies miss is that there are more people who don't understand technology and are not willing to spend time learning about it as they have other more important things to do. Tech is just one of the tools they are using to get their tasks done. We cannot expect people to spend time understanding everything about tech. It is not surprising that it took a commercial company with aggressive behaviour when it comes to controlling users data to put BSD on regular non-tech consumer desktops. And why Microsoft Windows succeeded in being on regular consumers desktop OS whereas commercial Linux-based OS struggled; and the company that successful put Linux on mobile devices also has quite a record when it comes to users data.
We techies can talk a lot about decentralisation and owning data. But the regular non-tech users really don't care. They just want simple things done quickly using tech and get on with their lives.
Recently I saw videos from multiple news channels on how to use Mastodon. They were at pains to explain to users how there are multiple servers and one has to choose a server, which is run by individuals or organisations. And if the server goes down then the user has to move to another server. Regular non-tech users really don't want to get into this complexity. Has anyone ever seen TV channels explain with great effort how to use Twitter?