Some weeks ago, I’ve come across Delta Chat, whose main thing is “(near) instant messaging using your email”
That left me thinking, has this been attempted before? If not, why? Also, why (besides servers’ limitations as means to fight spam) isn’t this solution used more often, given that e-mail has been a decentralized solution for well over 40 years now?
I think things have gotten better.
A few weeks ago I set up my own email server using https://mail-in-a-box.email and it wasn’t so bad. Above the capabilities of most internet users, yes. It has helpful status checks to let you know what parts of the config you need to address or fix in order to get it working and delivering email. It took me a few hours to get everything working well.
Congrats. Even with an “in a box” solution, getting email up and running is no small feat. I went with a classic Postfix+Dovecot+Spamd+ClamAV setup. Has worked well for me but definitely isn’t for the faint of heart lol. I spent forever trying to get DKIM working correctly only to realize that my DNS provider was accepting the DKIM TXT record in full, but was internally truncating it to 255 characters. Some DNS providers will automatically split it into multiple records transparently or if not, reject it for being too long; mine didn’t lol, and showed the full record in the control panel but only served the first 255 characters. Had to manually split it myself, and it worked after that.
The biggest issue I had was cleaning up the IP address of the VPS that was hosting it. I setup two, actually. The first one was easy since I was the first to be assigned that IP, and I only had to remove it from Microsoft’s hidden, internal block list. The second one, my backup MX, was more of a challenge as I set it up a few years later, and the assigned IP had been around the block a few times and was on every spam list imaginable.
Once it was up and running, and without it being a source of spam, it’s been pretty easy to maintain. But getting to that point was challenging.