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Comment by dfvgskdfjghs | Hacker News Reader

To me, the main obstacle is not the software (I can install a server in VM), it's the implication that I have to rent a VPS, or buy a DNS record, or subscribe to a different kind of ("business") Internet plan, when I already have packets flowing, just so that the email giants and everyone else believe I'm a legitimate participant in humanity. I feel stymied by email giants and ISPs that seem to collaborate to prevent me from doing something that even I agree is simple, to the point that I don't bother. That's 100% a social problem.

I think the desire to run one's own email server today mostly reflects a longing to re-discover the highly-accessible anarchy of the early Internet. Unfortunately, if that is ever to be found, it likely won't be in the form of complying with the highly-burdensome mostly-social requirements of our modern, well-centralized, email system. More likely, it will come from painting over it.

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It's not just corporations that would not think your legitimate but everyone really.

These sort of unspoken rules you mention are very largely due to combat spam. If anyone with port 25 open was trusted the amount of spam would be intolerable.

Seems sort of silly to want to use email without taking these steps to make it official as possible.

This is not some manipulative plot by google to get you to spend an extra 60 dollars a year, sorry.

Yes, treating dialup sources as likely spam sources has been done since long before Google became a significant player in email. In earlier years the main approach was to try to convince ISPs to filter outgoing port 25 by default on their dialup IP ranges. Later, people started compiling lists of dialup IP ranges (later expanded to DSL/cable/etc.) to block them at the recipient side, since there were too many ISPs who weren't filtering. Recipients disliked email from dialup IPs because ISPs seemed unwilling or unable to police their customers and respond to individual abuse reports, and so little legitimate email originated there anyway that it was easier to just cut them off.

I don't think the bigger end-user providers have been very involved in developing those kinds of policies. The NANAE crowd was/is mostly administrators of smaller and university servers, not Yahoo/AOL/Hotmail/Gmail administrators.

Most email providers block dynamic IP ranges because of the absolute torrent of spam that flowed from them before the block. Something like 90% of the world's spam used to come from hacked home PCs. Someone would install a hacked version of Photoshop, a "porn downloader", or get drive by installed and their PC would be under someone else's control and able to send out spam after spam after spam on an open port 25 from every ISP in the world. To counteract that, ISPs started blocking outgoing port 25 connections and most email server providers began blocking incoming connections from dynamic IP space. This cut down on spam dramatically.

This feeling of yours is not caused by the large email providers, it is caused by your desire to reach the billions of people who subscribe to their services.

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