toroidalcore

Running #email is treacherous these days, when you consider spam blacklists. A lot of people turn to some provider, Gmail, Outlook, or someone else focused mostly on the business of email. This way, if you send an email, you have the best chance of getting it through, as the thinking goes.

On the other hand, email is federated, and it is still very much possible to set up the required software yourself. It's still an attractive way to communicate with friends or family, even with social media. Even if universal deliverability is an uphill battle for the email self-hoster, what about just delivering to a smaller group of people?

The idea would be that, if you had a few friends who self-hosted their email, you could simply whitelist each other's servers. They could be on cheap VPSs, or even residential internet connections. The point is, the task of running email becomes easier if you don't have to worry about being worthy of every other major email provider in existence.

This of course is not useful to someone who wants to self-host for their business or some other organization. In that case, you would obviously want to put in the work to get your servers whitelisted, or perhaps just go with another provider. This is probably always going to be the case. But, the fact is that the protocols associated with email, for all their pros and cons, can still work to deliver messages. It's still an ability individuals have to control some of the infrastructure they use, and is something that should be taken advantage of.

Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town