On 24/10/2025 11:38, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
On Fri, Oct 24, 2025 at 3:31 PM Alaric Snell-Pym via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote:Much has been written about how this is a hard thing to do, requiringspecialist knowledge. And yes, it does, but that strikes me as fixable.Certainly it is. The only question is, is the cost/benefit ratio to your liking? :)
Well, I think the cost could be reduced a lot, which would make the cost/benefit ratio acceptable for more people.
> Despite the common stereotype, I find running email pretty easy. I setup SPF when that became popular, but my mail system basically Just Works.It isn't just about setting it up at your end (although that is non-trivial, and involves many pieces working together that can break easily, such as when Mailman just mysteriously stopped working with Postfix once after an upgrade).
Yeah, mailman's complex permissions setup to give Postfix and Apache write access to the appropriate parts of its database is a pain!
But everyone setting it up against Postfix and Apache ends up having to do it.
What I want is to have a pre-packaged "Postfix + Apache + Mailman + an IMAP daemon (cyrus? dovecot?) + DNS + LetsEncrypt" package that sets them all up and connects them to each other, out of the box. This shouldn't be hard!
There's still effort for users - finding somewhere with a stable IP to host it, getting a domain name and pasting that static IP into the registrar to point it at them, building reputation as a sending IP or finding a service provider to relay outgoing SMTP for you, etc - but everything involving configuring different software packages to work together really shouldn't be something *everyone* has to fiddle with. It's not inherent complexity of running a mail system, it's just accidental complexity of the fact that we provide a kit of parts rather than an out-of-the-box working thing, for mainly cultural and historic reasons.
-- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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