Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] OT: looking for email provider
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2020 11:27:56
Message-Id: 42724400.fMDQidcC6G@localhost
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] OT: looking for email provider by Jack
1 On Saturday, 1 February 2020 22:08:37 GMT Jack wrote:
2 > Relying on the collective experience and advice of the group here.
3 >
4 > As may be obvious to many of you, the address this message is sent from
5 > "...@×××××××××××××××××.net" isn't really a fully functional address.
6 > Email sent to that address will be forwarded by the sourceforge system
7 > to a personal address I specify. When I send a message "From: " that
8 > address, however, I cannot send it through the sourceforge system, as I
9 > don't actually have an email account with them. Currently, I send it
10 > through my gmail account. That works because I added that address in
11 > my gmail Settings under "Accounts and Import" / "Send mail as:".
12
13 This message sending mechanism is using an email address "alias". It used to
14 be a simple exercise of setting up as many different aliases you wanted and
15 then being able to send messages with a From: field, as whoever you wanted to
16 show up being the sender of the message in your recipients Inbox. The
17 forwarded message retains in its headers the original SMTP envelope sender and
18 recipient addresses, but if you used Bcc: to direct it to a recipient the
19 message headers could be less revealing of the path used to send the message.
20 depending on the particular mail server implementation.
21
22 It is easy to guess spammers soon cottoned onto the fact they could send their
23 adverts for products most of us do not need and immediately used this method
24 to spam the world from "Mr. Viagra" and what have you.
25
26 For this reason email ISPs introduced a number of 'email address verification'
27 hoops you have to jump through, to be allowed to use a different email alias
28 through their SMTP servers.
29
30
31 > To
32 > set it up, gmail sends a message to that address, and I click on a link
33 > in the message to prove it does come to me. That's been working find
34 > for a long time, but, ...
35
36 This is an alias address verification method. You have to show you have
37 control of that domain/email address, rather than being a spammer exploiting
38 this method.
39
40 Despite all this spammers are still getting through. So, alternative
41 technologies have been invented (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)[1] to make sure the sender
42 is legitimate, identifiable and is only allowed to use their own domains.
43
44 [1] https://dmarc.org/
45
46 > I'm trying to move away from gmail. Especially for mailing lists like
47 > this one, if I send a message to the list, I never see that I get the
48 > message from the list, because gmail refuses to show it in my inbox
49 > because it's a duplicate of a message already in my sentbox.
50
51 I think you can use Filters and Labels[2] in Gmail to tag and then move
52 whatever you receive/send into a folder you define.
53
54 [2] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/118708
55
56
57 > I do have an email account with privateemail.com (thorough
58 > namecheap.com) but they are unable or unwilling to have a similar
59 > setup. I'm not even sure they actually understand what I'm asking of
60 > them, but I've wasted more than enough time trying.
61
62 You could try using the terms "email alias address" and "Send As" with them to
63 see if this allows your conversation to progress further.
64
65 Many ISPs are a marketing shop buying the email service backend from one of
66 the big email suppliers, e.g. Google, AWS, etc. Such marketing shops without
67 commensurate technical capabilities are only a step away from having spammers
68 associated with their service and therefore keep features down to a minimum to
69 avoid being blacklisted due to potential misconfigurations.
70
71
72 > So - I'm asking if anyone can recommend an email service provider that
73 > understands this and will let me set it up. I have my own domain, but
74 > namecheap.com does seem willing to have the appropriate DNS record
75 > point to a different email provider. At this point, I'm not interested
76 > in running my own email server. I currently only need two mailboxes,
77 > maybe a small number more in the future, but this is personal, not
78 > commercial. I don't need to do bulk emails, maybe up to a dozen or so
79 > recipients. I do NOT expect it to be free, but cost is at least some
80 > consideration. I don't need huge storage limits, as although I use
81 > IMAP access when on the road, when I'm home, I use POP3 to download
82 > everything. I'd also like at least minimal control over spam
83 > filtering, mainly to let almost anything through for me to filter
84 > locally. If privateemail.com has false positives for everything from
85 > some sender (such as ups.com, for example) I need to open a ticket with
86 > them to add a whitelist. No such thing as clicking on "Not spam" and
87 > apparently no intent to ever do so.
88 >
89 > Thanks for any suggestions.
90 >
91 > Jack
92
93 I can't make any recommendations for email ISPs. There are a huge number of
94 them marketing their services, some offering only email services, others
95 include website hosting and data storage for the same price.
96
97 I also use Google for mailing lists et al. I have been thinking of moving
98 away from this capitalist surveillance service, whereby the email service is
99 free, but your data privacy is sold to the highest bidder, while Google keeps
100 all the margin. Although the concepts of privacy plus Internet are somewhat
101 orthogonal. I'll eventually get around to it, so please post what you come up
102 with in case it suits me too.
103 --
104 Regards,
105
106 Mick

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Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: looking for email provider Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-user] OT: looking for email provider Jack <ostroffjh@×××××××××××××××××.net>