Self-Hosting Email And My Respect For Satoshi

I haven't been a developer for that long. So last October, when I knew that this club was about to start, I thought it could be the perfect opportunity to self-host an email server. Sounds quite harmless, right? Wrong.

Turns out that running an email server is like volunteering at your favourite festival; sounds good in theory, but actually you miss out on enjoying the show.

Now that I still have your attention, I'm going to bore you with a list of terms that I had barely any idea about before deploying an email server:

• SPF
• Spam Filter
• DKIM
• Whitelist
• Blacklist
• POP3
• IMAP
• SMTP
• DNS
• SASL AUTH
• STARTTLS
• LDAP

Don't get me wrong, there are loads of open source solutions for running an email server, such as iRedMail which I finally landed on, and mail-cow. But that doesn't get to the problem of why email is so centralised; it's because configuring an email server is a nightmare and because there is no general solution for spam, email servers have centralised to basically Google, Microsoft (ie Outlook), and now Amazon (ie SES). These Mega Email Server Providers while doing lots of work to handle spam and provide very performant service, have so much power to whitelist and blacklist IPs.

The last straw for me was when it became clear that my email server ip address became part of an Outlook blacklist that was related to the cloud service provider I was using. This meant that no emails were going to get through to anyone using Outlook.

Anyway, my point is that email was meant to be this grand decentralised protocol. And in theory, it is. In practice, it has been captured up the wazoo.

My hope is that with bitcoin, the same fate does not materialise. Due to proof of work and the incentive structure, bitcoin can resist the same fate as email. Respect to Satoshi for his design.