[TriLUG] recommendations for on-line Linux VM

[shay walters via TriLUG]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 6:52 AM Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG
<trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

 > I'm not planning on having my own e-mail server,
 > although it would be nice to have one. It would
 > seem that the big tech companies are making sure
 > that only they can do e-mail, by squeezing out the
 > small players by assigning reputation in blocks.
 > I would have to take them on and deal with
 > their requirements.

I used to run the email for the company I worked for and we had been
handling our own email for so long that we passed the "reputation"
criteria, but the dual problems of hacking and spamming had grown to
the point that it was taking a full-time person (me) to deal with
incoming email.  It became a simple financial and logistical decision
to offload the handling of email to a third party, and although I
wasn't happy about it at the time, it definitely turned out to be the
right choice.  Fortunately, we never had anyone hack in and take over
an email account and start sending out bad email.  I can't imagine the
damage control that would have been required to recover from that.  I
have, since that time, set up a personal email server a couple of
times, and it has been basically worthless because if you're running
at a VM provider, you're almost entirely blocked from sending or
receiving email by the major players because so many scammers and
hackers use those facilities.  (That reputation thing.)  And you can't
really self-host email because pretty much every residential ISP
blocks SMTP, and for good reasons.
    I guess my point is that it's not that the big guys are blocking
the small guys from having email servers, it's just that they have to
deal with the floods of bad email out there, and if you don't have a
pre-existing good reputation on your IP block, there's really no way
to establish it, so it has become a defacto lockout of anyone who
isn't already a major email provider.

-Shay