Giving Up On Email
Studies have shown that email has fallen out of favor with young people as a tool for personal communication. They are increasingly turning to Instant Messaging (IM), domain specific messaging (such as MySpace and Facebook), and mobile messaging (SMS). I may not be "young", but I feel their email angst. Spam is rapidly turning personal email into a vast wasteland of pump-and-dump stock scams, discount Viagra, and porn ads.
This isn't a new phenomenon. Spam has been a serious problem for at least a dozen years. My own statistics show that the problem is actually improving slightly as ISPs and large email services (like Yahoo and AOL) roll out changes intended to stem the flood of spam through their systems. These changes however suffer from two problems. The simple problem is that they are too little, too late. The "defections" are already in full swing and the competing tools have had time to develop into viable alternatives.
The more complex problem is that the "cures" are nearly as damaging to email as the disease. For the last ten years or so I have run my own SMTP server. In the early days it ran on my desktop Linux machine. Later it moved to my external business server. Then, a couple years ago, as my business went from a full-time to a part-time endeavor, I pulled the business server into my home network. That's when the problems began.
Spam itself has always been a problem. But after trying a variety of tools, I found that Spam Assassin was effective enough to keep email usable. The real issue stemmed from the fact that my server was behind a dynamic IP address. The problem of mapping an internet mail server name to a dynamic IP address is easily solved. However, anti-spam tools recognize that my outgoing mail is coming from a dynamic IP address. Best case, they just count that fact against me when figuring the "spamicity" of my emails. Worst case, they completely "blacklist" me. In some cases I could get recipients to "whitelist" me an my mail would get through, but I've found that lately even that isn't working.
To make matters worse, many ISPs are completely blocking port 25 (SMTP) to and from their home users. I found recently that RoadRunner in my area had moved their SMTP servers to a non-standard port. I suspect this is a prelude to them blocking port 25 for outbound traffic. Now, even with those restrictions it is possible to set up most MTAs to use a "smart host", but I doubt the port restrictions are the end of it. I also experienced a period of a few days where RR's SMTP server would reject any mail that didn't have a "From" address matching my RR account. This extra security measure (which fortunately disappeared a few days later) really interfered with smart-host behavior. There are probably ways around that with address rewriting rules, but at some point it just becomes more effort that it's worth.
So the bottom line is I've given up on the idea of running my own SMTP server. As much as I like the idea of having that level of control, it just isn't worth the trouble. I'll go back to relying on my ISP or Gmail to serve as my email interface to the internet. It will require an adjustment in the short term, but I suspect that 10 years from now the role of email in personal communication (outside the corporate world) will have changed to the point where email will be a necessary evil no more interesting than the regular postal service is today.
Categories: CategoryRamblings
