How difficult to run a barebones POP3 email service?
How difficult is it to run a very basic barebones POP3/SMTP only email service, with regards to security (hackers) and reliability (not getting listed in anti-spam, and SPF - DMARK - bells and whistles errors)?
I'm thinking limits on free accounts. - 1 email address per account - 40 mb disk space, 5 mb per email - no backup, no support, no webmail, no IMAP, no 2FA, no verifications, … And for the first 3 months: - 1 email sent per hour to max 4 to, cc, bcc - 5 emails sent per 24hrs - 20 emails sent per 7 days to max 50 to, cc, bcc Thereafter per 7 days max 50 sent to, cc, bcc. I'm thinking to add 5 aliases on various cheap domains (domains which are valid for maximum 1 year) on which there is only receiving, no sending. I'm thinking to add paid accounts, but always POP3/SMTP only. Suggestions and comments welcome! |
I think it is harder than you think to provide adequate security and functionality. But, I also think that POP is not very popular, except for Gmail that forces POP3 on people. For my own part I haven't used POP, except for when Gmail forced it, in probably close to 20 years. I vastly prefer webmail and a matching app on my phone, with everything synced via IMAP. I spend months at a time away from home and having my email on the go is vastly important to me. By the way, Purelymail offers a lot more at only $10 per year.
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@nosim: your offer is very limited. Do you really think there will be any takers?
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If the service I look for is not available, then why not (try) do it myself?
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I've been searching long and hard for a service allowing me to do simple, all email offline, POP3 only, reliably, for free, without the need to have another email or phone verification, not being big tech or in Europe. There are a few ideologically inspired (no pun here) services providing this, but who may ban you or close your access overnight. By limiting the service I would hope spammers and scammers and abusers would not be interested. In setting those limits I wondered how may private (not business) emails do people really send per day? And if exceptionally the limit would be reached, is it bad for the email to remain queued until the next day? Everyone's use case is different. As a frequent traveler connecting to so many less than secure networks and environments I made the choice to keep as little as possible online or on phone. You could argue IMAP can download and delete on download too, but what's the point in IMAP if it is to not keep it all online? Thunderbird for one is set up like that, you need to move the messages out of the inbox in an offline folder for them to get removed online. So it is really about setting up a service I would use, and open it up to others. But what skill set do you need to do that properly? |
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Maybe the better approach would be to set up the email service you want first, and see how difficult and rewarding it is. My understanding is you can do this nearly for free. That would give you a much better idea of what is involved in expanding to an offering to the public.
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Ready to set up a new email service?
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Before throwing myself in the deep end, I need to understand more as to what's involved behind the scenes. As TenFour said rightly … Quote:
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I think I would want a security hardened and stripped down BSD flavoured OS. Which means I would need as a first step to learn about BSD, security hardening, and stripping down an OS to the bare minimum needed for the limited POP3 service, right? |
ForwardEmail lists some options for email servers using BSD: https://forwardemail.net/en/blog/ope...d-email-server
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I think TenFour’s suggestion about initially running a mail server just for yourself was excellent advice. I keep an email server running for testing purposes and as a backup.
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Seriously looking at learning openbsd …
On another note, does anyone know how to get in touch with John Capo from Tuffmail? I'd love to pick his brain ;) |
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