Email thoughts
--------------

Last weekend I spent a while getting a basic SMTP server up and
running.  Of course, following the strong NIH syndrome that drives
most of my lambdalab tinkerings, I put together a clumsy server
myself:

gopher://thelambdalab.xyz/1/projects/lambdamail/

which you can use to send me mail via plugd ~AT~ thelambdalab.xyz.
(Google seems to be crawling my phlog via the various proxies out
there, so my "burrowy thoughts" [1], including email addresses, are no
longer safe from spammers.)

It's extremely limited but, as pointed out on the project page, this
is partly by design.  However, one thing that annoys me is that it's
currently only capable of receiving mail, not sending it.  Again,
this has its benefits (I can be fairly certain nobody's relaying
spam via my server), but it does have an obvious downside - on the
off chance that somebody _does_ mail that address I have no easy way
to reply.  I could of course use one of my other accounts somewhere
to accomplish this, but it's more than slightly annoying that I can't
just correspond directly.

Of course I could easily add the capability of outgoing connections to
the server but, from what I understand, this is the easy part.  The
real difficulty is that in this day and age almost all of the mail
sent by such a server would be immediately marked as spam, and that
one needs to utter all manner of strange incantations and spells in
order to ensure mail is sufficiently blessed to be accepted by any of
the major webmail systems (you know who you are).

Incidentally, this fact is of course driving the centralization of
email, because the one surefire way to ensure your email is not marked
as spam is to have it delivered by Google, MS, Apple, etc.

Anyway, I've jumped through the SPF and reverse DNS hoops, but I doubt
I'll be able to implement DKIM on my own; and I'm not sure I even want
to.  Thus I'm wondering - has anybody else has had experience with
setting up a personal email server?  If so, are DKIM and the rest
completely necessary?  Keeping in mind that I only want to use this to
communicate with the odd person from the gopher community who stumbles
on my 'hole.

Is there another possibility perhaps?  Is there a way we could set up
a parallel email network (on another port perhaps?) specifically for
this community?  (I know that many of the pubnix servers have their
own local mail systems, but it would be great to have a way to
communicate from isolated outposts like my own.)  I suspect that if we
did this we could keep things far simpler: relative obscurity alone
would keep such a network safe from the spam that such nonsense is set
up to avoid.

---
[1]: gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20190524-robots-txt
.