DISCUSSION: Future of Email and how Mox plays a part in it

[mingsterism]

First of, want to say amazing work you are doing. Truly appreciate it and your efforts. I've been looking for open source email for the longest time. Gmail was the only thing that I could not find any viable alternatives as I wanted to ungoogle myself from their ecosystem, until your's came up.

Wanted to ask more of a discussion question, not sure if this is the best place to put it, but fundamentally, how do you see Mox playing a part in the email ecosystem.
I'm running my own decentralised data center (similar to https://rendernetwork.com//) powered on Kubernetes, and want to offer everyone the ability to just spin up their own email with a one click button.

How will Mox compare with Gmail and will users hosting Mox servers be able to reliably handle their own email (sending / receiving). Will their mail go to spam? Is it just based on ip address quality in regards to mail not going to spam.

How do you see the next 2-3 years of email be like. what's your vision with Mox.

Much appreciated for your guidance and insights.

Cheers
Ming

[RobSlgm]

Hi @mingsterism

As somebody heavily invested in Kubernetes I look forward to approaches tackling e-mail on a K8S installation.

Even a single email server instance on K8S requires a non-plain vanilla setup. Which CNI are you using and how did you solve the issue to deliver the real external IP to the e-mail server?

Even more, you want to spin up an e-mail server per user – which BTW is not how Gmail or other provider do it. I would be interested to know how you solved the set-up of egress IP’s per mail server instance?

Full disclosure: I still running e-mail server (private and corporate) on dedicated servers (outside of K8s)

[mjl-]

warning: I'm not a kubernetes user.
For delivering the actual remote IP to mox, what about mox implementing the PROXY protocol? https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/networking/service-protocols/#protocol-proxy-special
Should not be too hard to implement.

Indeed, if you have a fixed IP per container/installation, you wouldn't need much else. If you want to have multiple containers on a single IP, it will be quite a bit harder.

How will Mox compare with Gmail and will users hosting Mox servers be able to reliably handle their own email (sending / receiving). Will their mail go to spam? Is it just based on ip address quality in regards to mail not going to spam.

For me the webmail is already a pretty good mail client. For non-technical users, it'll need a bit of work, and at least making it look a bit nicer. Sending/receiving should just work. The usual caveats about deliverability and your email possibly be marked as spam apply. Nowadays, other mail servers classify messages as spam on lots of different properties of the message. Some are simplistic and only go by DNSBL, so if your IP is listed, you'll get blocked. mox can monitor whether your IP is on a blocklist though. Mox first looks at the reputation of the exact sender, then domain of the sender, then other DKIM signatures, then IP address and network blocks, and finally does content-based filtering. Other mail servers are usually doing similar checks.

Some more information about the junk filtering in mox: https://www.xmox.nl/features/#hdr-junk-filtering

How do you see the next 2-3 years of email be like. what's your vision with Mox.

I want mox to be a hassle-free way to run your own mail server. Both initial setup, and continuous maintenance. So we'll keep making improvements in that direction. Mox will also have at least calendaring included. I don't need mox to be a superscalable mail server for tens of thousands of accounts. Mox could also be interesting for prototyping new ideas in the email space, given its single coherent code base, but that's not something end-users may care much about.