I saw a terrible message from DigitalOcean yesterday. I was helping a co-worker learn to do SASL authentication with Postfix, using Dovecot to do the heavy lifting, (second co-worker this week! Breaking people free from Google!) and we got to the point where we were ready to have him send out a test email - a reply to an email I'd just sent him that exercised all the moving parts of his inbound path.
But when he tried to send, he couldn't talk to my email server. I checked to make sure he wasn't being firewalled, but he didn't show up in my abuse listing. But then on poking around, it became clear he couldn't talk to ANY port 25 ANYWHERE. And I thought, "Oh, right, they've got that blocked. Le'ts find an article talking about how to unblock it." Not too uncommon. So I looked for their docs on unblocking 25.
Turns out, there's no automated way - not even a support ticket type for the purpose. You have to open a general request.
But man, they REALLY don't want you opening a general request! This is a masterpiece of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may-not-want-to-run-your-own-mail-server
Without meaning to, they've eloquently captured the essence of everything we're seeing with the destructive corporatization and centralization of online services. They say:
"In many ways, mail server stacks represent a collision between the tools and values of the early internet — self-hosting open source software using well-defined standards and interoperable protocols — and the reality of the modern internet — a few centralized, trusted authorities."
This, not to put too fine a point on it, is BAD FOR US.
We need *more* selfhosting. I was a customer of theirs for a few years, but I stopped after they had some catastrophe that prevented me from accessing my server console for more than a week. Their support was underwater and I didn't get any movement until I decided to publically name and shame them with details of the incident.
This kind of attitude should make anyone hesitant to sign up for services with DigitalOcean.
