Postmasters: Managing Your Own Mailservers

Andrew Bonar 0:37
You right Right You Okay. Okay, welcome back everyone. I've enjoyed snacks, I have been getting a little bit more energized, we have a few killer sessions to end the day before you'll be able to take a little bit of a break for an hour, get refreshed, and you can join us for drinks in the bar downstairs. And again 6pm in the lobby if you'd like to come out with us this evening. Up next we have Keith Kouzmanoff, a man who probably needs no introduction, but he's gonna get one anyway. He runs into seven and they will help you with pretty much anything email. So inbound outbound running your own mail servers, whether you want to do that with open source tech or you want to use proprietary technology. Keith has an immense amount of experience with pretty much every MTA that is out there. super geeky. But also, an incredible marketer really knows an awful lot of email marketing. And yeah, that's why we always love to have Keith Huff on stage and he is literally fire and very high energy. So if anyone's feeling tired right now, I am sure Keith is about to fix that. So without further ado, please put your hands together for Keith Kuzmin off into seven.com.

Keith Kouzmanoff 8:38
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. What a great introduction. Thank you, all six of you who have stayed for day two of the conference and you on the video livestream right there. I really appreciate it, Andrew. Yeah, it's just about everything email. I like very complicated questions and very simple solutions. I've heard the expression. If you ask a complicated question, the person in the room who can answer it in the shortest amount of words, besides using alerts depends, is probably the smartest person in the room. So I'm gonna cut to the chase. We've had a lot of great presenters in there. Alright. Very intelligent. And would you like me here? Okay. On the floor. Oh, perfect. Sure. You know what, today I can follow direction. Okay. When I was a small kid in this industry, I did not like to follow the rules. And I'm gonna give you a quick synopsis of why you don't need a delivery consultant or delivery person because 99% of your problems is your date. out. Okay, fixing your data will fix 95 of those problems out of the 99. The other four problems you're probably going to get into is likely volume related. See, postmasters like to see a consistent flow of traffic, consistent growth, consistent decline. We love consistency. And anytime you change that consistency, you drive me nuts. Okay. Now there's another very large ISP in America. And Lori Beth was mentioning DNS. And if you don't his words, right, if you don't publish DNS records, we're going to publish them for you. Okay. And let me recap what you missed. If you're just here for my talk, you're doing yourself a disservice. Lori Beth about DNS, bottom line published SPF okay, if you do nothing else, publish SPF, dentists about privacy. I can't tell you the importance of privacy in the sector. Everyone is asking for your phone number. I can't buy a cup of coffee without joining a marketing club. Right? Jen, she's still hear talking about dogs, that that is actually true in all levels of marketing. I can't tell you or stress you how much he has hit the mark on that. Cake with empathy, wide open my my eyes to looking at possibilities of words meaning other things in life. I don't like getting hung up, hung up on the syntax when someone tells me that they believe in God. You know, that's their God. Cyril were several interactive emails without using amp. Oh my god. It's crazy. Raymond, with cerebral talking about domain reputation. I cannot stress you enough with ipv6. Okay. All right. We ran out of ipv4 ipv6 came out and there's oodles of ipv6 and Comcast here in America here in America. They're in America opened ipv6. To the public announced it send me mail. What was the first email that came in? Spam, domain reputation critical. We had a panel talking about personalization. Just be careful on the personalization that you don't say, you know, I saw your Facebook profile and I really liked your big ears and your large nostrils and I saw you lost a lot of weight recently. I hope you don't have cancer. Right? That kind of person. Yeah, a little touchy right there. For rukh AI. Brilliant. Kareem Cron is my pronouncing that correctly with the email. Being hard. It is hard it's difficult. Here, John, with this morning with email test and learn that's my mantra. As an email marketer, it's always about testing and learning.

Jacob about Bimini and why tea about best practices and my panel talking about what bringing an on premise solution well let's let's try and dive right in there. What do I have about two seconds? Good because I have to be a little bit about me. There's it's not self proclaimed somebody else put out a list 25 most influential among marketers the world I'm number 11 Why it's in alphabetical order. But is that list inclusive? No. Is it exclusive? No. There are tons and tons of experience here decades upon decades of experience in history knowledge in here that you can take away and use. First started out when this thing marketing and email came out with the DMA got on the council about deliverability case studies. A lot of solutions out there. And I guess above all, I am a father and I brought my daughter here today to the show to show what this what her father does for a living and I wanted to make sure I sent you home with a gift as well from where I'm from. She has in her possession, a chain. The rocks in this are called galena. It's from a town in America. Galena is a mining town they make silver and lead from this. The red bracelets that's attached to it is from Old Jerusalem. There is a Jewish man This, this isn't about this, it's to ward off bad evil. You can cut it off and put it in your wallet if you want read up about it. decades of experience is great. But it doesn't help some people starting off. It's not everything to know. It's the depth of that experience. So I hope to share with you today a little bit of that that depth. On the other side, if you like to test and learn, if you like to get your hands dirty, if do you send your car to the mechanic to get it fixed? Or D go on YouTube, to look how to get that thing fixed. I mean, thank God for YouTube, right? I can fix any appliance in my home right now. Some shouldn't be fixed. But I can fix just about everything with the aid of that. Okay, what happened? I'd say let's start off in the past. Not everything bad that happens in history does not also have a good cause. Okay, so in World War Two was a tragedy by any definition out there. All right, what there was some things that came out of there that were kind of good. Penicillin, radar, flu vaccines, jet propulsion engines, blood transfusion, and this thing that ended after that called the Cold War. Cold War? Well out in space. All of a sudden, in America, we heard Beep, beep, beep we like what the heck is that? That was bundick. Next month, what we heard, woof, woof, woof, woof. They put a dog in space, Sputnik to Well, where are our scientists and Los Alamos building bombs? Well, what's how should we fix this as Americans? You know, because we're so prideful, you know, we can't be second. God forbid, somebody else did it. First, we will conquer your country and rewrite the history books. NASA, which you're familiar with ARPA, came out of their 1958. And this thing called the National Education and Defense Act. And this basically gave a blanket check to every major public university in America, and what to do with that to teach our kids my daughter, right? teach the kids better. How can we do this better? And computers came out of there. So back in the 60s, there's probably as well untold story of computer history. It's called playdough. And you can you can look it up. There's this great book Brian deer wrote called The friendly orange glow. And if you're into reading, I highly suggest this if you want to know the heritage of email or the internet that came out there. Plato, I don't know. Did anybody play Castle Wolfenstein?

Yeah, that came from Plato. Lotus Notes. Ray, Ozzie, does anybody know Microsoft? Okay, Ray. Ozzie used to be the CEO of Microsoft. Okay, after gates went down Ray, it took his wife Ray out. He wrote Lotus Notes Ray as he was 17. And I was 13. At the time on the system there. Flight Simulator Dungeons and Dragons, Netscape Navigator mosaic, I think they say that you can even find the roots of Quake and doom on this system. So we're in this pandemic. Holy cow looks all bad. Why I beg to differ. I'm trying to look at the other side of the coin. What's happened right now they sent the kids back home and they told him to learn online. Shit. We've been trying to do this since the 1960s. It took a pandemic to get us there. And I say that's all right. What else came out? Because that backwards? What What else came out? I just learned this having dinner, right? What's that over there? To QR code was invented, put out into the public and dismissed as bad not being useful. Right? How many times have you gone to a restaurant and seen one of these? See the evolution that has happened? So I'm just saying I want you to frame things and put a new pair of glasses on when we're talking about email. We're here at Inter seven I've had the pleasure of working with some fine establishment ISPs. I believe Aruba is the second largest size P and Italy the Bank of America GoDaddy, the Weather Channel. For the federal Defense of Treasury, the IRS Is anybody familiar with the IRS? And, and amber alert. So what makes you so special? Keith? What the heck? What happened there? Well, we fell in love with this product that was coming out called Q mails built by Djp. Dan Bernstein, a brilliant mind in his own in his own right. Just absolutely fantastic forward thinking. Right, the one of the parts about Q mail it was it really didn't work very well. With his binaries, you needed to add on other things to actually make it work. And one of the things were having it could host virtual domains, but it couldn't do virtual users and virtual domains. And at that time, we needed hosting companies needed small solutions to hold hosts large amounts of people. And that's where GoDaddy Bob came in, right? Bob called us up and said, Hey, man, I need an email server that has virtual users and virtual domains that can authenticate that all in one platform on one machine. So we wrote an authentication part for that. I paid the whole $50 See where in the GPL open source community we tried to give away things for free? Where did these marketers come from? I think that came from this thing called MLM. At least our clients were using mailing lists managers at the time, the Weather Channel was using EZ MLM IDX EZ MLM was a product built by Dan IDX was built by Fred Lindbergh, who later went to go write cheetah mail. Is anybody familiar with cheetah mail? Or I think they're called cheetah media now why? Why didn't why these ESPs have to write stuff, new programs because mail servers didn't want to lose mail. Right? And when the weather channel asked us to build something for them that had the solution using what they had on premise, we said that's not going to happen. We have to write something else. Right. So Dan Bernstein wrote TCM elects easy MLM Fred Limburg later put on that ad on IDX it's still out there and open source you can look it up. He wrote cheater mail experienced bottom out I think it's called the cheated digital. And this is as far as I can remember, this is my memory. Don't take these dates and quotes. For fact. I think about 9099 ConstantContact came out about the same time power MTA and port 25 did as well. And it was basically an engineering piece of software for other engineers. Right write it It came with the engine but you had to add pieces on top of it

so the joke I have for you today is this meme I've seen around quite a bit on the interwebs Well, Keith I'm kind of curious I want to build my own mail server

Well, what does a mail server consist of? You're gonna be wanting to be Googling like an email toaster on this okay, that's our favorite catchphrase for what an email server is. Usually runs on an operating system Red Hat Enterprise boot to Debian Santos Oracle amo rocky would probably a preference now. CentOS is CentOS eight in 10 days is going away. So I don't suggest jumping the gun on them. And you're going to need an MTA and the popular ones out there. At least the free ones are postfix XM, send mail and Q mail. And there are paid ones that you can get as well exchange and this list is not inclusive or exclusive. It's just to help you sort through all the stuff that's out there. This is where you would want to start. Right? These are some of the pros and cons and some of the mailing platforms. How many people here use WordPress? How many people use Magento? Right. So WordPress has more user base than other platforms out there. And just solely by the popularity of it, more products get built onto it. So what you're going to be looking for in the open source when you're adopting like a Sugar CRM that we talked About yesterday, or some other content management resource or some other MTA platform or web server, you're gonna want a community that's supporting that product. So you can get help as well. Here's a little diagram of parts of the email. Look, there's a stick figure is not entertaining. Well, we're, we're engineers, we're not very good graphic designers. You're gonna see a lot of stick figures when you're looking at how to build your own email server. Okay, but I beg you to try and explore and look at it. The other parts, you have the MTA, the mail server usually has a transport the via IMAP or POP three. Basically, the differences. Part three is a one way send. An IMAP is back and forth. Everybody's probably using IMAP. Right now.

You're going to have a webmail client, there's several versions of it. You're going to have some type of spam filtering, right?

You're going to need dia DLs TLS SSL, Let's Encrypt the EFF offers encrypt bot that's out there. These are all open source. And you're going to need a database. Right? And an M UA client possibly. And all of this in here is free.

Hello, Keith, why in God's name would I want to build something like this? I mean, you're a hobbyist. Or you like picking things apart? You like watching YouTube videos and how to fix your carburetor. That's not me. I can't pay the guy who changes my oil. I can't go to the store and buy the oil and the oil filter and the tools to it's cheaper for me to take it somewhere else, right? There are definitely cheaper solutions out there. Okay, this is not the only mousetrap. But if these things are of your concern, you should probably consider it and I argue with any product or service out there. These are the three foundational decisions you will you will make price availability and service. Okay. The reasons beings privacy, security, storage, backup and ownership. You're going to take this thing in house. Does anybody remember who this person is? Just be careful when you take things in house. Okay. So a lot a lot to be concerned about. Will it play? No. It's gotta play. Can you play now? Oh, no, we're done for now. It's okay. It's from my tic tock. Time to do some sketchy shit, dude. Dude, I hope I get away with it, though, dude. You've seen it before. Okay. All right. So, okay, Keith, I want to get involved in this. I don't want to learn how to make motor oil as I'm changing my car engine. Right? What are some of the things off the shelf that can help me out there? Right. Here's some three. Easy out of the box solutions for you. Okay, easy to follow step instructions. Command Line, screen capture everything. Gui administration's where you can administer your server without being in the command line. Domain administration by opening up email accounts, creating mailing lists, forwarding email, web clients that you could have on for authentication. Okay, there's two webmail clients webmail itself. Right. Does anybody use Gmail? You're probably using their webmail client, right? Or their mobile app. Right. These are the Mun days. Roundcube is a little bit fancier we might want to upgrade from to that. Anybody use Zimbra? Right? Well, do you use it our stuff in the back end authentication pieces in Zimbra parts of that and you'll see some of this Roundcube kind of Zimbra marked marked off they marched in the order of the open source and then took some stuff away. And guess what, we gave it away for free and that's okay. You If you're going to do spam filtering, Spam Assassin is great. Nothing wrong with it at all. But what us kids today are using is our spam be?

Well, Keith, do you have instructions to build your stuff? And do you have product and software? Well, absolutely we do. Do we have documentation? Not so much? Right? How do open source companies make money? Well, I hope somebody uses the products and services that we put out there. And I hope somebody asked, well, how do I do it? Right? There's this catchphrase I've seen out says, never tell anyone. You're all your secrets. Has anybody heard that? Expression? But I argue there just is not enough time in the day. To tell you all the secrets, I have six minutes remaining. There was another email show in Utah. Did anybody hear about that show? It's an email show, media post, I think put it on. And they proudly put all the people who attended the show and the company names. So as a private email server, I said, Oh, really? These guys went out there to check out how to do email. Well, let's see how how they did. All right. So I took them, the top two lines, three lines, and I went in and I went through the entire process of signing up for the email, watching the email, opening up the email clicking on it, I wanted to see what was going on. And what did I find out? Look, if you're having trouble with email, all these brands are having much similar problems do okay. You are not alone. All right. On the on the forms to capture that they were using what failed sometimes. So when you are entering data information, it was dropping off. I mean, how is that possible? They have a shopping cart platform, right? That accepts payment. But for the simple email signup, the CAPTCHA failed. I just can't get over that one. I can't get in the front door. How are you going to spam me? I mean, send me email. Right? A bunch of these companies use third party operators to Dennis was talking about privacy. When you open up an email, a lot of these companies are sharing that data across other third party services that you may not want to share as well. Okay, well, let's get down to the nuts and bolts and let's see what I found out. Right. So I tried to sign up for three Day Blinds. I didn't get any email 711 God bless him. They sent me one email. albertsen to grocery chain i i believe right. 73 emails. That sounds sounds about right. Amazon didn't bother testing. Beard brand. Could not sign up. Belk sent me five. Good old Best Buy. Anybody heard the expression? Send it and forget it or send in prayer? Yeah, right carpet bombing, a lemon email emails. Why do you think they sent 11 emails? Because it works is that will work for you. I don't suggest it but it does work. Chick fil A, unfortunately. Co Co star they are a bunch of properties. So I signed up for apartments.com I got three that was very reasonable. Ergo Hello Fresh Hilton HP. This is a technology company. They're actually engineers that while the original company was engineers actually found Intel's processor. How it wasn't calculating math correctly. And told Intel Hey, super smart people you're not so smart. Right? Could not sign up on their form page. Great engineers probably not so good marketers. Jack in the Box three lands and for Legal Zoom zero LinkedIn. I didn't test NBC Sports of all of these NBC Sports was probably my most interesting one. Because the signup process itself. Was it at minimum like six pages, you know, what's your favorite color? You know? Do you like cats? Or do you like dogs? Thanks, Jen. I'll give you a little plug right there and see that recall? I mean, just question after question. What sports team do I do and you know

it was an intensive Okay. So Keith, I don't want to sign up for any of that. I just like to spy and look at the thing you just showed me and like, I like to see what the competitors do. And I don't want to pay a competitive service like, lash back or another one, how can I do this? And you can use these things called aliases, and use the plus sign for Gmail. You can take a look at that as well. So I've heard this a lot. We can finally say, email is not dead.

Right? Well, it could be. And I tell you where it could be. If it gets centralized? Who do we have centralizing email right now? 2 billion users out of 4 billion users on the internet.

This will be the downfall of the internet. Right. And this is one of my favorite jokes, where's the best place to hide a dead body? This spam folder. All right, if you keep repeating the same mistake and expecting different results, the postmasters are very happy to put it in the same folder again, and again. All right. I asked you in the open source community to support three different ways either time, talent or treasure, the different licensing agreements are GPL glue and open source. Take a look at that. You call it freeware Andrew, and Nellie. I don't know if you guys knew this, but they got a history, way beyond what what I thought, you know, I just thought, hey, where did these guys come from? And they seem like click cool kids. And I maybe want to support but actually have a history in this stuff, right. There's some awesome words here. In case you didn't hear him before. Thanks. And if you have any questions, you can send me an email. I have 10 seconds left. Thank God, because I really have to pee now. Let's I don't want you to give me a round of applause. But can we give it a round of applause to sparkplug SparkPost for are the major sponsor that actually made this event happen? Please, can we hear it?

Andrew Bonar 37:35
Thank you so much key, a fantastic presentation, as always, as I promised, and indeed, yes. SparkPost have not come in early and said Andrew, what is it that you need to make this happen? It would never have happened. So Karen, to the organization that you represent, thank you, and a personal random applause from me. Thank you so much. Everything that you see here, the fact that we were able to be fabulous and uses published location. If somebody hadn't come in early and said look, we're gonna fund this. We're gonna make this happen. It wouldn't have happened