@@ 0,0 1,94 @@
+---
+title: RIP Email Server
+date: "2023-11-13T19:54:09+00:00"
+draft: false
+---
+
+RIP my email server,
+[2023](/posts/2023/06/disruption-from-google-and-red-hat/) - 2023
+
+As you may have heard, Amazon wil soon begin charging an hourly rate for
+public IPv4 addresses.
+*Fair enough*, you may say, *it is a scarse resource*.
+It isn't $42/year scarse.
+I categorically refuse this highway robbery.
+
+So, it seems I am embarking on a journey to the strange lands of IPv6.
+A forthcoming blog post will discuss this in more detail.
+In the meantime, there's a more pressing issue.
+
+The only reason I've been able to run my email server is the permanent IP
+address afforded to me by AWS Elastic IP (EIP).
+I am otherwise stranded in the Midwestern world of awful ISPs that will
+never sell me a static IP.
+*Why does that matter?*
+Even if I gave up on the dream of *sending* mail from a self-hosted server,
+it isn't possible to even *receive* mail unless you have a PTR record
+published.
+Google's mail server
+*(the only one that matters, as far as I'm concerned)*
+will *not* talk to your server if your domain name and IP address fail the
+roundtrip MX -> A -> PTR -> A lookup.
+
+And it isn't just the static IPv4 addresses that are going to become a paid
+feature.
+No, this isn't as simple as 'the party being over' for everyone's single free
+static address.
+Even a *dynamically assigned* IPv4 address will incur the charge.
+The only way around this is to convert your stack for IPv6.
+
+*Experts have been saying for years that we need to adopt IPv6.
+For decades even.
+Time's up.*
+Sure, and I'm fine with that.
+I'll eat the cost of my own stubborness.
+But losing the PTR record means I have to shut down my mail server.
+
+*Surely AWS supports IPv6 PTR records* you may protest.
+No.
+*Why?*
+Great question.
+
+----
+
+*Warning: pure speculation fueled by dissatisfaction ahead.*
+
+I don't think Amazon is trying to push customers onto their full-service mail
+hosting offerings.
+If they cared to turn a profit on those,
+they'd invest just a bit of money into that engineering team to make the
+product at least a little functional.
+Also, I don't think enough people put mail servers on AWS to make a significant
+impact in that direction.
+
+I don't think that the cost of IPv4 addresses is actually high enough to
+*require* charging for them.
+Maybe this is a strategic pricing position?
+Establish a price that will scare away non-corporate users early.
+So that when costs *are* prohibitive,
+and competitors are forced to introduce similar charges,
+AWS can boast of 'cheaper' prices.
+
+Maybe someone at Amazon is trying to force a mass migration to IPv6.
+Could be a principled thing,
+or maybe there is some way to profit off of IPv6 addressing.
+I honestly can't imagine it, but behind every bad idea is a crypto bro with an
+inflated job title.
+
+I don't know too much about how Amazon's networking looks,
+but maybe this is as simple as EIP's overhead?
+EIP is a very powerful tool,
+especially for large organization that have fleets of EC2 instances.
+But maybe all that indirection makes for an unsustainable network?
+
+----
+
+I don't really know what the reasoning is, but it sucks.
+I had a lot of TODO projects floating around that were going to build off of
+this mail server.
+I devoted a lot of time to figuring out how SMTP worked in theory,
+and how it worked in practice,
+and trying to defend my system from webcrawlers.
+I'm sad to see it go.
+RIP.
+