Outlook.com is also rejecting mail based on blocklists that are not public and you essentialy cannot get yourself out. My VPS provider is pretty much entirely blocked and their regular blocklist process says we are golden so nothing to unblock.
Outlook.com and similar are an anathema to email. This is why they tell you not to run a mail server .
On the other hand rejecting domains without dmarc is fine. Just not happy it is silent.
Everybody I know who still runs their email server (you can get Europeans out of Europe, but you can't get Europe out of the Europeans) complains about Microsoft.
I bet Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for 80+% of complaints about email being impossible to host.
In a federated / pseudo-decentralized network, any provider with 10+% of captive users has an outsized leverage on the entire ecosystem. You don't need a monopoly; as long as you have a monopoly on just a few users that others absolutely need to be able to interact with, you can dictate terms to everybody.
Google is no better. It's quite absurd, they even went through the trouble of creating postmaster tools to help you manage your reputation - except that these don't work unless you have fairly high sending rates (I forget, but I think several hundred a day). So essentially they're actively hostile to personal and small business servers.
> I bet Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for 80+% of complaints about email being impossible to host.
They are the reason I dropped self-hosting my mails. They were silently dropping some of my mails depending on the day I sent them. If they were at least sent to the spam folder, it would be easier to communicate with their users. And since a lot of their users are not technical at all, it's complicated to explain them the issue.
It's absurd in every way. I was trying to get it to stop spamming maillist traffic. It's impossible. Global level filters enacted as admin to not spam check are ignored.
Don't forget Google! Gmail will hide your email for no reason no matter what you configure on Gmail's side of things. At least Microsoft has a "please remove me from your spam lists" form (that only worked for ipv4 IP addresses last time I tried).
outlook.com and O365 are horrible to deliver to. We regularly get issues where we sent an email it was accepted by O365 but was never delivered to the mailbox. We have one person working at least half the time on resolving stuff like that. And that's from a respectably maintained SES egress with good reputation, DMARC, DKIM configured.
There is a trick. Sign up with them, configure custom domain, but don’t set your MX records. On your MTA, route mail that goes to Outlook/Hotmail to go through their MSA with your Outlook credentials and headers stripped as if submitted directly by user. Outlook gets mail through their own MSA it trusts, rest of the world talks to your mail system directly. Replies still go to your MXes.
I haven’t productionized this setup (I send maybe a dozen emails a year) but it worked for me ad hoc a couple years back, when I had to send a mail to an Outlook-hosted address and they blackholed everything I tried to send while 250 OKing me.
The problem with this setup is that if I want to send email to fred@example.com and example.com is actually handled by Outlook, I need to somehow know beforehand that email to example.com needs that special routing. Or do you just route ALL your outbound email through Outlooks MSA?
You can usually figure that out by checking the MX records (though some spam filtering middlemen might make that hard to detect) and TXT records (if a domain imports Outlook's SPF list, it's probably on Outlook in the back).
I have a small client with a large email list who wants to switch from once a month constant contact newsletters to sending them through SES with a self-hosted Sendy instance. This seemed like a reasonable way to save $10k a year or so. I haven't used SES before for anything. I have run an email server for 30 years and had occasional blacklist headaches, but it's not used for mass mailing of that sort... it's usually several years between problems. Is this a terrible idea to switch, even if it's off a "managed" SES dedicated IP? I don't want to switch them and find out no one on Outlook is getting their mail.
I ran a SaaS up until recently. Emailing users notifications for events was just a normal part of the app. Users got upset when the emails didn't come through. So then I had to be email tech support for something I had no control over. Lovely.
Self hosting mail on a shared server in Moldova is basically the entire idea behind email (and the internet).
Which with cheap models like Jev as spam classifiers, this can now become a reality.
The problem is, Google and Microsoft have monopolized the entire email market, so their esoteric deliverability mysticism from 2007 still persists (basically blanket bans on entire IP spaces, locking out anybody trying to send emails on their own).
People used to have party lines and leave their doors unlocked too, but it turns out the world is filled with bad actors and other assorted shitty people.
The problem isn't that a random person can't rent a Moldova VPS and run an email server, though. It's that most people are forced into gmail, apple and outlook accounts if they want to use phone/PC, and a respectful Moldova company now can't reach their respective Moldova clients without paying money towards USA.
Switch Moldova to almost any country (or even a state that isn't California or Washington), and it's the same story everywhere
This is one thing I find more on Hacker News than most other discussion sites. Any topic about annoying or bad behaviour by corporations eventually devolves to "they're allowed to do it".
"They're allowed to do it" is one of those things that doesn't really bear saying so much because that's already been implicitly established. Nobody is claiming what they're doing is illegal, so how does this add anything of value? Who is still unaware that corporations will use their size and market control to their benefit?
Same experience here. We have multiple customers whose servers are in large blocked IP ranges, with seemingly no way to get them delisted. The strange thing is that Microsoft only seems to reject their emails on Hotmail/Outlook.com accounts (free accounts), while accepting them just fine on business accounts. Meanwhile, their “support” tools tell you there’s nothing wrong.
Based on my broad experience, I’d comfortably rank Microsoft as the worst of the major email providers. (I am owner poste.io)
I work at a big company that sends alot of emails. And even we have been put in the "bad bad books of o365 bad list", it's an absolute pain to get yourself out of the office 365 defender (I think it's what they call it now?) meanwhile your customers are complaining they arent receiving emails from you.
Yes. I once had issues with emails being rejected by Outlook on MailGun. And it was only Outlook. Had to contact support, they promptly changed my account to another server/IP once I mentioned it was Outlook, sounded like a recurring issue.
Well, your big company should then call M$ out then. E.g., consider you're sending a confirmation e-mail during account registration, then when your server detects that relay is `*.oulook.com` show a warning: 'outlook users most probably will not receive emails from us due to bs policy at microsoft. consider using a different email provider.'
Yes, that may turn some users away, but they would complain and leave anyway, because they don't receive emails from your server. On the other hand, that's how one can contribute to unwinding ms's share of email accounts.
Think about what you're saying: someone is near the top of the sales funnel and despite the odds you've convinced them to provide their email so you can start the process of trying to convert. Even if you are good you'll still lose 80% of people from this point before you see a single dollar. Now, inject some extra weird, sketchy-sounding friction AND ask them to change their email provider, something 99% of employees never think about let alone control. Not sure how old you are but you'd have better luck convincing users "this site works best in IE4".
Right, letting users frustrate silently, without explaining to them why they don't receive correspondence is the way to go. Discussing my age/gender/race isn't productive either. Dont rage, just pay attention to what's written. I only suggest them to select a different e-mail for better experience, not reqiring it. And the actual wording of this suggestion should always be developed in collaboration with company's layers and marketing teams.
> Outlook.com and similar are an anathema to email. This is why they tell you not to run a mail server .
It should be the other way around though.. More people should run their own mail servers so that centralized players cannot control what should be a decentralized communication protocol.
> More people should run their own mail servers so that centralized players cannot control what should be a decentralized communication protocol.
This plan relies on a meaningful number of people voluntarily switching to a setup that requires more expertise and effort for a worse experience in the hopes that eventually large corporations will take notice. That seems like it is unlikely to be successful.
I suspect that if the Europeans or Californians don't force email interop via regulations, it will eventually be an open standard in name only.
> more expertise and effort for a worse experience
It doesn't have to be that way, there has never been an easier time in history to set up a mail server.
Same way it is very easy for a non-technical person to install and use, for example, a Linux-based OS, it is possible to package a mail server 'in a box' and have it easy to setup and run.
> there has never been an easier time in history to set up a mail server
The hard part isn't just setup but making sure you're reliably delivering and receiving messages every minute of every day. Issues like the one mentioned in the linked article crop up periodically and require that you put on your sysadmin hat and waste an evening trawling forums when you could be spending time with the kids.
> it is very easy for a non-technical person to install and use, for example, a Linux-based OS
Say I ask a hundred non-technical people to "install Linux" on whatever computer they have lying around at home with no further instructions besides what they find on the internet. How many do you think will succeed?
I've had several times where mail from custom domains associated with a business were delivered hours late by Outlook. Time sensitive emails. A guy coming to my office for a meeting called me and said he was downstairs and having an issue with security. Went down and swiped him in.
Four hours later, I got the same message by email. I thought he was back - nope. An email sent at 10am that was delivered at 4pm showed it was from 2pm until I looked at the header and saw sent at 10am and just... chilling out for 4 hours. DMARC was set up for them just fine.
I've had the same issue with my own custom domain, with DMARC set up. A year later, it finally got bumped up to some sort of "trusted" domain for that one place and my emails get delivered the same day now.
They had blocked my server by block range, I filed a support request (free) at https://olcsupport.office.com/ and they had it fixed in less than 2 days.
I had experience implementing and debugging mail delivery, so when I chose to run my own server I just opted for a SMTP relay, and never had an issue. I don't know why this isn't the recommended default solution.
yeah I see it for them being a problem too if they are not accepting legitimate email. I might be a bit stubborn here but I refuse to give them the monopoly and self host our email anyway. I just wish more people would join this fight
I was viciously mean in my communication with the Outlook team when they said they “couldn’t” remove me from the blocklist. I pointed out that, as the operator of a perfectly compliant secure server their inability to deliver my mail is a technical failure on their end and one which I will be contacting their supervisor about and they somehow managed to scrabble together the heroic ability to delete my row from a table. Never back down from these bastards.
Pretty sure this or part of this just burned me. Icing on the cake is Nintendo will also ban hammer your email if it rejects some or all of their emails - including their dumptruck of marketing junk. The only and I mean only resolution to this is to basically move your Nintendo account to a different email completely. Absolutely unreal on both sides.
Yes, no one should not have DKIM or DMARC but holy yikes when neither side wants to actually give in to help the customer.
> Outlook.com and similar are an anathema to email. This is why they tell you not to run a mail server .
It turns out that whoever has the most power is the most powerful. This is why distributed/decentralized systems cannot singlehandedly free us from tyranny, and why I find people who spend all their time preaching decentralized systems to be quite silly. We don't need better systems (well maybe we do but,,,), we need better education and awareness of how billionaires manipulate us; this goes beyond software.
Complain all you want about the monopolists, and I do think you're right to do so, but a lot of their power comes from and is aimed at defeating the overwhelming flood of spam.
Mail, then emails, then home phones, then cell phones, then texts, then social media have been gradually rendered less and less usable by bad actors systematically abusing every single tool we try to use to communicate with one another to steal from us, lie to us, and manipulate our beliefs, and we'll just keep inventing and discarding new ways of communicating until we reckon with this.
With cheaper AI classification models coming out every day now, the spam problem is on the cusp of basically being solved in every communication channel.
The only question is how many years the lazy network-effects monopolies (like Google, Microsoft, Verizon, etc) will hold this back from happening.
The optimist in me says this will unlock pathways to true decentralization of push communication protocols (like SMTP) instead of only have decentralization of pull-oriented protocols (like HTTP).
Generation is, and always will be, cheaper and easier to do well than classification.
AI becoming faster empowers attackers far more than it empowers defenders. We're seeing this in every discipline and every corner of the software industry.
A bunch of my accounts were hacked a while book and since then my outlook email is getting flooded with spam.
I have to give MS credit their spam filter is pretty good.
I'll never pay for email so your options are either outlook or Gmail and I don't trust Google.
Decentralization is not a bulletproof solution. It is a mitigation. Until someone gets 50 percent of market share. Then they can run havoc on the ecosystem with their own customized system.
Just put codex in a continuous goal loop to keep you off the blacklists...give it whatever email / creds it needs to make the appropriate requests and make the needed changes (ofc tell it the guardrails it should follow).
Selfhosted email is likely easier now than it ever was before.
Requiring DMARC may be good, but Outlook's approach is awful.
I was working for Microsoft when outlook.com launched and got a good email address that was my primary for more than a decade.
I had so many issues with things getting silently dropped with no recourse (2FA codes, account recovery mails, etc.) on so many sites that I finally gave up, reversed the stream, and had Outlook forward to GMail instead of vice versa. A few months after that, I realized that all my Outlook got was an enormous volume (hundreds of day) a spam and that all legitimate mail was going to my other accounts, so I turned it off entirely and haven't read that mailbox in over a year.
> I had so many issues with things getting silently dropped with no recourse (2FA codes, account recovery mails, etc.) on so many sites
This is not unique to Microsoft and really the source's problem — they did something to get blocked in the first place.
Add in the fact that you're almost certainly not the only one impacted, and that they have no interest in fixing it, it screams incompetence on the source's part.
Been there, done that, good luck explaining the problem to the app's first-level support in the Philippines because it's not in their script.
> and had Outlook forward to GMail
Till the day GMail hits you with the "We couldn't verify it's you" bullshit and locks you out of your account forever. Good luck getting support from Google, the word is not in their lexicon.
> This is not unique to Microsoft and really the source's problem — they did something to get blocked in the first place.
I've never encountered this issue with GMail. Delivery just works. I'm trying to think of the last false-positive spam flag I've had with GMail, and I've definitely never had mail be entirely dropped.
> Till the day GMail hits you with the "We couldn't verify it's you" bullshit and locks you out of your account forever. Good luck getting support from Google, the word is not in their lexicon.
Some hosting providers are known for not caring about the activities of their customers, but in general, how would I know that the other tenants are scum?
I have access to a fairly large dataset of known bad hosting providers, but most people don't. So how do you tell the difference between getting a good deal and "this is cheap because it's sketchy as all hell".
We also don't block all of Vietnam, or all Jio customers in India, even if we know that 20% of bot traffic is from those two alone.
Wait until this guy realizes that all spam these days comes from Azure ASNs, and abuses cross-tenant issues as well as a simple "Fwd: ..." and "Re: ..." tricks to bypass Microsoft Outlook spam filters.
Because the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and sending content you'd want to interact with. If the big providers weren't doing this stuff, we'd whine about the enormous amount of spam.
The solution is allow only communications that are demonstrably not spam and not unwanted.
There have been lots of proposals to this effect but maybe you have to put up two cents in a crypto wallet, which the other person can claim if the mail is unwanted. If someone takes your two cents, you remove them from your lists ASAP. The receiver doesn't benefit meaningfully from the 2c so they are unlikely to claim it. The sender is only damaged if a lot of different people claim the 2 cents. Maybe a few domains are default whitelisted even if they don't put up 2 cents, to protect against entities that are important but would be frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar). If you use a provider that doesn't whitelist, fine, but you're going to miss those emails.
Maybe the top 'spite claim' users are published and it becomes difficult to get people to agree to put up money to talk to you.
This reduces spam to the level of junk mail, which is still not totally trivial but is orders of magnitude more manageable.
> the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and sending content you'd want to interact with.
There is and it's the same as other protocols including proprietary ones - a sender address whitelist.
There's no proprietary protocol that solved spam either.
I'm the sysadmin at my company and we regularly get emails spoofing our own addresses! It's wild that Microsoft can't even protect customers when they have all the info to do so.
Mine isn't from those email hosts, but it from google cloud or Azure typically (not AWS for whatever reason). Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible.
It seems insane that gmail doesnt provide a way to automatically send a mail (eg based on domain, keywords, etc) to spam. I know theres block sender but for example aliexpress uses a different name for every email so that's useless.
What this is called is survivorship bias. The question I would ask is how much mail are you not seeing at all because it's dropped at the edge first thing because it's IP block listed?
Next, how much spam are you seeing from them because they and Google are the largest providers on Earth? Kind of like selecting a random person from the population in the US and going "look, it's a white guy". Yea, that's how statistics works.
Lastly, because the are good at blocking spam at the edge, then that's the last bastion of attack for spammers to put their efforts in if they want any return at all.
I self-host and don't have a spam filter. Spam makes up about 1 in 5 messages I receive. It's always the same spam campaigns that would be easily filtered with a few regexes.
Self-hosting allows me to use a different receiving address for each entity I contact, so I know exactly who put me on spam lists and if it gets bad I can route that address to the garbage bin.
It's been a while since I've been an SMTP server admin but when I was I managed a few hundred thousand mailboxes under different domains. Most likely know one knows about your domain and it has little traffic. On average I saw users domains get around 5 spam to 1 ham. Of course you have outliers. I had one domain that received around 1000 spam to 1 ham. That was a domain that looked like it could belong to a university and it got absolutely flooded.
Anecdotes are not a great thing to run mail servers on, broad statistics are.
The irony is that if more people started to self host again, especially jogger companies, the problem like one exemplified by this post would be solved quickly.
A web forum's users, who love nothing more than using the "flag" button to stomp out comments they don't like, are indignant upon discovering the world's third largest email provider has a "flag" button of their own.
We have dozens of different ways to send E2EE messages to each other, with realtime publish-subscribe, and yet billions of dollars are spent trying to duct tape email. Who cares if Outlook/Gmail/Icloud use IMAP or Websocket? If the interface looks the same to the end user will they really care?
Why are we so willingly ceding one of the few widely used free and open protocols to replace it with incompatible proprietary ones that don't interoperate?
Experience shows that the walls will get taller and the moats will get deeper.
Sounds more like using outlook.com is a mistake. I've been running my own mail server for over 20 years and outlook.com is literally the only domain I have had problems with, and this is the only reason that I now send via Scaleway's free transactional email service.
The people working on outlook.com are just talentless amateurs - the rest knows how to do it right. It's a shame it's so widely used.
I still run my own server and do not use a relay service and do host on a cheap (free actually, OCI) VPS and other cheap VPS's before that since the 1990's. In that time only one big email service blocked my IP by a large block range, twice...Microsoft but by filing a support request here https://olcsupport.office.com/ both times, they resolved in in less than 2 days. The second incident was just in the last several days so the request does work.
I don't disagree, but what are your options when a giant portion of the population uses O365 and outlook.com? How are you going to get them to stop using it, so that legit emails from user-owned servers are not silently rejected?
I've also been running my own server for over 20 years, but do note that the big players may block their senders from delivering mail to your server. This happened to me with GMail around 6-7 years ago, until I configured DMARC and/or DKIM and/or SPF to their liking. As far as I know, they don't do a press release when they update their rules.
I have a perfect score in google postmaster tools on dkim, spf and 0 spam reports. They still send all emails to spam. They will even do this if you are replying to the user who contacted you. Same experience for my friend running an indie festival. These days you pretty much have to alert gmail users by some other means (like if signing up on a website) that they have to check spam and whitelist you since it appears gmail would rather block legit emails than allow a single possible spam through.
It depends on the nature of the transaction. If the user needs the email more than you do, you just remind them Outlook deletes your messages, and they'll find a way, and in the long term usage of Outlook will decrease.
That may be so, but you can't control what mail service your recipients use. So whether or not it's a bad idea, it can be your problem. That said I don't agree with OP that self-hosting mail is a bad idea.
Sure, and the same is true from the recipient point of view: If you miss important emails because you are using a MS hosted server, it becomes your problem.
Seems to work for many websites. But only if your users aren't giving you money, because it's 50/50 whether they'll use a different email address or give up entirely.
>Always? If emails are not answered you'll usually notice unless you're a Spammer
Means you're not using your email seriously. For example, to send CVs in response to job postings.
I send up to 20 email per day to people who have issues with their package build scripts, and I have no idea whether they ignore me because they stopped using the distro or because mail got dropped.
Now watch the goal post moving at light speed. This site is by business for business. They can't stand self hosting. Saas or bust. No matter how much time you spend demonstrating the opposite the next time someone mentions email they'll get a backlash. It's mind boggling how it plays out the same every single time. But give them a saas that returns the next integer for $19.99/month and that "creator" will be praised for their hard work. :)
At the most you need to use an external service for delivery (usually because you have problems with MS) but you can still run your own server with no difficulties once you do that.
That said, DMARC is required by a lot of people now, so I do not think this particular issue is a problem.
I have been self hosting my my personal email (and for family). Few problems so far other than delivery to MS and I have recently moved a domain I use for work email over.
Oddly enough the MS problems come from hotmail, but not other services. If that is a problem, then pay a bit to have email delivered.
It's not enough. I have a domain that I had a very long time but it is on an undesirable tld. I got it long before it was problematic. Outlook always puts my mail in the SPAM folder even though I have done everything I could. I even deliver through a trusted provider. Not on any spam list. DMARC, DKIM, SPF all set up. No dice.
Personally with LLMs now, I don't actually see a reason for dynamic languages at all. LLM now makes it faster so python, js and similar are fully redundant. It's all just inertia for now
Although I was a Python/Django developer, nowadays I only use golang or rust for greenfield projects. And I haven't ever written ONE line of golang or rust by hand.
Switched to intellij http scratches ages ago. Then go curl. I remember a bunch of people using postman from a decade to a few years ago. It's been a while since I've seen anyone. Probably people who do it rarely but haven't taken the time to change tools.
Lucky for us, the embedded folks don't take security too seriously! You don't need to be a garden variety hacker when your LLM can handle the drudgery for you.
It’s getting a lot easier these days. The microcontrollers these are built on are not and have never been actually secure. But I know that because I’ve built firmware for them in production, I guess
Turning on logging and seeing bots for the first time does not equate to novel or specifically crafted attacks. Web services get hit regularly by bots. A few dozen an hour is almost nothing for a public facing web service.
Yes, but seeing a few dozen of a new type show up within less of a day of the exploit being public is pretty mad. The usual probing is nothing special.
Biggest problem of leds is we have no good standards. Classic screw in bulb makes no sense with LEDs. Other formats usually mean you are screwed when you have to replace. So far LED strips seem the best way. A bit of soldering but you can replace them by parts.
Screw in bulbs make plenty of sense. You are not going to get people to convert to LEDs by forcing them to replace every single fixture in their home. That would be ridiculousmaxxing.
It would be nice to have an updated standard for newer buildings, though. In practice fewer and fewer fittings are using screw-in lightbulbs at all but there's not another standard.
What happens when something does go wrong though? Now, you have to replace the entire thing instead of just simply replacing a bulb. If only we had some other previous existing examples of fancy tech that used non-replaceable parts requiring a full replacement...
The lightbulb that you're throwing away also contains all the same electronics that a larger light fixture does, just in a smaller and less thermally efficient space.
Mounting options that allow larger LED lights allow you to use lights that are more thermally efficient without sacrificing any replaceability. JIS C 8310 mounts for example.
I think they're suggesting a lightbulb equivalent of going from USB-A connectors to USB-C. Replaceable bulbs in sockets that are just as easy to use, but with a smaller profile.
The problem is going from mains voltage to 3.3v means some sort of waste heat. Rewiring the whole house to 12v is one idea I've seen, but again, total house rewire and fixture replacement. In the mean time, it's A9 bulbs with LED electronics going from 120v to 3.3v generating heat. Making cheap electronics means that heat will kill the electronics. Making good electronics at a higher retail price is the solution, but consumers are not educated enough so all they see is sticker shock.
Your comparison of USB-A to USB-C is nonsensical and does not actually acknowledge the issue of why the existing screw in bulb direct replacement have issues
My vote would be 24v or 48v. You cannot power substantial LED with 3.3v. You’d spend a fortune rolling out ultra-thick gauge wire to avoid pissing away non-trivial amounts of power into heat. Many, many LED strips come as 24v. It’s the perfect balance of wire gauge for the amount of power you’ll be drawing.
Screw-in sockets are more durable and long-lasting than any replacement so-far, most of which have been replaced again (remember those weird fluorescent mini-bulb sockets?).
12V is too high for your LEDs, you still have the power supply. 12 volts is not near enough voltage for a house. You can get around it with very big wires but copper is extremely expensive. Even in cars, 12 volts is borderline. Trucks are fairly often go to 24 or higher voltage because even at the size of a large truck (semi), higher voltage is an advantage.
Well, we can certainly argue with 110 or 220 is a better voltage for a house. It is quite clear that 12 volts is too low.
It doesn't need to be for the whole house, it just needs to be for the lighting fixtures. Obviously nobody is going to use a microwave or blender on 12V. It's not like our bulbs plug into NEMA 5-15 outlets. Having good DC standard voltages and plugs would be incredibly useful. Don't bother running 12V everywhere, but like after the 120V light switch go to a single controller that then drives the lights for that room. Or have that be in the box with the switch, although that might still have the same kind of cramped heat issue.
And it's not like we need to just stop producing Edison socket styles tomorrow. But let's make sane standards today.
I don't know how it is where you live, but most apartments where I've lived in Paris didn't have dedicated wiring for the lights in the "living" spaces. They had them in the bathroom / hallway / kitchen, but not in the living rooms, for example.
My current apartment has dedicated circuits in the living room and bedroom. But in the living room they're in awkward places.
I always had to resort to multiple lamps that would plug into an outlet so I could place them where I needed them. Running 12 V for the bulbs would require rewiring most of the apartment.
Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Its not like your bulbs are plugging straight into your wall outlets. You've got some kind of lamp fixture that the bulbs screw in to, correct?
Your lamps would still plug into mains, same as they do today. The lamp fixture overall would contain the driver components, hopefully in packaging which lets it manage heat well and have good build quality. But whatever parts do fail routinely should be able to be easily replaced with some kind of standardized socket. It just seems like we're trying to squeeze too much too cheaply into a form factor that's ill suited for the requirements by trying to shove all the driver circuitry into the same envelope of an older Edison A-shape socket style bulb.
This has already kind of been a thing for a while with low voltage halogen lamps. The bulbs themselves aren't made for mains voltage, the lamp structures themselves give the right voltage for the halogen mini bulbs. I've replaced a few bi-pin halogen lights for LEDs with drop-in replacements (especially for outdoor lights), but this same kind of bulb packaging hasn't really been very common for interior lighting from what I've seen.
> Now, I'm not against having a new socket standard. But it would have to be connected to 220 V.
Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
> Why would it need to be 220 V in the "socket" for the bulb? Why do we need lamps themselves to just be a frame to hold a wire, why not put the driver circuitry in there to step it down to whatever voltage we decide to drive the DC LED bulbs at?
I was talking about the lamp itself. Maybe I used the wrong term? I meant the fixture which holds the wire and expects a bulb. That fixture needs to go into mains, because that outlet may have to also service something else entirely.
Now, sure, usually those fixtures tend to be larger than the bulbs, so they could hold the conversion circuitry. I'd be fine with that. But the commenter I was replying to talked about having an alternative DC circuit for the lights.
Sure, and we can have that too, in the places where the lights are built-in to the ceilings or cabinets or whatever. When we have lights in the ceilings, the fixtures again can handle this specialized LED bulb style. And one might even link several lights into a single DC circuit for all the lights in the room versus having each individual light do its own AC->DC conversions in compromised envelopes.
That is fairly typically in the US as well. Most often there is a switch in the living spaces, which controls have the outlet half of a duplex outlet. Plug something into the top (sometimes bottom - there is no standard) and the switch controls it so you can get the lights on/off when you enter/leave the room, plug into the bottom (again sometimes top) and it is always on, perfect for whatever else you have in the room.
Yeah 24VDC or 48VDC would make more sense but tbh you only need to drive the LEDs with it.
At 48VDC you could run 16AWG like 100ft and still be fine as long as the lights pull around 60W or less all together (which works out to ~12 lights on a circuit). And that circuit would only add another ~2W or so in power losses when energized.
That circuit is essentially what power over ethernet does today so you could replace romex with PoE Type 3/Type 4 plenum rated ethernet and it'd be like half the cost.
And if you really want to optimise for losses you could put the switches on the ethernet data line and use that for sensing rather than running the PoE circuit out to each light switch (and then de-energise the PoE circuit when the switches report off). Bonus points in that this would allow you to "reprogram" which light switch controls which circuit without needing to do any re-wiring.
You still have to run Romex everywhere, though. People want to run other things in various rooms. They want the option of turning a bedroom into an office should that make sense. That means they're going to see enough power to run a decent sized computer. TV's and bedrooms are common. Stereo systems. Just me and my wife charging our beds by the phone overnight is going to take a significant amount of the power that you allocated to the room.
And again, your whatever voltage, 48 volts, is way too much for an LED, so we still have a power supply. What's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC? Ultimately, there's not much of a difference, well, you could do a very cheap linear regulator and be horribly wasteful of power, but more likely you're going to be doing a social power supply, which is going to be more complex and have similar efficiency losses. I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to know this for sure but I would suspect the power supply in your Ethernet switch and then the second one to get to that your voltage is less efficient than just having a single power supply that goes from regular line voltage to whatever the LEDs need.
You still have to run romex for the other circuits. But it's not hard to run those on a separate breaker. Rooms often have like one and a half 15A circuits each because lighting used to draw so much power but now you can drop it down to one 15A circuit per room and run a single circuit that switches out to the entire house off of one 15A breaker.
> what's the difference between a power supply running on 48 volts DC versus 110 or 220 volts AC?
It's already DC. A properly sized buck converter based LED driver is going to have like 80-95% efficiency when the LED is on (and it's trivial to draw no power when off) and they are like 0.25USD per IC.
They are going to have equal or better performance than AC->DC switching mode power supplies because buck converters are already the simplest and most efficient type of SMPS.
I've seen on Amazon packs of 4 bulbs for $7 which is significantly less than the price of a single Hue bulb for $25. While the Hue bulb is "tuneable" white adjustable from cool and warm, the price is 3x for 1/4 of the number of bulbs. Not really sure that counts as marginal. Unless you're marginal is describing the cost to manufacture, but what's that got to do with anything?
Early LEDs were fine. Then they overclocked them a bit too much and they just break now. Too much current and so on. You can make a very simple led very bright but it won't last. If you undervolt them instead they are dim but last forever. So the deal is to have many undevolted LEDs. Ofc that is pricier...
Outlook.com and similar are an anathema to email. This is why they tell you not to run a mail server .
On the other hand rejecting domains without dmarc is fine. Just not happy it is silent.
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