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Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

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Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#91

Post by Tepix »

tasn wrote: post #62
Tepix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When communicating with your own server using https, it is already end-to-end encrypted.

While this may feel true, there are a few reasons why it's not. 1. This assumes https can be trusted, that is, MITM is not a possibility. This is a fair assumption for many people, but not for people whore are scared of state actors, which is common for journalists in and citizens of some countries. - This can be mitigated to an extent with certificate pinning, but I don't think all software support it (correctly?) a…

Re: 1. You can deploy additional security measures such as certificate pinning or a VPN tunnel to your CalDAV server if you have a high security requirement.

Re: 2. If your server is untrusted (because it's a remote virtual server) or hacked, e2e will not protect you.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#92

Post by philtar »

sctb wrote: post #84
philtar wrote: post #7

You lack critical reading skills. His concern is not that they companies would grab a copy, his concern is that he used to rely on them for syncing. He no longer has to rely on them. Google can shut down calendar and contacts and he would still be fine.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14837015 and marked it off-topic.

You are too sensitive. My statement was literally (and I do mean literally) an objective statement of fact. Nothing more nothing less.

This ultra-politically correct mentality is what makes it hard to battle people like Trump.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#93

Post by tasn »

Tepix wrote: post #91
tasn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this may feel true, there are a few reasons why it's not. 1. This assumes https can be trusted, that is, MITM is not a possibility. This is a fair assumption for many people, but not for people whore are scared of state actors, which is common for journalists in and citizens of some countries. - This can be mitigated to an extent with certificate pinning, but I don't think all software support it (correctly?) a…

Re: 1. You can deploy additional security measures such as certificate pinning or a VPN tunnel to your CalDAV server if you have a high security requirement. Re: 2. If your server is untrusted (because it's a remote virtual server) or hacked, e2e will not protect you.

1. That's exactly what I said, though you are just patching a broken system here, why not just use a system that's resilient to all of this in the first place like with end to end?

2. How so? EteSync for example has a git like integrity verification (just with HMAC instead of hash), so it's easy to check consistency across clients, and the server can't forge anything. The worst the server/MITM can do is stop syncing a specific client which would be easy to detect. A rogue server can't even omit specific changes, only stop sync. So I don't agree with your assertion.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#94

Post by pas »

urethrafranklin wrote: post #88
acidburnNSA wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that all those things are needed, and it did take me a while to get them all working. But now I know about tools like mail-tester [1] that analyze your emails and tell you exactly how to fix them. Once you know what to do, it's really not that much actual work to set them up. [1] https://www.mail-tester.com/

How feasible would running a mailing list (say 10k subs, one email/week) be off your setup?

We're doing something like that.

The problem is that you need a lot more volume to be able to use the feedback loop mechanisms ( https://blog.returnpath.com/what-is-a-feedback-loop/ ) efficiently.

Sure, it all works, but it's still the old piece of shit SMTP wild wild west, because when it stops working, you can do nothing. (But usually going to the saloon, having a rough night and waiting will solve things.)

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#95

Post by loa_in_ »

The only thing I miss in Google's thing is ability to allow people w/o tech savviness and w/o google account to sporadically add things to my calendar and have them marked as unconfirmed (like semi-transparent). I don't care if they'll recieve any further info, I want people to add their things to my life.

The subject of "who the hell isn't tech savvy enough and doesn't have an account already" is quickly answered with: I'm an uncle, my niece knows her way around the computer and knows the calendar, but has no idea why'd she need an e-mail account, and wouldn't bother to even try at this point.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#96

Post by sctb »

philtar wrote: post #92
sctb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14837015 and marked it off-topic.

You are too sensitive. My statement was literally (and I do mean literally) an objective statement of fact. Nothing more nothing less. This ultra-politically correct mentality is what makes it hard to battle people like Trump.

The comment violates the guidelines by jumping to a personal attack with “You lack critical reading skills.” We need you to not do that when commenting here.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#97

Post by king_phil »

gtaylor wrote: post #58
acidburnNSA wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a self-maintained version of the same email stack (Dovecot, Postfix, Spamassassin) and Spam is pretty much not a problem. I train the Bayes filter on my collection of 10,000 spams and a few thousand hams every 6 months and, while I do get an occasional false negative I feel that spam is pretty much fully under control. Self-hosting email is fun you guys!

As long as you set up SPF, DMARC, DKIM, reverse DNS, and SSL/TLS, plus do that all correctly. Oh, and make sure you pick a provider or host whose IP ranges aren't damaged goods. And don't get me started about sender reputation with the various email providers, or the often erroneous blacklists (and fighting to get your server/IPs off and kept off). IMO, there are limitless other things I'd rather be doing than these!

You forgot DNSSEC +DANE

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#98

Post by ausjke »

the_common_man wrote: post #64
adekok wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sogo: zero maintenance. No problem upgrades. It's really, really, nice.

sogo does not release stable packages anymore (it's only for paid users which is basically businesses). How are you updating sogo?

https://sogo.nu/download.html has all the new releases, where did you find that "only for paid users" info?

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#99

Post by tptacek »

king_phil wrote: post #97
gtaylor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you set up SPF, DMARC, DKIM, reverse DNS, and SSL/TLS, plus do that all correctly. Oh, and make sure you pick a provider or host whose IP ranges aren't damaged goods. And don't get me started about sender reputation with the various email providers, or the often erroneous blacklists (and fighting to get your server/IPs off and kept off). IMO, there are limitless other things I'd rather be doing than these!

You forgot DNSSEC +DANE

You do not need to set up DNSSEC+DANE, and, in fact, doing so is very likely to make your system less reliable; the primary function DNSSEC has in practice is to cause outages.

Observe how few of the major sites are DNSSEC-signed. In reality the only purpose signing has is allowing your site to vanish from view of the few DNS resolvers dumb enough to do DNSSEC validation.

Re: Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices

#100

Post by rebootthesystem »

jeremye77 wrote: post #83
rebootthesystem wrote: post #66

I've been looking a Zimbra [ https://www.zimbra.com/ ] for a while. I like the general idea of the product. Even the free version is feature-filled. My only problem with it is that it seems to be a resource hog. You'd have to get a fairly fat Linode to run it. I've used garden variety email hosting auto-magically setup on VPS's from such luminaries as GoDaddy without problems for many years. I have never worried abou…

I'm a fan of Zimbra. In reality...a Linode 4096 handles 5 "normal" users just fine, and a few here and there users, possibly more...that was all I needed. Tack on Z-push and you have a nice Activesync implementation as well. Then it is just like gmail just plugin the server and password and calendar, contacts, email, and whatnot all sync as you would expect. http://z-push.org/

I probably have a dozen email addresses across five companies that I need to manage. I thought Zimbra would be the answer but server requirements sky-rocket quickly.
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