161–170 of 311 posts
* CVE-2019-11500 : Critical Dovecot and Pigeonhole vulnerability (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/08/28/3)
I still run my own mail server, but I hate having to keep up with these security vulnerabilities which can come up at the most inconvenient time.
Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero. There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just one incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider w…
By the way, how many times did you get locked out of your Gmail account vs how many times did the same happen with your own server?
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If you're living at the country side, producing your own milk is healthier, can be a good hobby while you're young and a great occupation after you're retired. Manual labor is good exercise and can be fulfilling. But I'd probably go with goats instead. I don't think maintaining your own email server can be very fulfilling, but hobbies are a matter of taste.
> producing your own milk is healthier How's that?
Raw milk from grass fed animals has a very different, much richer taste.
For one you can control what you feed your animals. The taste and quality of milk varies greatly depending on what they eat. You can feed them high quality grass, although in winter some cereals are fine. Anybody that drinks raw milk knows that the taste of what they eat really is reflected in the milk. E.g. if you let them graze on a field with flowers, it will have a flowery taste.
Leave raw milk on the table to turn sour and you get yogurt. It's quite good too. And you can't do that with the pasteurized milk from the store, it doesn't matter if it's whole or not, doesn't work.
Goes without saying that with high quality raw milk it's quite easy to make cheese too, which again, you can't with the milk your can find at the store.
As for why it's more healthy, the pasteurization process reduces the nutritional quality of milk. There are also weak indications that people with a lactose intolerance can tolerate raw milk better than they can tolerate pasteurized milk. It might be that it contains some lactase. Although this claim you should take with a grain of salt.
And in the US at least you can argue that the pasteurized milk you find in stores is ultra-processed. Read the following article:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-aug-02-fo-62752...
Note that I'm not saying that you can't find a good source of raw milk from a farm with free range, grass fed animals and great quality control. But it's harder to do so and if you're living in the city, depending on the city, next to impossible.
I do encourage you to try find such a source. The difference in taste is well worth it.
And if you grow it yourself, it's much like anything else. For example tomatoes no longer taste well due to being picked too early. Grow your own tomatoes in season and the difference is night and day.
I remember a story where a guy had the DNS of his custom mail domain changed after a malicious actor social engineered his domain name provider. The story was coupled with the recommendation to use a mail provider for the added protection that it would in theory be way less likely for their domain used by many accounts to be hijacked in this way. The guy got really screwed because once they got his domain and thus hi…
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Because it is not the same result. Yes, it is a similar result, but not the same. You give up a lot of control even using a smaller email service provider -- not the least of which is direct control of your own email data. Obviously, since it is email, there is nothing you can do about what others do with emails once they are received on their end, but it is still nice to have direct control of your side. The counter…
Setting up offlineimap to backup your mail is easy. I run daily backups of my protonmail account so in the even they decide to do something nasty to my account, I wouldn't loose more than a day of mail.
A mail server is hard. Writing applications is hard. Designing a website is hard. Professional work is hard. But setting up your initial mail server is not hard. Read some guides (ahem: https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix ), fix a lot of typos, and you're up an running. Same with developing the initial version of an application, or designing the first draft. Not rocket science. Not easy but not that hard for an experienc…
> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use... non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.
Number of times I have had the problem of "email not working for some reason" since switching to gmail ~20 years ago: zero. Number of times I had this problem when running my own mail server (and presumably would have today): non-zero. There's your entire explanation as to why this is a losing battle. Just one incident of an email delivery problem probably outweighs any privacy risk wrt using a centralized provider w…
I eventually caved in and switched to fastmail - and everything is good since then.
Google is giving you no trouble because the main instigator of trouble these days is google.
You may find it acceptable to use them with this in mind. I do not.
Let's see... Postfix, Dovecot, SPF and OpenDKIM on the server-side, each of them with their own config. Then you've got to set up your domain, and domain headers on your domain host. Oh, DMARC is also another thing. Then, most ISPs will outright refuse to accept incoming mail from your IP address, since they've basically changed from blacklisting to whitelisting. So you've also got to relay your outgoing mail via you…
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If there's one lesson from the history of spamming, it's that spammers are among the fastest adopters of anti-spam technologies. If PoW meant that spammers could only send 1/100th the email, but the email was 1000× more likely to actually show up in an inbox, spammers would jump on it in a heartbeat.
That doesn't make sense. Each email is only worth so much to a spammer. They can't lose money on every email and make up for it with volume.
A mail server is hard. Writing applications is hard. Designing a website is hard. Professional work is hard. But setting up your initial mail server is not hard. Read some guides (ahem: https://flurdy.com/docs/postfix ), fix a lot of typos, and you're up an running. Same with developing the initial version of an application, or designing the first draft. Not rocket science. Not easy but not that hard for an experienc…
> If you just want a reliable mail service, just use... non-Fastmail options that are a lot cheaper for multiple mailboxes and provide more, like Posteo, Mailbox.org, Runbox.com, Mailfence, Migadu, etc.
Thanks for mentioning some alternatives, but I've just checked the first example and it does not support custom domains (which Fastmail does), so it does not "provide more".