91–100 of 218 posts
Normal people definitely don't want to manage a mail server though. Life is too short to waste figuring out why you're banned on Spamhaus for the 93th time. GMail sucks, but a home-made contraption is not the alternative.
Ugh!
All you are saying is that if you aren't looking for a home made contraption, then a home made contraption isn't what you are looking for.
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The point about trusting hosting providers is an interesting one. Indeed, when renting a Virtual Private Server from a service provider, you have no choice but to trust them to keep your data safe. This made we wonder: would it be possible to actually secure the server in such a manner that the hosting party won't have access to your stuff without your say so ? I think you can (sort of) do this already with having so…
I have a dedicated server with encrypted partitions and admin backdoors turned off at ovh. So theoretically they shouldn't be able to access the running system, and if they take it down to access the partitions directly, they're encrypted so that won't work either.
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I have a dedicated server with encrypted partitions and admin backdoors turned off at ovh. So theoretically they shouldn't be able to access the running system, and if they take it down to access the partitions directly, they're encrypted so that won't work either.
How do you handle reboots? If all of your partitions are encrypted I would guess you use a serial console to enter in the encryption password to decrypt and mount the actual OS drive?
I eagerly read the article to see what alternative to this feature the author was suggesting, so I was surprised to see he's reading the emails with a standalone client...in fact, it's an emacs plugin!
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I have a dedicated server with encrypted partitions and admin backdoors turned off at ovh. So theoretically they shouldn't be able to access the running system, and if they take it down to access the partitions directly, they're encrypted so that won't work either.
That's why they take memory snapshot first, which is trivial with VPS and then pick encryption keys from it to access encrypted volumes. This is well known method and works with pure hardware machines too with physical access. It's great question when you get to server, to shut it down or leave on. If on, it could destroy data, if turned off encryption keys are gone. I think it would require some individual case anal…
To play the devil's advocate, what exactly is the practical use of all this if most of your family and friends are on Gmail (and couldn't be arsed to figure out pgp)? From what I can see, your emails will now be sent in the clear over the internet, instead of staying within google's servers. Either way, the government's going to get your data, but at least you're protected against... /more/ unscrupulous people snoopi…
That's a great point. Reminds of the time I taught my friend to use PGP and sent him an encrypted email. Every single time, he would reply in plain-text, thus exposing my older conversation. When asked why, he told me it's too much of a pain to do it. So my being careful about my privacy doesn't help if other people don't play along.
To play the devil's advocate, what exactly is the practical use of all this if most of your family and friends are on Gmail (and couldn't be arsed to figure out pgp)? From what I can see, your emails will now be sent in the clear over the internet, instead of staying within google's servers. Either way, the government's going to get your data, but at least you're protected against... /more/ unscrupulous people snoopi…
That's a great point. Reminds of the time I taught my friend to use PGP and sent him an encrypted email. Every single time, he would reply in plain-text, thus exposing my older conversation. When asked why, he told me it's too much of a pain to do it. So my being careful about my privacy doesn't help if other people don't play along.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a great point. Reminds of the time I taught my friend to use PGP and sent him an encrypted email. Every single time, he would reply in plain-text, thus exposing my older conversation. When asked why, he told me it's too much of a pain to do it. So my being careful about my privacy doesn't help if other people don't play along.
The OTR plugin for Pidgin does a better job of userfriendliness and gives more useful privacy guarantees (like plausible deniability).
Many of us did similar in the 90s. I might go this route again but would use Postfix and Dovecot. I'd do this for my wife and kids as well - but if I get hit by a bus, email eventually not working is not something I should burden my wife with.
I worry about the same things which is why I'm actually migrating my email to outlook.con slowly (in spite of the NSA etc). She knows my passwords already.
I've thought about doing this, but email is important enough I don't trust myself to provide as much uptime as a commercial email provider. You probably should add SPF records too, if you don't want your outgoing mail marked as spam.