All this new excitement with Lemmy and federation has got me thinking that maybe I should learn to run my own instance. What always comes up though is how email is the orginal federated technology.
I am looking at proxmox and see that is has a built in email server, so now I am wondering if it is time to role my own.
I stopped using gmail a long time ago, and right now I use ProtonMail, but I am super frustrated with the dumb limitation of only having a single account for the app. I get why they do it, and I am willing to pay, but it is pricey and I don’t know if that is my best option. I guess it is worth it since ProtonVPN is included. It looks like they are expanding their suite.
Is it worth it? Can I make it secure? Is it stupid to run it off a local computer on my home network?
I just decommissioned the mail server I was running, because I didn’t have the capacity with the rest of life to keep on top of it. Mailu was my choice of suite, and it was really great once I figured out how to get it behaving nicely behind my reverse proxy. For the most part it was low maintenance, but I would occasionally have issues with cert renewal and subsequently my email clients would stop connecting. I didn’t have issues with non-delivery once I set up the various DNS records and did a lot of test emails that I could mark as not junk to various providers. I ended up switching to using icloud+, which includes email with a custom domain. Would I host my own email again? Possibly if I really need more than 6 addresses. But icloud+ costs less per month than the power consumption of the tiny server I was running mailu on over 3 days. Which is… Not insignificant in the current financial climate.
Yeah. I need to stop pretending. I am not that tech savvy, just aware of tech from sites like Lobste.rs and the fediverse of course.
I will say that I initially started hosting mine as a learning exercise, so from that point of view I think it’s totally worth trying out, even if you don’t keep it long term. :)
For sure, there is value in learning how something you use all the time likely take for granted actually works.
A bit of a tangent, but the amount of emails my mother gets because she is always signing up for shit and giving out her address to anyone who asks is mind numbing.
Systemic implementation of security can only go so far, people really need to be more critical of the information they give away.