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?

    • 2xsaikoEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      Great post!

      I’m a rather dismayed to see those universities and institutes nowadays no longer as pioneers and innovators in this area, but instead as mere consumers of ready-made corporate solutions, following corporate interests and centralising solutions. I have two employers, both academic, and both have resorted to big-tech corporations that offer solutions like e-mail as a service.

      Same here, my university recently switched from their Horde webmail to Exchange. The new outlook webmail is absolutely awful and I couldn’t set up all the filters that I had before. Luckily I could enable IMAP login, thankfully without OAuth because imo that’s another awful practice, so I can connect to it with non braindead mail clients. Still a massive downgrade and I bet they now have to run it on a 10x as powerful server because I hear Exchange is an absolute monster in terms of resource usage.

      (Also, I’ve been self-hosting mail for probably 4 years at this point. Here’s to many more!)

    • @styracoEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Aren’t you afraid about some important email getting discarded without you knowing about it? Or about unnoticed downtime which results in missed mails?

      • @proyconEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        When I am sending? Well, once things are set up properly I’m pretty confident that things arrive (though nobody can ever be 100% sure of course). I also tend to mail to the same recipient domains a lot, like for work and hobby projects, so once those are tested you get pretty confident.

        Unnoticed downtime is usually quickly noticed, I depend on my server for a lot of things. Senders are often resilient enough to keep things in their queue and try a few times. There’s also a fallback MX registry at my (3rd party) DNS host which will queue stuff in case the primary MX goes down.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      I like what you write, I am going to look deeper into it. It really sucks that the nearly utopian promises of the future and newfound freedoms have been progressively squashed. Every ‘disruption’ that looked like a return to that utopia has ultimately been evil and firmly entrenched in the capitalist mindset.

      I am glad it is still possible. I think it would be healthy for me and everyone else to practice digital homesteading, to become self-sufficient while still being able to lean on the greater community of like minded people.