What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
Email… My wife really wants to further de-google, this means moving custom domains off gsute.
Do I move to proton/tuta or go back to self hosting email again like I did for years until about 2010?
If I self host, do I do it at home or on the server that runs my lemmy instance?
Cool your wife is into de googling! My wife thinks I’m a conspiracy nut. I have custom domains on proton and its been great, but with their moves toward AI and crypto who knows. I would probably try tuta if I was setting it up now - but who knows if they will eventually go wonkey then you will wish you self hosted anyway 🤝
I self-host my email using Mailcow, and use a VPS for it. I don’t trust my home server to be reliable enough, and the VPS providers have nicer equipment (modern AMD EPYC CPUs, enterprise SSDs, datacenter-grade 10Gbps or 40Gbps connections, etc). I use a separate VPS just for my emails - it’s the one thing I want to ensure is secure, so I didn’t want any other random software (that could potentially have security issues) running on it…
I also use an outbound SMTP relay to avoid having to deal with IP reputation. Very easy to configure this in Mailcow. SMTP2Go has a free plan for sending <1000 emails per month.
It kind of amazes me that, in this day and age, email has turned out to be the lynchpin of security. Email as a 2FA endpoint. Email password reset systems. If email is compromised, everything else falls. They used to tell us not to put anything in email that you wouldn’t put on a postcard…how did this happen?
That and email protocols are outdated and aren’t too secure. For example:
IMAP has a modern replacement in JMAP, but it’s not widespread. SMTP is practically impossible to replace since it’s how email servers communicate with each other.
The “solution” has been for companies to make their own proprietary protocols and apps, for example the Gmail and Outlook apps combined with a Gmail or Microsoft 365 account respectively.
Don’t go to Proton or Tuta - both are impossible to get out of basically, do not support free standards and Proton is scumy in terms of their marketing.
Mailbox.org Infomaniak Fastmail Posted
Just to name a few.
I went with Tuta because it’s my backup if everything else goes wrong. If my house burns down or my VPS shuts down my instance (e.g. billing fail, IP block ban, provider goes under, etc), I don’t want to lose access to my email.
I use a custom domain for it, so if I ever need to, switching to a different provider should be as simple as swapping some domain configs.
It’s relatively inexpensive too at €3/month when paying annually. I wanted two domains (one for personal, one for online stuff) and didn’t need any of the other stuff Proton has, so Tuta worked.