perlgod

I host email from my basement. Rackmount server down there runs all my VMs, including ones for Postfix, Dovecot, and Rspamd. Apache Solr/Tika are connected to dovecot for full-text IMAP search. Never had any issues, but I have postfix on a static IP from a business-class cable internet connection, so I'm sure that helps.

Dovecot and the postfix submission port (587) are only accessible internally, or through my home wireguard VPN.

Rspamd catches just about all junk mail. I might have one or two messages a week slip through. Moving messages to/from the Junk folder trains Rspamd to recognize spam/ham.

Make sure the IP of your mail server has reverse DNS in place, and set up SPF/DMARC records and DKIM signing, and you should be fine. I've been doing this for a decade and never had any problems.

I do maintain a separate, paid email account at a commercial provider for things like banking. In case I die, I don't want my poor wife to deal with my crazy email setup.

This topic always brings up so many hysterical naysayers, I almost wonder if some are paid Gmail shills!

I agree. If you're the only user of your instance, they can easily track you server-side by your IP address. You could mitigate this by routing your egress traffic (either from the individual device or network-wide, from your router) through a VPN.

I host everything from a server in my basement. Each local application gets a dedicated Rocky Linux VM on a proxmox hypervisor, with the VM/DNS/app configuration managed though a custom ansible framework that I've developed for my "homelab" over the years. Don't currently mess with containers.

My mobile devices have an always-on wireguard VPN back to my house so I can access everything while out and about.

Fantastic extension. I self-host Invidious, Teddit, Nitter, and Bibliogram and configured LibRedirect to use only my private instances. Unfortunately, the community instances are often either overloaded or down entirely. It's hard to imagine going back to the "real" sites...they are all so user-hostile.

Since Android doesn't support browser extensions, I accomplish the same thing using the Bromite browser along with a handful of UserScripts to redirect youtube/twitter/etc to my private instances.

Edit: Yes, I know Firefox for Android supports extensions, but the work required [0] to actually install any extension other than the handful "blessed" by Mozilla borders on hilarity. Firefox for Android seemed pretty good a few years ago, but at some point since then Mozilla has done a full redesign of the GUI and the whole thing now feels janky to me. I tried using it for a couple days and just couldn't bear it. My impression is that Mozilla is letting it languish.

For simplicity, I use the exact same setup for all my family's Android phones (GrapheneOS with a persistent wireguard connection back to the house) and Firefox was just too strange for the non-technical people to use.

In addition, GrapheneOS makes some pretty compelling arguments [1] against FF-based browsers.

Lest anyone accuse me of being a Firefox hater, I do use it on the desktop.

[0] https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...

[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

"muh GPS" is definitely the most common argument people give me. Garmin still makes car GPS units. I have one and it works well.

To be fair, I was able to refrain from mindless scrolling all the time. But with the phone nearby, I always wanted to mindlessly scroll during every random quiet moment.

I liken it to an alcoholic keeping an ice cold beer on his desk all day, but doing his best not to take a sip. Why subject yourself?

I experimented without a smartphone and I am happier as a result. This will probably not be the case for everyone. But, if you ever feel like a slave to your own technology, I highly recommend trying it out.

I have not found it to be overly burdensome. I have an indestructible kyocera flip phone, so I'm able to call people (and SMS in a pinch).

I have an LTE-enabled tablet, so if I'm going somewhere totally unfamiliar, I'll throw it in my bag just in case I need to look up some information. Otherwise you just have to plan your outings in advance - like we always did prior to 2008 or so.

I have a Garmin GPS mounted in car for road trips, which I honestly prefer since it doesn't tempt me to fiddle with it while driving like a smartphone does. I also carry a semi-nice digital camera sometimes. It's obviously not as convenient as a smartphone camera, but I find I am more thoughtful and appreciative of the photos I take as a result.

I use more paper items (small paper notebook for grocery lists, transit tickets instead of using the app, etc). This can be somewhat freeing, as I've missed my ferry a handful of times because their app glitched out.

My personality tends towards obsession and analysis paralysis, which can be good for programming but sometimes bad for real life. I no longer obsess over which restaurant has the best looking pictures or online reviews, I just walk inside and try it out. Sometimes this is for the better, sometimes for the worse, but it's definitely a more human experience.

Without the smartphone, I also find I am much more inclined to talk to random strangers, since I can't just whip out the phone during awkward silent moments.

With lack of FOMO, I am also much more present with family and friends, which is probably the biggest benefit.

Getting rid of my smartphone was without a doubt the most positive thing I ever did for myself.

I'm sure some people have the self-control to use it sparingly. But for me, not having to constantly fight the urge to check my always-connected magic pocket internet portal has freed up a huge amount of my mental willpower, which I can now redirect to other more important things.

Now that everything is closed, I don't even miss having the convenience of Uber/Google Maps. Additionally, without social media, I remain blissfully unaware of whatever corona hysteria or political drama is consuming the minds of my peers.

These devices have a veritable legion of engineers working to make the smartphone experience as addictive as possible. For some people, the only winning move it not to play.

(I'm the author of TFA.)

I have never had this issue. Generally the issue is either IP reputation of your server (common with VPS providers if you get a recycled IP of a previous spammer) or your domain name.

Otherwise you are probably just unlucky enough to tickle the spam-prevention mechanisms in the almighty "algorithm" run by $BIGMAILER.

I keep one "normie" email address at a $BIGMAILER for situations like this, but at this point in my life I mostly just shrug if some big advertising/surveillance company's email system won't deliver my mail, I just won't email that person.

Be the change you want to see and all that.

Author here. I actually use OpenSMTPD currently, but I haven't bothered to write a full article about it.

Details of my current setup are here:

https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted

Though this will be out of date soon since I'm moving everything over to Illumos...I have a fondness for dying operating systems I guess!

I wouldn’t take this as a representative sample of all men.

In my experience, sharing feelings makes me feel worse and substantially reduces my appeal to others. I prefer to just deal with my problems logically and avoid such navel gazing.

Because email is one of the few edifices left of the truly open internet, and some of us aren’t ready to concede defeat of what was once a free platform to a corporate oligarchy.

I too was a happy user of iCloud keychain for many years. Except one day, I made a new password on my Mac, but even after a few hours it hadn't sync'd to my iPhone.

I followed some instructions and toggled iCloud keychain sync on my iPhone (just turned it off and on) and it proceeded to erase about 250 of my 300 saved passwords. Wasn't able to get to my other devices fast enough to turn off the networking - they had all already been deleted from my Mac, iPad, etc as well.

Spent an entire weekend resetting passwords - never again. I am now a happy Bitwarden user. Even if it eats all my passwords one day, at least it's trivial to export them all to CSV.

Never understood the desire for unions in the tech industry. Thankfully the USA has plenty of right-to-work states.

I should try something like that. Honestly just having the device in eyesight triggers some kind of latent mental FOMO. Removing the option entirely has worked well for me so far.

I still keep an old iPhone for when I know I'll need an Uber or something, but the smartphone isn't a part of my daily life anymore.

It can!

I would imagine it's pretty bad. The interface is pretty slow and T9 is just frustrating enough for me to just call people instead. The call quality is great though!

I use a HiBy R3 [1] with a 512gb SD card to listen to my collection of ripped FLACs on the go. It's a great device, highly recommend!

https://store.hiby.com/products/hiby-r3

I have my eye on the MP02. Waiting until they get certified for VoLTE in the USA, otherwise it will drop to 3g for making calls. 3g coverage is limited in many metro areas of the USA as carriers move to 4g/5g.

You will be in a tough spot if you're in the USA. All the nice Nokias and decent low-tech phones are rapidly becoming useless as carriers phase out 2g (and even 3g) coverage to free up bands for LTE and now 5g.

If your "dumbphone" doesn't support VoLTE you'll be frustrated with dropped calls and spotty service everywhere. I know this from experience.

I settled on T-Mobile's only "dumbphone" - the Alcatel GoFlip [1]. It supports LTE, the battery lasts for days and it even has a rudimentary IMAP and CalDAV client.

I tried turning my smartphone into a "dumbphone" and using it less, but I honestly lacked the self-control to put the stupid thing down. Having a kid made me realize how many moments I was pissing away just scrolling.

These things are designed to be addictive, and some people (like myself) can't compete with the entire teams of "engagement engineers" many tech companies employ to exploit your dopamine-reward cycles.

I had forgotten what it was like to be alone with my thoughts. I feel as though I am rediscovering a part of my brain that was suppressed by having a boredom-prevention device at my fingertips all these years. Also other humans now look like phone-zombies everywhere I look. It's kind of dystopian honestly.

[1] https://us.alcatelmobile.com/alcatel-go-flip/

All those things work fine with Gajim. Probably not the case with other desktop clients though admittedly.

Although most of my friends prefer Matrix these days, XMPP is still my favorite way of chatting. You can easily run your own Prosody instance [1] on a $5/month VPS and have a very modern chat experience - offline messages, syncing between devices, OMEMO end-to-end encryption, group chats, push notifications, HTTP file upload, etc. My wife and I use it for all our communications.

There are some great clients for Android [2], iOS [3] and Linux/Windows [4] that support all the modern XEPs. Sadly, there aren't any mature, actively developed clients for OS X that I've found. Adium is pretty much abandoned. Monal is in active development though and seems promising.

It's so nice to use an open protocol with native clients. Most other self-hosted chat solutions require electron apps, which can be painful to use unless you have top of the line hardware.

[1] https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted/blob/master/roles/...

[2] https://conversations.im/

[3] https://chatsecure.org/

[4] https://gajim.org

I used to run Postfix + Dovecot + Rspamd with all the bells and whistles enabled [1], but I recently switched to OpenSMTPD + spamd on OpenBSD.

Unlike rspamd, which has pluggable modules for everything under the sun (RBLs, word filters, Bayesian filtering + learning), spamd uses plain ol' graylisting with some PF integration to throttle spammers connections to 1 character/second for maximum annoyance.

With Rspamd, I never got any spam in my Inbox. With spamd, I get maybe 1 spam mail every two weeks. To me, spamd's ridiculous simplicity is worth the tradeoff.

You do have to be careful with graylisting large mailers like Gmail, since they rarely retry the mail from the same IP address. For this, OpenBSD's smtpctl now has the spfwalk [2] command to whitelist the big guys. That's what I use in my current setup [3], which was linked here a few days ago.

[1] https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/

[2] https://poolp.org/posts/2018-01-08/spfwalk/

[3] https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted

Thanks. I think the issue is DOCTYPE, here’s the real file that I use hosted on GitHub, haven’t had any problems with it.

https://github.com/cullum/dotfiles/blob/master/fontconfig/.c...

Thank you!

Thanks for the feedback! I've added a tidbit about syspatch, and also warned users about the (somewhat unusual) state of updates for third-party packages on OpenBSD:

https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/#updates

About 7 hours on an oldish ThinkPad (T530) on a full charge:

  $ apm
  Battery state: high, 99% remaining, 430 minutes life estimate
  A/C adapter state: not connected
  Performance adjustment mode: auto (1200 MHz)

Can second Synth. I always used it on laptops where a full poudriere setup would have been overkill.

Also it’s written in Ada!

Thanks!

Speak for yourself - I've hosted my own email for over half a decade and never had any issues whatsoever. Set it up once, keep paying your DNS/VPS provider, and update your box every now and then, and you won't have any issues.

Of course, it's more work than having Google or Fastmail do it, but so what? I'm sure a significant majority of HN readers already have a VPS and domain name of some kind. Setting aside a few hours to set up a mail server on it isn't the indentured servitude many of y'all make it out to be.

I'm always amazed at the negative comments on HN when the topic of self-hosting your email comes up - I saw many of the same replies when my mail server guide [1] got linked here a few weeks ago. Most people suggest to give all your email to some corporation.

If people want to create their own mail service, more power to them - this is supposed to be HACKER news!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16238937