mspencer712

That doesn’t sound too bad then. Thanks.

Agreed. “Here’s a comic and also use my totally legit web site for your search traffic”

Yes, I host my own with mspencer.net. Feel free to look at whois info. Your registrar should offer something similar.

There’s this problem we have with self hosting standard public services. Everything that could be used by a business seems like it’s either a full time job-sized hobby to maintain it or you have to pay a bunch of money to a service provider for them to handle it for you. Nobody takes the time to create an easy recipe for people to follow.

Luckily, though email was a difficult setup, it’s run worry free since. My emails are delivered because I did the security stuff: opendkim, dnssec, tls, all that. And I get zero spam (apart from exactly two cases where they abused a legitimate sender - whose abuse department responded and handled it) so it’s been lovely. I don’t seem to have time to maintain this so I’m lucky it’s been running well hands-free.

It’s a project but I would recommend it. Don’t let the big tech companies own all email, too. We have to protect that ability by exercising it.

What goes around comes around, Russia.

True. I kinda dodged that problem by having a personal .net domain that’s older than wikipedia.org. My understanding is that you can raise your domain’s reputation with some work.

Honestly the most important thing I use my domain for is easy-to-delete mailboxes and aliases to give to companies and contacts. That’s just incoming email.

For outgoing, there are services that let you send them an email and receive a report on any mistakes or misconfgurations they notice. I followed the first tutorial I found that didn’t seem like it was just advertising “see how hard email is? Looks impossible doesn’t it? Why not pay us instead.” Ended up being at linuxbabe dot com, run by Guoan Xiao, with part one titled “Build Your Own Email Server on Ubuntu: Basic Postfix Setup”. No links but search engines find it.

Big difference is I use OpenLDAP/slapd, and I put different components on different VMs. Took maybe a couple weeks of free time here and there, but I’m proud to say my outgoing emails seem to be accepted everywhere. Not that I send many, really.

Eventually planning on implementing filtering for terms and conditions updates for long-forgotten sign ups. I would like those to bounce.

I’d recommend looking again, as I think that advice is becoming dated. Greylist and DKIM make spam prevention super simple, ironically because the centralization of email towards Outlook and gmail has trained pretty much every sender to follow the rules or your email doesn’t go through. And then Greylist catches the rest, because spammers don’t come back and retry after a few minutes.

Ohhh I get you then. Instead of checking against an author’s key, and building a distributed web of trust between trusted authors, you build a system that requires everyone collaborate on one shared chain of signatures.

Friend, PGP signed messages were around in the 90s. Key signing parties. Web of trust.

This is one of those “technically true but functionally useless” arguments, and I hate arguing the other side here… Valve always has the option to stop using Visa and, I don’t know, have customers write out and physically mail checks or money orders.

Obviously the number of customers who would do this is microscopic. It’s not a real thing anytime would ever do. But because the option exists, they aren’t technically making the content impossible to sell.

Ok yeah that makes sense. Thanks.