Lots of people have said worthwhile things. Don’t selfhost email for example. While going with an email hoster has been recommended a couple times, which is good and easy, I want to offer an alternative: SimpleLogin (or comparable providers). Essentially a “email alias generator”, it forwards received emails to one or more mail addresses (Google, Hotmail, what have you). It also allows you to connect a domain and then create new inboxes on the fly by simply sending (or telling a service to send) an email to that non-existing inbox. Which is incredibly handy if you’re faced with a situation that demands an email, where you don’t want to give out an actual email.
So say you have the domain doe.com, and you’re in a physical shop at the register, faced with the question if you want to get 10% off by registering for their members club. You can simply give the cashier the email “coupon_walmart@doe.com” (which does not yet exist), the email will be sent, received bei SL, the inbox created and the coupon code forwarded to your Gmail account. Afterwards, you can disable or delete the inbox and never have to worry about newsletters or data breaches. Nifty!
Every one of these boxes also has its own “sent from” address visible in your actual mail account. Which means that you can simply respond to incoming emails, and the recipient will see the mail address they sent a message to. This also means that you can set up filters in your mail account to move messages from certain sender addresses into specific labels, as if they were real separate email accounts.
DokuWiki for simplicity. Everything is a text file that can just be copied to a web server. It doesn’t even require a database. And since all the wiki pages are plaintext markdown files, they can still be easily accessed and read even when the server is down. This is great and why I use DokuWiki for my server documentation as well.
I was going to say that the big downside to that would be a lack of any kind of version control, but I guess if you need that you can always use git and just commit changes there and (optionally) push them to a repository somewhere.
Do you have any particular way of organizing the links themselves? I’ve moved to hosting all my bookmarks in Obsidian as well and am curious as to how others go about it
I treat links like atomic notes. I add as much detail as I feel like to each link, sometimes I go back and add tags and notes. Then I have an exceptionally poor process that attempts to go back to each link, get the archivebox archive and uses python to attempt to grab the article text (I tried using newspaper3k at first, but it’s unmaintained, so moved to readability). Then sticks the resulting link text into the note.
Honestly It’s a mess, and I really haven’t figured out how to do link things together very well, but, for now, it’s my little disaster of a solution.
Just throwing in my two cents since I just went through this same ordeal: I use Proton, but be aware that you can only use a custom address if you pay for the premium plan which is not crazy cheap. I’ve been pretty happy with their premium plan so far, which includes premium features for mail, calendar, cloud drive, VPN, and password manager, but if I ever decide that I don’t want to keep paying for it, I can always transfer my custom domain to a different provider without needing to update my email.
As for the domain, I went with namecheap. I also have a pretty common name, so the good domains were taken and I had to settle for firstname@lastname.in but I think it’s still pretty easy to remember.
And that the bridge is only available on PC – on mobile you must use their proprietary app. And they’re working on launching a proprietary desktop app, after which they’ll have no reason to offer the IMAP bridge anymore.
Interesting. I have always used their web app (even on mobile, i just use their pwa instead of the native app since the native app is missing obvious features), and I haven’t had any issues, but I can definitely understand the frustration if you want to use anything else. OP, keep that in mind if you’re thinking about Proton!
I’ve had providers being acquired from under me several times over the last couple decades. They usually get worse after that; new owners typically want to squeeze the customers not to improve quality. That’s why I won’t use (anymore) any email service that’s not easy to migrate away from.
To achieve a reasonable level of email independence you need IMAP access, you need to use your own domain, and you need to keep your DNS service separate from the email provider.
Interesting. I have always used their web app (even on mobile, i just use their pwa instead of the native app since the native app is missing obvious features), and I haven’t had any issues, but I can definitely understand the frustration
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against you… but…
This is the irony with the privacy minded people and anti-google / monopoly folks around here - they can’t use Google and Microsoft because of the monopoly and then use a solution that is 10x more closed and doesn’t even has an option to use standard protocols and email clients. Logic ham ? :P
Yeah the Proton hype has got a bit out of hand lately. Proton started out with good intentions but I don’t think people realize it’s a Swiss startup with a marked interest in making it big, and being acquired by an investment fund is one of the classic exit strategies for startup owners.
All it takes is discontinuing the IMAP bridge and suddenly a large portion of their user base is completely captive. I hope I’m wrong but there may be a big sentiment reversal later this year.
I just spent a week evaluating all the popular choices to document an overlay network I’m standing up. All I want is a simple markdown interface to write notes in. My goal was something with a very simple UI, markdown, and very light weight.
MediaWiki, Bookstack, and WikiJS (or JSWiki) were good but they were too much for what I needed. I ended up with stumbling on gollum and really like it. It’s very very simple, fast, and clean. I wrote a one line cronjob and now I’m backed up to gitlab.
I’m administering a wiki.js instance. Despite it being written in node, it’s a pretty nice wiki with a lot of modern features builtin. The only other wiki I’ve ever setup and used was mediawiki, which is obviously a complete legacy php clusterfuck where you need add-ons (which are terrible to install and configure) for everything.
GoDaddy is notorious for terrible service and NameCheap has started doing some shady stuff too lately. Luckily there are other decent registrars out there. I can recommend Netim.com or INWX.de in the EU – they also provide EU-specific TLDs which American registrars don’t.
If you need more than one mailbox you can’t beat the offers from providers like PurelyMail/MXRoute/Migadu, where you pay for the storage instead of per-mailbox. I’m using Migadu because, again, they work under EU/Swiss privacy laws.
You do not need to spin up your own mail service and should not. Email and DNS hosting are the most abuse-prone and easy to mess up services; always go to an established provider for these.
Are there concerns tying my accounts to a service that might go under or are some “too big to fail”?
Look into their history. Generally speaking a provider that’s been around for a decade or more probably won’t dissapear overnight; they probably have a sustainable income model and have been around the block.
That being said nothing saves even long-established providers from being acquired. This happened for example to a French service (Gandi) with over 20 years of history.
The only answer to that is to pick providers that don’t lock you into proprietary technologies and offer standard services like IMAP, and also to keep your domain+DNS and your email providers separate. This way if the email service starts hiking prices or does anything funny you can copy your email, switch your domain(s), and be with another provider the very next day.
A general reduction in service quality, increasing domain prices (double check your renewals) and there are reports of domain name sniping (where they grab names that people are looking up).
Still much less bullshit than other providers. It has less dark patterns than OVH. I would also recommend their VPN service for beeing so cheap the first year
I don’t know current pricing, but a premium proton account, which was ~$9/month when I started has worked very well for me. I like the other features they are rolling out and use them a lot.
Domain is purchased through cloudflare, and I think it was like $10/year?
Purchase the domain with cloudflare, for email it depends how you use it:
With an email client like thunderbird:
A cheap service like mxroute is perfect
If you need to use a webmail:
You need to pay a lot because the free webmails are all unusable for advanced use.
Good options:
Zoho at $1 per user per month
Exchange with ovh at €3 per user per month
Bad options:
Google workspace at $10 per month per user plus the blood rights for your firstborn and pray that they don’t alter the deal
proton pro at $9 per user per month but IMHO is extremely overrated for what they offer at their price point (unless you need end to end encryption when emailing other proton users)
+1 for own domain and some email hosting service. That also makes it pretty easy to switch providers because you can simply point your MX records etc. somewhere else - no need to change the actual email address.
I can also recommend mailbox.org as an alternative to mxroute, they’re even a little cheaper at $3/month (mxroute is $49/year at minimum).
Can’t find the info in the repository. Can I share a collection or specific links via RSS? I built my own application to archive URLs and grab the text content, and I also build a RSS feed from that. Can Linkwarden do something similar?
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