I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for...
For anybody interested in more choices for volume-based providers like PurelyMail (with tiers based on storage and emails sent/received but who otherwise allow unlimited domains/mailboxes/aliases) there’s also MXRoute (US) and Migadu (Swiss/EU).
These providers don’t usually make sense for a single mailbox (although some of them have a low entry tier for this purpose) but can be extremely cost-efficient if you need 2 or more mailboxes/domains.
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.
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.
I have a bunch of users (friends and family) on a bunch of different domains. It’s honestly not so bad but yeah, you need a decent dedicated service.
Migrations aren’t simple but aren’t that complicated either (just did one last year).
I mainly need to copy their email over but it’s also a good moment to check they’re using decent passwords and to have them freshen it.
I also need to update their webmail and IMAP/SMTP URLs in their bookmark/email apps but I’ve been playing with DNS CNAMEs for this purpose and it’s mostly working ok (aliasing one of my domains to the provider’s so I only have to update the DNS which I do anyway for a mail migration).
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).
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’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.
Of course it can. And your PC can also fall off the desk. I’m saying a snapshot tool is a really poor solution for distro problems, it’s really a bandaid for a problem that shouldn’t exist.
Use a decent distro, take proper backups, and use snapshots for what they were intended — recovering small mistakes with personal files, not for system maintenance.
This may not be a Linux specific problem as I had the exact same issue earlier with Windows 7 and it’s one of the reasons I installed Linux in the first place....
There are people for whom 2 weeks is too old, don’t mind them.
Ironically it’s also this type of user that tends to get in over their head with rolling bleeding distros and destroy their system. 😄
I tend to think about it as the “wild” years, it’s a time in a PC enthusiast’s life when they want to experiment with lots of stuff and only the most fresh will do. But there are lots of people who appreciate a bit of stability more.
In search for free domain I got IPQuick. It gives a random domain for any IP4&6. I know not reliable for commercial use but I just want a domain for nextcloud,fediverse and mail....
I think you can get a free subdomain and dynamic DNS service at desec.io, with this you should be able to keep the domain updated with your IP and point it at your home server. But you need to have a public IP from your ISP and not to be behind NAT.
Anither option is to use a Tailscale Funnel. You will have to use a .ts.net subdomain with them and they terminate TLS and re-encrypt for you. On the other hand it’s completely free, you get NAT traversal, an encrypted tunnel, and you don’t have to maintain the IP even if it’s dynamic.
I spent two hours today trying to figure out why Nextcloud couldn’t read my data directory. Docker wasn’t mounting my data directory. Moved everything into my data directory. Docker couldn’t even see the configuration file....
I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales...
Se if you can get a DVD or Blu-ray writer and backup stuff to DVD or Blu-ray discs. If you keep the discs in individual jewel cases or in a disc wallet they keep very well.
I have autocron jobs that sync various server directories to a daily backup (on the same server), then sync that backup once a week to the weekly backup, and once a month take a tarball snapshot of the weekly backup.
Every once in a while I plug in a HDD on USB and take a Borg backup of the monthly dir. Borg does compression and deduplication (and encryption if you want to). I should be doing this also once a week but sometimes I’m lazy and leave a few weeks between them.
Built a nice little PiKVM and deployed it in my NAS. The NAS is heavy and placed in a dark half-height place under the stairs so it’s awkward when things go wrong and you need hardware access....
I was thinking more about the basics, like USB input and getting the image+sound. For that you could get away with a special USB cable and a capture card. I’m just not aware of any software for it, I don’t think the original PiKVM stuff was ever ported to PC.
If they can find a kernel exploit they might find a hardware exploit too. There’s no rational reason to assume containers are more likely to fail than VMs, just bias.
Oh and you can fix a kernel exploit with an update, good luck fixing a hardware exploit.
Now you’re probably going to tell me how a hardware exploit is so unlikely but since we’re playing make believe I can make it as likely it suits my argument, right?
I read a comment on here some time ago where the person said they were using cloudflared to expose some of their self-hosted stuff to the Internet so they can access it remotely....
Any stories you’ve heard about websites enabling CF to survive DDoS were not on the free tier, guaranteed.
Please re-read the description for the free tier. Here’s what “DDoS protection” means on free tier:
Customers are not charged for attack traffic ever, period. There’s no penalty for spikes due to attack traffic, requiring no chargeback by the customer.
Will they use some of their capacity to minimize the DDoS effects for their infrastructure? Sure, I mean they have to whether they like or not, since the DNS points at their servers. But will they keep the website going for Joe Freeloader? Don’t count on that. The terms are carefully worded to avoid promising anything of the sort.
In addition to the above, most of the percieved advantages of CF are non-existent on the free tier that most people use. Their “DDoS protection” just means they’ll drop your tunnel like a hot potato, and their “attack mitigation” on the free tier is a low-effort web app firewall (WAF) that you can replace with a much better and fully customizable self-hosted version.
I think it should be fairly trivial to do with Python and a calendar library, you’d just have to go through the input entries, keep the ones with the properties you like and dump those to the output.
I’m not well versed in Python either but I had a specific calendar problem once — had to clear a calendar storage that went back years and the provider’s UI didn’t let you delete the base calendar — and after looking it up it was a few lines of Python.
That’s probably why you don’t find established tools because every person who runs into this stuff has a super specific need.
Self-hosted or personal email solutions?
I have a unique name, think John Doe, and I’m hoping to create a unique and “professional” looking email account like johndoe@gmail.com or john@doe.com. Since my name is common, all reasonable permutations are taken. I was considering purchasing a domain with something unique, then making personal family email accounts for...
Friendly reminder
This is your annual reminder to do a snapshot (timeshift or whatever you prefer) before doing relatively minor changes to your system....
Steam not launching games - no idea what to do [Solved]
This may not be a Linux specific problem as I had the exact same issue earlier with Windows 7 and it’s one of the reasons I installed Linux in the first place....
Linux Distros Evolution - January 2024 Update: Pop!_OS in Decline? (boilingsteam.com)
An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros and their adoption by users over time.
In search for free domain I got one but some questions
In search for free domain I got IPQuick. It gives a random domain for any IP4&6. I know not reliable for commercial use but I just want a domain for nextcloud,fediverse and mail....
PSA: The Docker Snap package on Ubuntu sucks.
I spent two hours today trying to figure out why Nextcloud couldn’t read my data directory. Docker wasn’t mounting my data directory. Moved everything into my data directory. Docker couldn’t even see the configuration file....
How often do you back up?
I was wondering how often does one choose to make and keep back ups. I know that “It depends on your business needs”, but that is rather vague and unsatisfying, so I was hoping to hear some heuristics from the community. Like say I had a workstation/desktop that is acting as a server at a shop (taking inventory / sales...
PiKVM Build and Deploy (feddit.nu)
Built a nice little PiKVM and deployed it in my NAS. The NAS is heavy and placed in a dark half-height place under the stairs so it’s awkward when things go wrong and you need hardware access....
How to secure (podman or docker) containers for public-facing hosting?
Context...
What's wrong with using cloudflared?
I read a comment on here some time ago where the person said they were using cloudflared to expose some of their self-hosted stuff to the Internet so they can access it remotely....
A tool to filter and reorganise iCalendar (ICS) files?
Hi,...