wth @ wth @sh.itjust.works

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2

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76

Joined

2 yr. ago

My 5 year old brother color laser is awesome. Cheap to run and toner doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and clean (i.e. use up) the ink.

However having seem comments like this, I think I will hold off on any firmware updates.

While technically that is true, if you have any other users they will be annoyed. And anyone running iOS will almost immediately get regular popups about the mail server being down (because iOS checks for new mail frequently - and yes I know this can be adjusted) and so they will be telling you straight away.

Also - I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.

I forgot to mention - spam isn’t too bad with a well trained SpamAssassin.

Plus you will need to learn your virtualisation tool really well because of all the networking routes required and operating it on the command line. VBoxManage is your friend, but its just not friendly.

From a security perspective - I did everything in Linux, and only opened the required ports (plus ssh, which I moved to a random high port number). I have auto-update on for security patches, but NOT for regular patches (because Zimbra tends break things, so you need to snapshot first).

I’ve been running my own mail server for about 15 years now… Let me offer some insights.

• Its used by me and the family, so I do have other users who expect things to work.
• I used commodity hardware, with a Linux host (and guest).
• the mail server runs in a VM, so it is trivial to: stop, copying the VM to USB, restart.
• Maintaining uptime isn’t too bad, but when the mail server goes down, you need to get onto it quickly. I’ve had power supplies fail, HDD’s fail, memory fail.
• If you should happen to be out of town when a failure occurs (I’ve had this twice), then the server stays dead until you are back. That does not make your users happy. If its more than 4 days, then the SMTP standard says email is lost.
• There have also been a few software issues with Zimbra (my current tool) - the stats daemon filled the disk, the upgrader broke permissions all over the place multiple times. Each of these requires time to investigate, research online etc. Snapshotting is awesome! Right now I have a problem where the VM disk file is growing, but the space used inside the VM is not. I have zero’d out free space and compacted the VM but don’t know why it is happening yet. More research needed.
• You will learn to hate blocklists. There are many, and there are meta blocklists. You have to watch them because at any time, you will be added and your email will silently get dropped. Sometimes the blocklist trashes whole subnets because of a single actor, sometimes even more, and so you will get included due to other bad actors. Getting off a blocklist is hard… you send emails, you fill in web forms, you look for a contact details, you wait… Then some number of days/weeks later, you are off again.
• You have to learn DKIM, SPF, DMARK, managing DNS etc.
• I used to use self-signed certs and live with the warnings. Now I used Lets Encrypt, which is awesome!.
• You can try to get reverse DNS working, but that’s up to your ISP (who usually don’t care, so good luck). No rDNS can be viewed as bad by email recipients so your spam score starts at >0.
• If you run it at home, you will be part of a block of IPs that are known to be home users, so your spam score starts at >0.
• I’m lucky in that I run it on a spare public IP address on my server housed at work. But that will need to change soon.

I started using native Linux mailboxes, later added roundcube (web UI), investigated Mailinabox, but now use zimbra. That gives me calendar/contact sharing, email/calendar/contacts to iOS devices (which is the main way my family get email), and lots more. Moving data from one to the other took a couple of days of effort. (Yeah… I know its supposed to be trivial, but its not when you include tool research, testing, execution one at a time etc).

Bottom line - you will learn lots, you will lose many weekends and sometimes a weekday here or there as you try to handle emergencies, it will never be set-and-forget.

My original rational was learning, privacy and my own domain and nicer looking email addresses than john1234@gmail.com. I’m looking for an online alternative as its time to lighten the load, but I have a lot of services that we use in Zimbra.

Good luck with it!

I can’t find it now. But I took an image while waiting for a crash… https://files.catbox.moe/3om0a8.jpeg

Note that as I said later my scrolling ability seemed limited.

Let me clarify that a bit. It seems that any scrolling more than about a page causes a crash.

• Open the app.
• set Top, 6 hours.
• Start scrolling

After about 1-1.5 pages, the app will crash.

BTW - can we get a different icon for Top/6 hours and Top/12 hours etc.

And now this post causes Bean to crash. This happened just now - I opened the post, Bean crashed, then an update arrived, then Bean crashed again on the same post: Each crash was freezing for 20+ seconds, then disappearing.

“Don’t judge me I know that frequently they represent almost the same softwares…”

The thing to remember with these examples is that those companies would have royally fucked up their purchases. Big companies always impose a culture and a mindset.

AT&T would definately have crushed the internet with a monopoly - we would have had to use AT&T approved internet devices, and they would have brought long distance type charges to it. Oh so your email is going overseas? That’s an extra 10c.

Same with Google and Netflix. They were all able to continue with the founders vision and create something special.

“Let’s drive over a rickety bridge…” was the title. App hung for about 30s, then crashed.

Completely random. And then I’m back at the top on restart so I have no idea where it was. I’ll try to remember the post next time it happens.

I gotta take my hat off to the GOP here. While both parties have gerrymandered, the GOP have taken it to the extreme. They will lock in their ruling majority (despite losing at the polls) in every state where they control the Supreme Court and legislature. They will become unassailable in those states.

They know they have to do this - they are (or will be) in the minority.

The Supreme Court did the USA a disservice because they could have tempered the worst excesses of the various states. But they have declared themselves hands off - let the states decide.

Sigh.

Its getting there, and there is some entertaining content on here (comments and posts). But I think we are still missing the super high end responses. No matter what the topic, one or two people would jump on and have deep specialised knowledge of the field - be it naming an insect from a blurry image or commenting on a geopolitical situation. I still see lots of posts that generate nothing more than “huh” or “wow” type comments.

When that starts appearing more broadly, I think the quality here is going to take another leap.

Closed. Otherwise dog sneaks in, climbs up on the bed and falls asleep. The he slowly but surely takes over the whole bed.

Yeah. I didn’t realise initially, and wrote a response to a post on there, with multiple links to research (real research, by real scientists). Response was banning for misinformation. Kinda proud to be banned from that cesspool.

This is a great answer. Thank you.

Being enraged is also being engaged (see Fox News).

So this was a great tactic because all the people that could have left reddit are still there yelling into the void.