I like that a great deal, and now I wish I had set things up that way from the start - anything to ‘family.domain.com’ should always audio alert, 100% of the time, regardless of hour of day or silent mode.
The idea of going back and updating 20+ years of accounts and communications and other folks’ address books feels insurmountable, but that’s neither here nor there. No real reason I couldn’t start fresh with a nice, short, simple domain and subdomains for the purpose.
Right there with you on “just works,” as well as the simple fact that the config snippets you need are readily available - either in the repo of whatever you’re putting behind the proxy, or elsewhere on the internet.
I consistently keep in mind that it’s ultimately an RU product, of course. But since it’s open source and changes relatively infrequently, that’s mitigated to a large degree from where I sit.
Nothing against Caddy, though Apache gets heavy quickly from a maintenance standpoint, IMHO. But nginx has been my go to for many, many years per the above. It drops into oddball environments without having to rip and tear existing systems out by the roots, and it doesn’t care what’s behind it.
Ages ago, I had a Tomcat app that happened to be supported indirectly by an embedded Jetty (?) app that didn’t properly support SSL certs in a sane way on its own.
That was just fine to nginx and certbot, the little-but-important Jetty app just lived off to the side and functionally didn’t matter because with nginx and certbot, nothing else gave a crap - including the browser clients and the arcane build system that depended on that random Jetty app.
I’m not sure I fully agree with your suggestion of CloudFlare, though your point is well-taken - ten year renewals with nine to fix billing issues is a best practice. Last thing I want is to lose my primary email because I missed a billing email after replacing a card six months ago.
Catch-alls are definitely a win, especially for people who sometimes forget to write down every single ephermeral email address they’ve ever used to sign up for anything with… I like subdomains for email, but only when planned/executed in an intentional way. Has the potential to get out of hand quickly.
I’ve elsewhere mentioned my preferred provider, but it seems to be fairly common that most email providers also offer DNS as part of the package, which makes the whole process much simpler.
Migadu is relatively private, dirt cheap, and dead easy to set up. Supports both web and desktop email clients of choice.
IMHO, TLD matters and always will - the problem is that it matters to varying degrees depending on the destination host, the remainder of your setup, etc. If you’re fastidious about configuring all of the requisite DNS records, etc., it will be less of a problem.
I mostly avoid the newer non-CC TLDs for that reason, and general personal preference. Deliverability is enough of a challenge without adding more work to it, which is why ‘actually’ hosting one’s own email is mostly a toy project, and not something generally done as a serious endeavor. Useful for learning and understanding, of course, but not particularly practical to literally host one’s own email server for ongoing usage in any critical use case.
You’ll find certain providers easier to get your emails through to than others - Hotmail and variants are notoriously difficult, and tend to drop inbound mail at the gate without sending a bounce message, as if the inbound mail just disappeared.
No reason it has to literally live ‘at home’ - you could just as easily use a VPS via LowEndBox for five or six bucks a month, though of course trust in providers varies widely.
Visible has worked well for me recently - it’s wholly owned by VZW as I recall, and exclusively uses their network. In most areas, VZW is objectively the best coverage of any carrier.
$30/mo and I have yet to see throttling, even with heavy use. It “just works”.
Yes, I’m effectively handing that data to VZW, but I have no illusions that any MVNO I chose would behave any differently. One way or another, they’re all reselling the same 3 carriers, who by definition must have some base level of access to your data.
VPNs go a long way towards mitigating that, but using a carrier is likely to leak some level of data. While I have a great deal of respect for RMS, my own life doesn’t really fit within his internet usage model and I’m forced to make choices. (Sacrifices, really, but informed ones.)
As far as function, they’ve got a nice little package all wrapped up and easy to use. Aside from the group text thing I mentioned elsewhere, it’s a pretty slick implementation. But for a user base of one, with privacy concerns, I’d rather use something that’s a bit rougher around the edges yet more configurable, and more private.
From where I sit, it’s a pretty decent email service from both user-side and admin-side, including for biz use in nearly any size org.
It’s all about the data, and not wanting to be the product for me - I have no direct beef with their implementation or abstractions of admin-side details. I just would rather pay a relatively small amount of money than pay with my data.
In years of using GV, group texts never worked correctly for me, and generally broke in unpredictable ways - some recipients would get some msgs, others would get other msgs, and others might just get dropped entirely. It was both weird and completely untenable for anything even remotely important.
Yes, remotely important business does get conducted via group text once in a while - is it ideal, probably not, but I meet companies/individuals I work with where they are in the mutually easiest format. That only works if I can rely on the SMS solution in the first place, though.
See voip.ms for voice. I can’t speak for specific non-European languages, but I’ve been quite happy with LibreTranslate for my on the fly needs. Setup was dead easy too. (And if you see a lack of coverage for particular languages, obviously your contributions to improve that would be welcome)
Seconding @[email protected] 's suggestion of voip.ms.
I throw them a lil cash maybe once per quarter or so, they maintain a bunch of numbers that I may or may not utilize at any moment, but are just too good to give up, and anything I’m not actively using is set up to send inbound SMS to my email - that way I don’t lose access to multi-factor codes and such, but I’m not trying to juggle a bunch of numbers in some app or other either.
Dirt cheap, ‘just works,’ and they even made porting from GV easy.
Also, by the same token, to de-google your email, I’m a big fan of Migadu. Same sort of scenario - I prepay a lil bit once a quarter or so, have catch-alls set up so I don’t miss random crap from emails I’ve forgotten I created/used a decade ago, etc. A nice, simple solution that also plays well with on-the-fly outbound email addressing, Thunderbird for day to day needs, and webmail.
Haven’t seen RTFM casually dropped in conversation online in… um… a while…
You’ve been hanging out on the intartoobz at least as long as I have. Circa the paleolithic era, or so…
sed harbors no demon beasts, in my experience.
On the other hand, by default using sed -i is where the demons come in.
No, sed, NOT in place. Not the first time. Show me what you want to do based on the instructions I gave you, and then we’ll talk about letting you play with the real data.
As part of a much larger project that was all-in on Java to begin with, I’ve used Tomcat to serve pages and PDFs/office doc formats rendered based on a postgres backend and FreeMarker templates.
For these purposes, you don’t want that level of complexity (or Java) but the general premise and template libs should be available in nearly any sane web programming language.
It’s amazing how many companies rely on a crazy amount of FOSS libs, etc.
In the relatively recent past, a boss who I had software PMd for across numerous years had the unmitigated gall to ask me for a list of licenses for “all the software we used.”
I literally laughed in his face, explained open source and the rabbit hole such a question goes down, and he just couldn’t (wouldn’t) get it.
Unfortunately, the biz side of the house doesn’t like “yeah, it’s all legal, but fuck you if you think I’m documenting every piece of code in every library in a ten plus year old code base, allllllll the way down.”
Thank you for the TL;dw. Sincerely appreciated.
Used it in a pinch once, and realized how incredibly awesome it is. Now, it’s my go-to.
Haven’t tried data and files on same stick, but…. Now I want to.
Migadu has been amazing. It “”just works,”and there’s no reason to deal with any of the crap that comes with hosting email.
They are affordable, and provide exactly what they claim to provide.
Email is not - IMHO - worth the trouble to self host. There are too many hard stops where email is required as login, etc to bother.
I enjoy hosting and using a variety of services. But I’ve no desire to bother with something I can ship out to folks who live and breathe that particular service.
Only reason dd hasn’t bitten me is that in my head, if and of make perfect sense as input and output.
Doesn’t mean I won’t make that error tomorrow, ofc. But I tend not to alias except harmless stuff to avoid that very problem.
Elsewhere, someone suggested that it would be necessary to take the rebuild down to the dirt to handle plumbing and the like for individual units, but I’m not sure I agree.
Generally there is significant excess ceiling height in these commercial spaces, no reason the floor couldn’t be raised throughout the space to accommodate plumbing and the like in a way that’s easily accessible for future maintenance. You still end up with 8’ ceilings (or probably rather more) throughout.
Over the years, I’ve watched a number of retail chains and malls die, sometimes suddenly and sometimes slowly. It’s continuously seemed like a huge waste to me, when conversion to residential space would be relatively easy, relatively affordable, could be funded by local gov or nonprofit, and would make a significant difference in net housing costs in a given area.
When ‘traditional’ residential developers are competing with that, and with the ability to slap down standard-sized (AKA easy) risers/walls/etc. within commercial spaces of defined sizes, a further reduction in local housing costs is likely.