• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve been running mail servers for about thirty years; my personal ones and production for 100K+ users.

    The personal one is a pain for the reasons you mentioned. I use sendmail instead of postfix, but I was able to use some rules to push certain messages through other relays.

    I signed up for Amazon SES and have so far stayed in their free tier. Mail coming from one of my addresses always goes through SES, and mail from any address to certain domains (aol.com, gmail.com, etc.) go through SES as well.

    It allows me to ensure delivery for my important mails, but leave things up to chance for less important ones.

    It’s the best solution I’ve been able to come up with for a really annoying situation. Big Tech ruined it all.









  • I’ve been using my own cloud-hosted SMTP relay and Zimbra server for over a decade now, and I love it.

    There can be a bit of a learning curve, and in some cases sites won’t accept mail from cloud-hosted domains. I add those domains to a rule in sendmail that sends those domains through Amazon SES, and then they get accepted.

    If you do go this route, just make sure that your recovery emails or 2FA for things like your registrar go somewhere else. If your cloud provider pulls the plug on you or something you don’t want to be stuck waiting for an email that can’t arrive.

    I love the level of control that I have over my email and wouldn’t have it any other way.

    tl;dr: steep learning curve, but worth it in the long run. Keep gmail as a recovery/2FA account or something, though.







  • So many things!

    We moved to a new house a couple of years ago and I mapped out the whole property, put it into LibreCAD, designed the space, and have been planting/building it since then. I now have thousands of plants, over 1000 unique types, and a vegetable garden in our 1/3 acre lot. I’m very proud of it, but don’t really know how to best share it with the world (or if anyone cares).

    I also have a web site that I’ve been building forever, lots of little programs, things like my irrigation system built from a Raspberry Pi, my homelab, all of the plants that I start from seed in the spring for the garden (thousands under grow lights with heated mats), the hydroponic system… I’m sure there’s more.




  • I started a created a company in 1995 to do web stuff for a very niche market – I guess now it would be called SaaS. It never really completed or became a money-maker, but it’s out there and I still work on it.

    First I had problems with IP theft – I had lots of original photos that people took. Then datasets and articles I had written were copied, so I focused on trying to stop that. Then I found myself spending too much time trying to deal with SEO, then x, then y… It was always a game of wackamole, trying to figure out how to keep ahead.

    Throw in the ebb and flow of life’s challenges and it always seems like time, money, health, or some combination thereof seemed to come up at just the wrong time (is there ever a good time?)

    I’m still plugging away. It’s thirty years later and I’ve retired from my 9-5, so hopefully I can make some real progress.