Self Host Email

I want to move IMAP to my VPS and move CalDAV and CardDav to the same VPS or possibly the homeserver.

A fortunate plus-side will be that my email address the same as my XMPP address.

If I ever get tired of self hosting or find it too inconvenient. I will just point the MX records of my domain at a new email host.

[*] Decide if I need a backup email provider. ( Example: Maybe a day will come when I will need to email the VPS support, while my VPS is down? )
[*] Setup mailservices on VPS. Possibly redoo the whole OS while we are at it. Setup MX records. Etc.
[*] Test email functionality. Possibly against a bunch of email hosts among family and friends. Make sure my smtp server isn’t being flagged as dangerous and other claptrap.

  • Local public library has issues with posteo.net. Specifically because of how their name resolution is setup on their domain. It’s extra peculiar. This should be tested.

[*] Migrate all various accounts that refrence the old address to the new.

  • Criticial accounts such as the VPS might need to be associated with the backup provider. If I decide I need one.

[*] Backup Calendar, Contacts, E-Mail folders migrate them to the new.
[*] Setup backup schedule for email via BorgBackup.
[*] Consider if I want to revise my current policy of not using GnuPG

VPS rebuilt, with email and XMPP up and running. Email seemingly working well.

I think I gotta have a backup email. Considering Protonmail or Tutanota. Tutanota has a FLOSS android client ; but no imap interface. Protonmail has a imap proxy you can run locally but a proprietary android client. May not matter for a true “break glass in case of emergency” account though.

Other email hosts confirming my hosts email signatures seems squirrely. It seems like other email hosts are eventually considering me valid; but not immediately. Work email clearly failed DKIM on first try, but has decided subsequent emails were safe.

https://www.mail-tester.com seems to think ive got everything correct saved for reverse DNS lookup, so ive corrected that.

Sending out test emails to contacts at various hosts.

Do I need a webmail interface?

Im thinking no.

Heard back now from gmail, apple, yahoo, outlook.com users. Waiting on one earthlink user but it looks like my VPS is not deemed suspicious by most.

Earthlink email and public librry system are both compatible.

Started migrating accounts. SOO many accounts. Wish more websites would let me delete accounts. Deleting cruft though where I can.

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This is inspiring to me and I want to try self-hosted email, like from my house.

I am really curious of what happens if the little email server is down, ip changes, etc.

I spent $9 for a .systems domain yesterday to get tricor.systems, so I could have an email like tim@tricor.systems because it sounds so wonderfully 1980s idea of a future tech conglomerate name.

Also it’s the name of my fictional starship company on cosmic.voyage: Garnet Star - Good news, bad news. Check out the sweet ASCII logo i made.

</derailing>

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So you changed your email address too? That is awesome.

Assuming other email hosts are standards compliant, they keep retrying up to five days to reach an unreachable email host before they start discarding emails queued for you.

A fact my campus had to test once.

If my VPS goes down and I cant stand it back up, I plan on pointing my MX records elsewhere, if repair time is greater than a day or two.

Ive been using an email address with a @members.fsf.org alias as my primary non-work email address for more than a decade now.

It has advantages. (Can change email hosts freely just by moving where it points to.) But it has disadvantages too. (Hard to convey it over the phone, etc.)

Ive been meaning to dump it for a while. Recent events made me think now was a good time to do it. As I was really considering terminating my FSF membership (and the alias) quite shortly.

Im leaning towards keeping the FSF membership for now’ but I think detangling my email address from them is still a priority for me.

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Cool name!

How you like cosmic.voyage? I keep meaning to check it out.

My homeserver and not the VPS might have been doing this, save for a desire for hurricane redundancy on my end.

It is neat! I wrote two entries, but some people were writing like 5+ a day, and it was exhausting so I stopped. However, it seems like things have slowed down there a little, so I might continue on with my story idea.

So far one megacorp has responded very badly to me switching email addresses. Declaring my account compromised and locking me out of until I provide the company with photo ID.

IF I unlock my account I may try again with the “break glass” email address. It’s domain might stand a better chance of being on a whitelist I suppose.

MAN one more evening and im pretty sure ill be done migrating and deleting accounts but I just dont got it in me tonight.

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Grand account migration is effectively done.

The biggest stumbling block is my Arena.net account. There is no automated way to request a deletion or change of email account. And the documented support path is a little more arduous than I really care to proceed with.

Considering that I haven’t seriously played in over three or four years; and im not sure im going to be well positioned to play again; and im not sure I want to play again. AND the game has gone free to play. I think abandoning the account seems like the thing to do.

DRM free technical book publisher APress gets a special note here too, for not having any publicly facing email change process, manual or automatic. I’ve got a ticket open with them though. Again though I can live with abandoning that account I think.

I spent some time getting to know my spam filter and dovecott a little better this past week. Leaving a roundcube instance in place. Less because I need a webmail interface and more like I think ill want a GUI for building Imapsieve rules.

Caldav / Carddav transferred to a Baikal instance on the VPS. Calendar and Contacts successfully transferred via KOrganizer / KAddressBook import-export.

Select email folders transferred in mass direct from one mailbox to the other.

Going to monitor the old email address for about a week. The move the alias to a different mailbox on same VPS and set an out of office message.

Not actually receiving calendar invites from users who have outlook.com as their host. Though I can receive vanilla emails from them. I have double and tripple checked my logs and I can’t find any attempt at such invites even triggering any kind of connection to my server.

Ive noticed increasingly that megacorps-who-are-email hosts ; are creating whole seperate systems for handling their calendar invites independent of other emails.

For example calendar invites from icloud users, don’t come from their own email accounts anymore for example. They come from seemingly randomly generated email accounts, with their owner’s name and noreply@email.apple.com as the forged “from” field.

However I only have one contact who regularly sends me calendar invites from outlook.com and they were thinking of moving elsewhere allready. So they have done so.

They chose yet another megacorp unfortunately… but atleast it’s one I can interoperate with.

sigh

Pointed the old alias at a temporary disposable mailbox with an away message.

Informed the FSF I will not be renewing my donation. Alias should self destruct at the end of the month.

Will be setting up the borg backup schedule later this weekend. Then ill be done.

Borg backup setup, cron job setup. Done.

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