I will always recommend against running your own mail infrastructure. The administrative expense is to high in the long run. Unless you want to employ a 24/7 on-call admin team, Office365 is always the better choice. Email encryption can still be done client side (SMIME/PGP).
"running your own mail infrastructure" - I once got responsibility for a complex email nightmare dumped on me (tens of thousands of users, hundreds of domains, hundreds of servers) and I had no idea the vast number of entertaining ways email infrastructure can be screwed up.
Mind you - I guess at a small scale it might be OK - but infrastructure like email is both vital and utterly thankless. Let someone else do it.....
Still have nightmares from my first job in help desk, sweating bullets while handling decades of Outlook .pst files for a C-level in my company. Only place they existed were on the laptop itself, and a cheap 250GB external drive.
I still remember the conversation with a senior IT support guy who had been sent my way by the CIO - "<boss> says to speak to you as email is broken". "How much of it is broken?", "All of it"....
The cheap VM running sendmail with 12,000 entries in its alias file was being DOSed....
That was my introduction to crappy large email systems!
I asked them that directly (it was a tiny company and I was like 20) and the answer was no, but that they wanted to hold onto them in the event they needed to look up old contract info.
Looking back, I should have suggested backing it up to network storage. I imagine it must have been stressful traveling or going through TSA and worrying about losing 20 years of email data.
I agree that one should not host their own mail server these days, however, do the business, clients, and employees a favor and evaluate something in other than Outlook and Exchange based email systems.
I've been running email servers for my personal and business email for nigh on two decades now. It's "an hour or two of maintenance a quarter", on average, and is nowhere near as big of a deal as many would make it out to be. Is it 100% perfect? Certainly not. Would it be 'easier' (FSVO) to just give my email to gmail/O365/fastmail? Probably. However, I feel "the net" was meant to be (and works best as) a series of decentralized systems. Feeding my data into a 'just this side of a walled-garden' ecosystem does not help the net, so I don't do it.
I agree, there are tons of good options out there, such as ProtonMail or others. As a sysadmin, who no longer works in the MSP world, managing Exchange was such a huge time-sink. There is reason basically every MSP who is worth their salt will migrate their clients to O365 or some other solution. It works. There is relatively little down time. And you barely have to manage it. It's a win-win for everyone.
Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;)
I'm just not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people who try to sell me their product.
> RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing ... a blog, an article, something.
Exactly this! I really miss the time of the internet before social media, when it was more about quality content then clickbait articles. I was a heavy user of Google Reader until it got shut down, but couldn't find any worthy alternative, so I used Twitter as a news feed reader from then on. It's ok, but it's hard to ignore the noise sometimes.
I'm hosting my mail on my own server with postfix and dovecot for 6 years now. It's running smoothly, but I invested alot of work into it. it was fun to figure out how everything is working, anything I needed to know I had to google and stitch the pieces together for my needs, but it was totally worth it because I learned so much when doing it.
Since I know how easy the whole system could fail, I would never run a professional/commercial mail server by myself, not even for a small company. Office365, always!
So google for postfix, dovecot, mysql, dkim, roundcube and figure out how to glue it all together. Advise: start with an unused domain, not with your everyday mail address, migration can be done when everything is tested and running.
Don't get yourself onto spam block lists, which can relatively easy happen if your mail server is misconfigured. You can test the spam-level of your outgoing mail on this site: https://www.mail-tester.com
you send a mail to the displayed address and it will parse the incoming mail and analyzes the message headers. the headers contain valuable information about the authenticity of the mail. If a mail looks authentic to the spam filter, it will be marked with a lower spam score.
Nano is perfect for the casual terminal user, it does its job fine when editing an apache server config file once in a while. But when working on the terminal all day, there's no way around vim, IMO. It's good to memorize some basics (save, quit, search & replace) of vim, because there's always a system where only vi is installed (e.g. ESXi).
Great work!
I did something with a similar approach, although it's just kind of a knowledge base for myself build with Jekyll and a little search function, called "My Sysadmin Cheatsheet": https://docs.j7k6.org
Did it mainly for myself, because I was tired of having to google for the same problem more than once, but decided to make it public to kind of share my knowledge with others.
I'm not familiar with Jekyll. How much work was it to get your site up and running besides the posts' content?
I'd love to be able to run the same kind of site you are - a series of markdown posts with a live search frontend. Did you use a specific tutorial to do that? Is there a Jekyll live-search plugin or whatever it uses?
Whenever I come across one of those articles promoting "use Firefox instead of Chrome" I wonder if I'm the only one having those huge performance issues with Firefox on macOS. I seriously tried to make the switch from Chrome to Firefox a few times in the recent years because of all the dark patterns Google is pushing upon its userbase with Chrome, version after version. But Firefox feels significantly slower, makes the MBP fans go crazy and drains the battery like hell.
I've come to the conclusion that at this point it's no option for me to make the final switch to Firefox, as much as I'd like to. But I try to cut off Google's prying eyes from my browsing behaviour as much as possible:
- uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger is all you need to block the most nasty privacy invaders, seriously.
- I don't use the sync feature.
- I don't use Gmail, so there's no reason to login to my Google account, ever.
- I used Youtube's thumbs-up button as sort of bookmarks for my favorite videos, now I have a bookmarks folder for Youtube videos, which is ok for me, but might not be for everybody.
- automatically clear browsing data after quitting Chrome.
My dream browser would be Firefox with Chromium under the hood, but that's not very likely to happen...
You're not the only one. Firefox uses way too much GPU power on MBPs. Supposedly fixes are in the works, but I doubt they will happen any time soon. I've learned to tune out the 'improvements to performance' claimed by Firefox releases because never actually do anything for MBP users.
Like you, it is one of the main things keeping me to Chrome (although pinch-to-zoom and casting are nice, too).
My solution for Chrome's privacy issues are similar to yours, except I use the full sync for bookmarks, but then I switch to a private window for actually using any Google site (except for search). At the end of the day, it's still a huge compromise. I might try going full Chromium for a while and trying your bookmarks method, although plugins are a bit of a PITA.
I've had the same issue as well. I use Firefox at my home Windows 10 machine and really never miss Chrome. But for work I run macOS and find Firefox slightly intolerable. It's really unfortunate because Tree Style Tabs is a game changer for me, and it'd be even more useful at work than home.
I really wanted to have Firefox work for me on macOS, but if you use more than 1 OS user concurrently, Firefox regularly locks up when switching between them, or when the computer comes back from sleep. Having to constantly reboot the browser was a deal breaker for me.
Privacy is always about trust. I trust Apple (more than others) because they never gave me the impression they are doing anything shady with my personal data behind my back. Unlike Google.
Privacy is only about trust when you can't know what software does. That's only a concern with closed source software and services. Much of Apple's software is closed, much of Apple is based on services. The one thing you can trust is that, at some point, something they do with data they have will displease you. Software that doesn't even try to collect data is the only acceptable kind of software.
Using services obviously requires trust as far as data your client software exposes, but if you choose closed source clients, you've given up on privacy at a fundamental level.
Totally. If something is meant to be a mount point, a chattr +i on the underlying directory is a godsend, because it gives you an immediate error in case the mount should fail for whatever reason.
I will always recommend against running your own mail infrastructure. The administrative expense is to high in the long run. Unless you want to employ a 24/7 on-call admin team, Office365 is always the better choice. Email encryption can still be done client side (SMIME/PGP).