[Discuss] Running a mail server, or not

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 04:26:14AM -0400, David Kramer wrote:
> My main motivations for running my own mail server is that I rely
> heavily on procmail rules to deliver mail to the right folders, and
> I am also not crazy about third parties scanning and storing all my
> mail, though that's negotiable.

I'm in pretty much this situation, but I've kind of given up on the
idea that no one should be able to read my e-mail.  The fact is your
e-mail is already being consumed by the great government surveillance
machine regardless, since both incoming and outgoing mail has to
traverse multiple ISP backbones (excepting perhaps the case where all
your recipients are on your own server), and only crazy people like me
were ever willing to put up with the hastle of encrypting all their
mail, so... it's a total loss, pretty much.

So I use some random hosting service.  They keep my system running, I
do updates and such and configure my mail.  I forgot which MTA I'm
using, but configuring it was pretty trivial (sure, I used to be a
sysadmin, but really--I think I needed to make almost no changes to
their provided config, and maybe actually none at all).

I do use procmail.  I do not use IMAP--I log into my server remotely
over SSH to read my mail with Mutt.  I've found over the years that
this was the simplest way to ensure I could actually get at my mail
without being blocked by firewalls or other problems.  Yes, that does
have its limitations, but they largely don't impact me.  Especially
now that Windows 10 has the Windows Subsystem for Linux, enabling me
to run Linux natively inside Windows, having easy access to nicer
Linux-based SSH tools, terminal windows, etc.; I don't even need
Virtualbox (or in byegone days Cygwin) for that anymore.

Another crazy thing I do is maintain a completely separate e-mail
address for literally every single business / website / etc. with
which I interact.  Yes, this does get tedious to maintain, but I'm
kind of stuck with it now... without making a big effort to rework how
I do everything related to e-mail.

And to be honest, now that I'm getting older, I've started to think
about what happens if I should die.  Frankly, no one will be able to
figure out my hosted server details, and even if they somehow did
they'd never figure out my complicated e-mail management nonsense, and
any messages I receive which might truly be important for a family
member to handle will simply be lost, in all probability.

I do also maintain and use a gmail address, and over time, I've been
increasingly relying on that for convenience.  I forward "important"
messages to it in case I need to get them at a time when I'm not
likely to have convenient ssh access, and in very rare cases I also
give it to businesses, if I haven't done business with them before,
and actually want them to be able to e-mail me (which FWIW is pretty
rare).  Because otherwise, to stick with my current scheme, I'd have
to create an e-mail for them on the fly, and find a way to actually
create it before they're going to use it.

I've begun to think that maybe what I should really do is just get
myself one, or at most two new gmail addresses--one personal address
for friends and family, one for all businesses, and a last one for
things where I'd really prefer to just stay anonymous--and dump
everything else.  It'd be a fair amount of work, but so is what I'm
already doing... and once it was done, I wouldn't need to muck with it
ever again.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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