anotherandrew

That’s an excellent question. I only know of them because mxtoolbox and other checkers list them.

Kind of a piggyback on this – is there a favoured “search my saved links from karakeep/linkwarden/hamster.io and show them first before feeding the search terms to google/bing/whatever” extension for your browser?

There was a recent thread on reddit about this, where I wrote this comment (copied here):

I’ve been hosting my own email for a long time (almost 25 years).

Today it’s better than it was, but there are some hurdles:

• Microsoft has their own system, but it’s reasonably easy to get listed
• Google does their own thing, and it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get anywhere
• UCEPROTECTL3 is just a fucking extortion scam

When I switched providers, I found out I was in a “bad IP neighbourhood”. Microsoft wanted a letter from my VPS provider saying that I am in control of the IP I wanted listed, and that was not too hard to get. Also, Microsoft’s blacklist management is sane - you can log in, see the status, raise issues and get a hold of people. A little frustrating, but workable.

Google, on the other hand… You can’t participate in their spam system unless you have a minimum volume of email, which means little guys like me who send maybe 50-100 emails a day end up in gmail’s junk folders by default and there’s abso-fucking-lutely nothing you can do about it. There’s no one to report it to, there’s no way to fight it… they simply don’t care. And whether an email gets flagged as junk or not seems completely random. It has nothing to do with the content as far as I can tell. All you can do is contact people from your personal gmail and ask them to check spam/whitelist. It’s been years and I’m still waiting for the “eventually your domain will get whitelisted globally” bullshit to happen.

That leaves UCEPROTECTL3. Fuck these guys sideways. They block entire ASes and no, you can’t get an exception made. You can pay them to get whitelisted which is why I call them an extortion scam. They’re the only blacklist I’m on and I’ll be fucked if I’ll pay them to get off it. Bunch of fucking pretentious scammers.

Everything else is pretty easy: DNS, DMARC, DKIM, SPF… it’s hoops to jump through but not overly difficult. Ensuring you’ve got SMTPS set up and constraining the encryption protocols to get it tight takes some iterative work, but nothing too difficult.

I totally understand why people give up. This is a huge problem with these gigantic monolithic companies – they hold way too much power over the internet and there’s no way to hold them accountable.

A couple things I’ve been working on

First, I spun up a larger VPS to consolidate two smaller ones. This time I dockerized almost everything. Still a docker newb, but karakeep, redmine, mbin, lemmy (still deciding which I want), davical. Asterisk and postfix/dovecot are probably gonna stay on the vps root. I’m using zfs and compression. Interestingly, the postgres database that everything is using seems to get better compression than the mail spool.

A couple weeks ago I picked up a NetApp 7 bay disk shelf for $30. It uses fibre channel (AT-FCX) controllers and I’ve never used that before. I grabbed a $7 FC HBA (QLE2560), a 2m cable and an m2-to-PCIe adapter meant for an eGPU. The idea is to see if I can’t get the RK3588 board I’m playing with to see it. I did something similar with a $50 Dell 12 drive bay and my old C6100.

A full archive of the Japanese TV show Supreme Skills. I can find bits and pieces but I don’t think I even have one complete season.