tired of hearing about "self-hostable" software that mandates out-of-process database servers because everything is built to scale out to zillions of users but not down to 1
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@megmac fair warning, it's absolutely insane and we would give slightly different advice to anyone else interested.
that said: we run the freebsd installation of net-qmail except we don't set up the stock
qmail-smtpd, we use Untroubled'smailfrontinstead, which depends on Untroubledcvmto validate recipient addresses at SMTP time. we map our whole domain to a subaddress of our unix user, mail delivery is controlled via.qmailfiles in our home directory, and go into thenotmuchindexer via pipes throughnotmuch insert, automatically tagging stuff based on the sub-address components (exposed in environment variables). the default notmuch client runs in emacs and on our laptop we have it set up tosshinto the actual machine.basically, the stock
qmail-smtpdgenerates backscatter, but the rest of the MTA works fine, we also don't set up IMAP, or webmail because we havenotmuch -
@atax1a fascinating. My mail host still runs qmail but with basically all ability to send any email out blocked (including bounces). It's also pretty janky but I have the same view of "the rest of qmail" and I'm kinda stuck with it because of literal decades of filter setup I can't be assed to migrate to postfix or w/e.
So at the very least the way you have SMTP ingress setup sounds interesting for maybe rehabilitating it...
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@megmac oh we transact out through DKIMproxy chaining to the openbsd smtpd running on our router
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@megmac also weow another qmail user, nice to meet you
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@atax1a @brook that said part of why I drag my feet on replacing it is that I do really *like* its architecture. I understand how it works, or at least how to figure out the parts I don't understand already. Which is not something I can say for postfix at all. It may as well just be a big blobby ball of goo.
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in our professional opinion postfix's internals are strictly worse than qmail's from a modularity standpoint
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@megmac also the cool thing about cvm is that the same interface works for various backend data sources because the abstractions aren't insane bullshit
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Erin 💽✨replied to mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4) last edited by
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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)replied to Erin 💽✨ last edited by
@erincandescent @megmac i mean you're not entirely wrong, and so our real advice ends up being "unless you're absolutely bought into the
.qmail-*defaultsubaddressing infrastructure you can probably just get away with postfix" -
@atax1a @erincandescent yeah I wouldn't use it if I were starting from scratch in spite of my fondness for the way it's architected and the way you manage filters. The world moved on and it got stuck and the biggest thing you get out of using it now is getting stuck with it.
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@megmac @erincandescent and ability to run
ezmlm, which was why we switched off of postfix. but, again, we're a coyote -
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@lispi314 @ireneista @kouhai our objection is specifically to the extra care and feeding out-of-process database servers require
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@atax1a @kouhai @ireneista Fair, though ultimately the backup problem remains anyway.
Some sort of controlled access is necessary for backups whether it uses SQLite, Postgres or loose files in a directory for storage. -
@lispi314 @kouhai @ireneista we dump a zfs snapshot of our filesystem to tape
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Erin 💽✨replied to mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4) last edited by
@atax1a @megmac for spinning up a mailing list these days i’d be tempted to use mlmmj which my friends tell me lives up to its name as much as any software that has to interact with email does.
though whatever mailing list tool i’d run ideally would shove archives into a public access anonymous imap server or similar
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@atax1a @ireneista @kouhai File/data-wise or as a ZFS datastructure/patch (the differential thing it does)? (The latter might be more space-efficient, but I'm not sure what guarantees it provides for stability & compatibility.)
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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)replied to Erin 💽✨ last edited by
@erincandescent @megmac yeah mlmmj wasnt quite there when we switched over
