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

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@atax1a ugh yes

like... for our own needs we prefer postgres over sqlite

but we want it to be a choice. running postgres is a pain, it's just a pain that we happen to be good at.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

we self host our email with nothing but our filesystem and an out-of-process credential validation server for privsep. now that is a system that runs itself, we haven't had to think about it since we stood it up.

postgres? Major version upgrades, slow SQL, long migrations, backups, additional points of failure, i am not paid for this.

[kouhai@social.treehouse.systems]

@ireneista @atax1a the backups are the main annoying point tbh

you can use host trust, and only listen on a socket, but the backups!

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@ireneista i mean, we host our own email, that's where we've put our running-things-that-are-a-pain points

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@kouhai @ireneista the major version upgrades are the ones that come to top-of-mind for us

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@atax1a Hmm can you say more about this email setup?

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@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's mailfront instead, which depends on Untroubled cvm to validate recipient addresses at SMTP time. we map our whole domain to a subaddress of our unix user, mail delivery is controlled via .qmail files in our home directory, and go into the notmuch indexer via pipes through notmuch 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 to ssh into the actual machine.

basically, the stock qmail-smtpd generates backscatter, but the rest of the MTA works fine, we also don't set up IMAP, or webmail because we have notmuch

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@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...

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac oh we transact out through DKIMproxy chaining to the openbsd smtpd running on our router

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac also weow another qmail user, nice to meet you

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@atax1a it was all the rage in 1999 or whenever @brook and I first set it up lol

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac

yeah ok that tracks, lol

@brook

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@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.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac

in our professional opinion postfix's internals are strictly worse than qmail's from a modularity standpoint

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@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

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@atax1a @megmac I keep thinking about looking at qmail but these days (compared to postfix) it feels like an increasingly convoluted set of arcane incantations

While the other software that's supposed to sit around it has increasingly moved on in other directions

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@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-*default subaddressing infrastructure you can probably just get away with postfix"

[megmac@social.treehouse.systems]

@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.

[atax1a@infosec.exchange]

@megmac @erincandescent and ability to run ezmlm, which was why we switched off of postfix. but, again, we're a coyote

[lispi314@udongein.xyz]

@kouhai @atax1a @ireneista NNCP & cronjobs might be of use for this.