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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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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Irenes (many)replied to mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4) last edited by
@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.
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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)replied to mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4) last edited by
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.
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kouhai, Breaker of Cachesreplied to Irenes (many) last edited by
@ireneista @atax1a the backups are the main annoying point tbh
you can use host trust, and only listen on a socket, but the backups!
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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)replied to Irenes (many) last edited by
@ireneista i mean, we host our own email, that's where we've put our running-things-that-are-a-pain points
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@kouhai @ireneista the major version upgrades are the ones that come to top-of-mind for us
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@atax1a Hmm can you say more about this email setup?
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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
