They do use btrfs. However, Synology also uses some additional tools on top of btrfs. From what I remember (could be wrong about the precise details), they actually run mdadm on top of btrfs, and use mdadm in order to get the erasure coding and possibly the cache NVME disk too. (By erasure coding, I mean RAID 5/6, or SHR, which are still unstable generally in BTRFS).
This is almost completely correct. However, I have heard of one other possibility that might be a problem - a steam explosion (maar).
From what I understand, a person died falling in a crack in town earlier this week, and when they went down to investigate, they found ocean water in it. There is a possibility (albight slight) of magma finding it's way into such cracks and causing a steam explosion. Nothing on the scale of something like what happened at Hunga-Haapi earlier last year, but still a not-so-great explosion.
I'm using Nexcloud currently, but an alternative for you to check out for you might be Pydio.
It has a lot of the same features, and generally seemed a little more stable. However, it was a little more painful to configure, and has a few unique terminologies you'll have to get used to. Also it's UI does load faster than Nextcloud, but once loaded, it is a little less snappy.
For the user downloaded client, I found that it works, but is a little less convenient than Nextcloud (no Automatic pinning of the folder, no partial downloads to save space)
Self hosting the infrastructure is incredibly easy. There are a lot of products out there that make hosting your own email system a cinch. One I'd personally recommend would be Cloudron, but I've heard MailCow is very easy, and I'm sure there are many other tools out there that sort of just 'do it for you'.
Email deliverability on the other hand is... I'm going to say, it's not hard, but not easy either. Mainly you have to deal with blacklists, as well as certain providers being a bit weird. Staying off of blacklists can be both easy and hard. Most blacklist providers have several different layers of "Don't accept email from this server". The highest layer is easy to stay off of - just don't send spam. The layers below it might not be though. In particular, if your IP address is even in the same range as where other people might be sending spam, your going to end up on a blacklist because of it. So certain blacklists might have a 'Level 2' or 'Level 1' where if you use the same VPS provider as a spammer, your VPS that's never sent spam is going to get some of that 'bad reputation'.
Email servers deal with blacklists in different ways - some just accept most things, some are a lot more strict. Usually email server will count up indicators for spam, and score them, and then, if it's above a certain score, the email bounces. Usually having a little 'bad reputation' (like from Level 2 / Level 1 like I listed above) won't be enough 'score' to effect things, but having a lot of it certainly will. I had an email server hosted on a VPS with a Level 2 warning, and my Gmail still got my emails. But I don't know if my emails would go well to all email providers (didn't do enough testing). In addition, some email providers will silently fail your emails if they don't pass - Google is pretty notorious about doing this. So it can be a bit of a pain to debug problems.
The advantage of SES is that they deal with the reputation problem. They will jump on a Level 1 for a few days, then stay off of it for the rest of the month, then jump back on it again, and the cycle repeats. This is for the generic shared IP form of SES, so it's pretty good. It's certainly going to be more expensive, but you will need to send a good amount of email before it make sense to start managing reputation on your own probably.
If you want the best of both worlds (although this sounds like what you are already doing), I'd suggest hosting your own server, but then using Amazon SES as the outbound email relay. Amazon's outbound costs are very very cheap, and that's what you need the reputation for anyways.
It would be really nice if there was a system with fallback relays though, I agree. Let's hope that happens sometime :).
> If you want the best of both worlds (although this sounds like what you are already doing), I'd suggest hosting your own server, but then using Amazon SES as the outbound email relay. Amazon's outbound costs are very very cheap, and that's what you need the reputation for anyways.
The only thing I'm actually interested in is sending transactional email. I actually think paying a managed provider for it is the most pragmatic approach, but it seems like the existing providers are all pushing the limits of charging what the market will bear and, based purely on subjective info I've seen online, the margins aren't even close to anything resembling fair value (for me).
If there wasn't so much business and technical complexity related to bringing your own IPs, the $10k ish (?) it costs to buy a /24 starts to look like a reasonable expense when put alongside the pricing of a lot of email sending services.
Pretty sure ZeroTier supports relaying (I remember reading some of their earlier blogs and it mentioning something to that effect). In practice, you just have to turn off the uPnP in Settings to use it I've found.
It's just a bit more snappy and has a few advanced but helpful features that gmail does not.
For comparison... think about how it feels to work in Microsoft Word compared to Google Docs. You can do most of what you can do in Word in Google Docs, but there are helpful things in Word that just make it that much better. And it just feels a little better when you use it... thus, if you need to do really serious word processing, you do it in Word.
Outlook and Thunderbird have a similar feeling when compared to gmail. It won't matter much if you are only sending 10 emails a day. But if you are sending 50 or 60 emails a day over multiple inboxes (particularly in the context of business email)... you might find it's a little easier to organize and respond to people in the desktop clients.
In the case of Thunderbird, here are some features it has I probably couldn't live without:
-Archiving split by Month (As a bonus there is also an easy shortcut key for archiving)
-Open in thread (this is a little different than gmails as far as I understand in the way that thunderbird deals with split threads, which can be important in a business context where you have some replies only going to some people, others going to other people - it's easy to see this tree structure in Thunderbird)
-Folders AND Tags (Thunderbird's Tagging and Folder system are separated, gmails is combined as far as I'm aware. As a bonus, Thunderbirds tags highlight emails in color for easy identification, and also have easy shortcuts)
-Add-Ons (For example, I use a Thunderbird extension that can attach notes to an email message... which can then synchronize between computers which is useful for accounts where a lot of people access the inbox, but where sending an internal email would clog said inbox. For gmail, you can write web extensions, but Thunderbird has an ecosystem already pre-existing and mostly free)
-Reminder if you use the word 'attach' and don't have an attachment (It sucks when you send out an email saying 'such is attached below and it's not actually there. Gmail might have this too now - have not checked.)
These things all seem pretty small but they make a big difference in how I manage my email, and especially with Thunderbird, this is all customizable. Want Unified inboxes, or separate ones? Your choice. Want to see the cc's from an email as a column in your email list, but not the favorites ('important' tag in gmail) column? Your choice too. And there's a lot more options than just these, meaning you can really streamline your email process. And this just ... at least for me, makes enail a little less painful.
So I would probably avoid Amazon just because many of their services charge for data out. It isn't out, but it's a variable for you, and you probaly want something that's flat per month. Cheapest you are going to get with somewhat reliable service is either going to be Hetzner or BuyVM. Hetzner is better for someone who doesn't want to tinker, BuyVM for those who do (BuyVM is a little less reliable, but you can set it up cheaper if you are willing to do a little bit of manual work with shell commands).
Secondly, I'd suggest you host this through Cloudron. It helps you handle automatic security updates and backups. It's very nice, and worth paying for, although it's a little pricey for individuals.
Third, with email, you can host it yourself (in fact Cloudron has this built in), but I'm going to recommend against it, or at least recommend that you pipe important emails through another service like Fastmail. Let me explain why. There's going to be some point after hosting for 5 years, where your server is going to go down. Now email will be fine, it's built to deal with cases where servers go down, but... we rely so much on email right now, that it's going to really suck to have it down. So by all means, have your personal email come to the server, but keep anything that you can't do without running on a managed service. You can pipe it through your own domain, and set up automatic forwarding, but it's going to be a little better to run important stuff through someone else's server, imho.
To clarify: it's not hard to set it up. It'll just be useless because all your emails to people will be marked as spam. And it takes years to have a chance at getting a good enough "algorithmic reputation" to be pulled out of that bin.
The state of email is disappointing and sad. It is possibly one of the most centralized decentralized protocols/networks on the planet. We need a good replacement for it. It's so legacy.
My email is not landing in spam for people I do business with, others need to add me to white list, do you think this is a problem? I don't, I believe more of us are self hosting less of a problem this will be.
You said that you're hosting since 2011, which makes sense since you're essentially grandfathered in.
If you have set up a new system without any reputation now, even if you have set up DKIM and SPF, it's now a lot worse. Major providers like Google and Microsoft won't really tell you, but if you are new but don't have a dedicated AS and instead you're using (for example) Linode you'll be scored lower by having low-cost solutions that just so happens to be abused by spammers.
As ever with these discussions, I host my own email on a Hetzner VM with https://mailu.io/ and there was no special setup or precaution required to ensure delivery both ways.
Still - if you self-host just assume at some point it will go down and you may have to deal with a backup restore before you can receive any more email. If that gets in the way of your life, you may want to reconsider :)
Recently, a shared hosting company where I had the emails went off-the-grid in a puff. I know I should have taken backups, but, it seems trivial that why would a company just shut off the servers/ stop responding if the service has been impeccable for last 5 years? This is another story.
So, what can I do to just keep a backup of all my emails (one @gmail.com and other personal website emails)?
Maybe for me, just having those emails accessible somewhere is more important (other than primary source/ provider)
Worst advise. If you are incapable (no offence) to set up your own email server, doesn't mean anyone else should avoid doing it.
Source: Having own email server for 17 years. Absolutely happy with it. Again, that doesn't mean everyone should do it, but I'd abstain from advices like you should not! or should do same.
I'm perfectly capable, as is the vast majority of even passing readers of HN. If you think that the hard part is setting up the mail server, you're exactly the type of person that should _not_ be hosting it yourself. The problem is, and always has been, deliverability.
Deliverability _is_ a part of setting everything properly. Setting up mail is not juts installing exim and expecting everything will work by some magic and the manual online.
I do host mail for tens of domains and never had issues with deliverability.
I’ve got a Cloudron instance on a 1G buyvm (3.50). The Cloudron free tier is kinda perfect for it because the 2 app free tier maximum pretty much exhausts the 1G of memory (running rocket.chat and The Lounge).
I have it setup as my.srv1.domain.com (with apps at appX.srv1.domain.com). This way if I need more apps I just spin up another 1G Ubuntu instance somewhere and install cloudron as srv2 etc, for another 2 apps that fit squarely into the 1G and also Cloudron free tier. Cloudron in their forum has also stated that this does not violate their terms (they said completely within terms).
Glad to see BuyVM mentioned here because I was just about to suggest it, I've been using them for close to a year now and nothing I've found comes close to the performance to dollar you get with them, their services are great +1
I'd prefer to pay someone else to handle email, in the final analysis, I just don't need that headache in my life right now. It's why I'm not making any plans for a big dramatic change on that front yet, but I might dip my toe into piping it through someone else's servers, if I see something that makes sense from all angles.
Since almost all of the people you correspond with are sending from Gmail or Office365 or <insert other oligopoly provider>, there is no email security anyway. Sadly.
Just responding to one part of this, if that's cool.
I think what the comment above is saying is that it's not about whether or not speech on Twitter is protected. It's that the government isn't supposed to act to restrict speech in any manner that doesn't cross the lines he listed.
If I'm remembering correctly, there was a big court case because Trump was hiding critical responses to his tweets on Twitter. The judge ruled that Trump violated the 1st amendment even though Twitter is a private company ("private property"?).
This is because the 1st amendment not only protects speech, it restricts government attempts to control speech (or at least that's the argument that would be made).
The base of those thoughts is that user contributed content is somehow an expression of free speech. Is it? what if it the user contributed content is from someone from another nation? what if its a bot/ChatGPT generated content? I think there are arguments that user content online can’t be universally treated as protected by one countries laws. IANAL so I could be wrong.
I use it with a few different email providers, including fastmail and a self hosted server. Works pretty well for what I need it to do.
The only feature it's missing which hurts is nested folders. All nested folders are displayed in a list structure, rather than a tree, which is a bit of a pain if you use a nested archive (think Thunderbird's Monthly Archive structure).
