Don’t send spam, behave nicely, have proper configuration on postfix and dovecot, set up SPF and preferably DKIM, keep your domains reputation clean and so on. You’ll likely still end up on some lists, so you need to manually dig them trough and ask nicely for removal.

Self hosting email has a pretty bad reputation and many will strongly advice against it, but in reality it’s really not that bad. But email as a whole is more complex beast to manage than simple website or running Jellyfin for your family and friends. You need to understand how the mail routing side of things work (SMTP itself, authentication for it encryption included and so on) and also you need to understand how DNS works and how various entries are related to mail transport. Then you’ll likely want at least some kind of spam filtering and so on. And with email you’ll need to have proper backup scenario too so that you don’t lose the likely pretty important data. All of that is perfectly doable and it’s not as difficult as many claim it to be, but there’s a bunch of stuff you need to understand and implement all of them correctly.

There’s various permission errors on the log file, I’d start from those. Also your dovecot configs seem a bit funny to me, usually mails are not stored to user home directories with dovecot, but instead somewhere under /var, likely you’ll want /var/vmail. Logfiles are pretty good with these tools, so pay close attention to those.

And take your time to understand what the config options actually do. Too permissive configurations will get your sever to every spamlist on the world pretty quickly.

Also: The Onion writers in peril: reality gets more and more stupid.

You can, but don’t expect that to spark a lot of discussion. Limitation is set to English so that majority of participants can understand what you’re saying. It wouldn’t add much to the thread if this comment was written on Finnish (my native language).

There’s plenty of news coverage on this on multiple outlets. BBC, Reuters and a ton of European national broadcasting companies, for example.

unless the data is off site, its not truely a backup

Two is one and one is none. No matter if it’s offsite or on top of your main server. Also 3-2-1 is an industry standard for a reason. Plus unless you test that you can actually restore your backups they don’t really exist (also known as Schrödinger Backups).

As far as I know, the condition was that US (nor NATO) weapons can’t be used on attacks to Russian soil. That’s one part why Ukraine has basically done a world record speedrun on native drone production. No one has (nor can) deny them from using their own weapons how they see fit.

Removing stupid limitations on how they can hit back has helped, but that was mostly for short(ish) range missiles.

Zalo has at least unofficial linux client and polytoria seems to offer flatpack. So those should run on linux, but that’s just based on few quick web searches.

i still need to find a way to setup a simple sambashare via a web gui and a good backup solution.

I’m running openmediavault as an VM for file shares and backups with proxmox backup server. Works pretty well. I’ve got a physical backup server in detached garage and another in a VPS which syncs the most important parts to remote location.

I definitely didn’t suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.

There’s multiple. Some devices are on wifi, some on z-wave and as zigbee is getting quite a lot of support from vendors I’ll likely add that to the mix soon-ish. Also I could use bluetooth for some automations, but at least for now I don’t really see any advantages over that.

As for pihole, it’s main DNS server for devices in my network and rest of the family uses the net quite a lot too (IPTV and streaming services included) so any longer downtime would cause at least annoyance for them so it’s nice to have an option to keep things running and take my time to maintain hardware or whatever. I of course could change DHCP server to offer something else too, but it’s simpler and faster to just migrate a VM to another host.

Is there a benefit for splitting your services on 2 hosts?

I don’t know about OPs situation, but I have a mini-PC as proxmox hypervisor too addition to my main server. Mini-PC is located middle-ish of the house as it’s running home assistant with ZWA-2 and the location helps a lot with Z-wave coverage. But added benefit is that I can (within the pretty strict resource limits) move VMs to the mini-pc when doing maintenance on main server. It’s pretty handy to move PiHole and some other small stuff to another host so that everything on network still functions even if one hypervisor is down.

Would spamming low effort comments to fill a quota then fall under the spam bit, not necessarily self promotion bit?

Possibly, but there’s equally gray area that what counts as low effort spamming and what actually contributes to the conversation. For example I’ve replied to comments “I’m using X to do Y” with “I’m using X too and I’m happy with it” to give an opinion to possible solutions. That kind of comments are easy enough to throw out and, if the “10% rule” is interpreted strictly, it isn’t really obvious if they should be considered as “improving your ratio” or as a part of actual conversation.

I disagree that it would be the same than no rule at all, in my opinion that gives a pretty clear position on what’s allowed and what’s not without setting any strict limits so there’s some room for interpretation for community/mods to act.

Maybe rephrasing a bit helps: “This community is not an advertising platform. Self promotion is allowed only from active members of this community. Excessive promotion will result on post removals and/or ban from the community.”

What I’m afraid is that if there’s a strict rule then someone will argue that “only 9,87% of my posts are promotion, I don’t deserve a ban” even the rest of their content has little to no value for the conversation. And, since it’ll be a rule for the community, I personally think it should apply as it’s written, so it should have some kind of option to weed out smartasses trying to game the system in place.

But I’m not likely to promote anything around here, so for me it doesn’t really matter, just trowing out my thoughts about the matter.

I worry a bit that its getting unwieldy, so feel free to suggest options to clean up the language a bit.

I would just keep it simple: “Self promotion for your product is allowed, but this is not an advertising platform. Be sensible and participate to community. Abuse will result in post removal.”

I don’t think it really helps to place any arbitary limit as it might just result on spamming low-effort comments so that your “quota” stays under the 10% rule and also posting about your fantastic FOSS project daily could be equally annoying. That 10% rule could be useful when deciding if something should be removed and obviously free projects should have more relaxed “limits”, but in general what counts as abuse can be decided by community feedback.

Find two more selfhosters and they will criticize both of us!

Absolutely. However I’d argue that some BSD variant is at the other end, not Gentoo, so there’s at least some critics to you ;).

I’m running proxmox and (mostly) Debian on top of that, and I’m sure that there’s someone thinking I’m doing things the wrong way.

With Windows Servers I think the bigger problem is that there’s way less people running things on top of it, so there’s less knowledge about problems and solving them. However, many of us are on corporate IT jobs too and thus have to work with Windows, so that might somewhat cancel out the difference in popularity.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing on my server stack that’s really worth anything is immich. The rest will have very little value to anyone once I’m gone. Plan is to create printed books from the photos and those should stay accessible for the future generations, our archive just needs a ton of work on creating those photos and possibly adding descriptions on who’s on the pictures and when they’re taken.

I don’t really plan for ww3 nor solar flare frying half of the planet, but one thing that’s a real problem is that if something happens to myself. My wife or kids don’t know how to manage/access a majority of the stuff there is even if their everyday digital life is using network and services in it I’ve built. They’ll be just fine without pihole or jellyfin, but data in immich/nextcloud is valuable and bus factor for the digital environment is pretty low.

I should at least verify that all server passwords are on my bitwarden vault and set up dead mans switch on that. Then they can at least get someone to pull the data out of the systems or even hire someone to maintain them. Best option would be if one of the kids would learn the ropes, but so far it doesn’t seem like they’re interested on anything like that.

Obviously there’s a ton in successful email hosting since it’s not just configuring few services. Proper DNS-records and privilege controls are mandatory, you need to occasionally clear up your domain/IP from spamlists (specially at the start) and single mistake can ruin your DNS reputation quite quickly which then takes time to build back.

But it’s still perfectly doable and, when you have proper knowledge on how the whole circus actually runs, not too difficult either. Only problem is that there’s no longer money on just email hosting since cloud hosting offers much more than just emails for the price a small gamer can’t just compete with. At least around here.

I flagree that hosting email servers on residential IPs is a recipe for being filtered and blocked

Unless your ISP gives you a static address and agrees to change PTR record to your server address. Then it’s no different than any other server on the internet. Obviously odds are that you’re not getting one or if it’s an option they’ll likely charge more than VPS is going to cost you, but it’s not unheard of.

But for the actual topic, I don’t get the myth either. I’ve got a good old postfix+dovecot setup running and the only problem I have is that spam filtering isn’t quite as good as with commercial providers, but the handful of trash coming trough is easy enough to take care of manually.

Sounds reasonable approach to me. Also I’d include VPS and other cloud services too. “Is this VPS enough to run NextCloud” is a perfectly reasonable question for this community just like “is my old thinkpad good for…”. I don’t think there should (nor can) be a hard rule about what hardware to use. Questions obviously outside of self hosting (e.g. “what GPU I should by to play minecraft”) should go elsewhere but otherwise I don’t think there’s even a real need to limit activity.

And also there’s a half a dozen of posts here daily (unless mods remove posts really efficiently). My opinion is that even if the post could go to some other community but leans to self-hosting side of things it can stay. Maybe if there was tens or hundreds of posts daily it would make more sense to limit what goes, but as things are now I don’t think any kind of (in a lack of a better word) gatekeeping is beneficial to this community nor anyone else.

Editing original post and including steps which helped would be great. I don’t expect anyone to reply to each an every comment separately, but a summary on what caused the problem and what fixed it would be nice. Specially when someone later finds the post with similar issue.