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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
the HN/Lobsters RSS feeds are so close to being useless I wonder why they even exist

You basically get a title and a link to comments and that's it. You can't read anything without leaving your feed reader.
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Phantasm @phnt@fluffytail.org
3w
@feld Sadly a lot of sites are like that nowadays. Bleeping Computer RSS feeds are also utterly useless. You get the title, first sentence and a link to the post. That's it.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@phnt sometimes the rss feed is like that but the atom feed is complete. If they also have an atom feed.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt But they all work with Miniflux’s full text extract. Especially if you selfhost Miniflux on your local connection. If you have it in a data center or use the miniflux.app paid one you have to put a cloudflare solver proxy in front of it. Though half the time you have to do that to get the RSS feed at all anyway because cloudflare, and every other WAF, is a blight on the universe.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@fastfinge @phnt I haven't experienced that cloudflare issue yet. I have a couple dozen RSS feeds that do fetch successfully and I've been using rss2email to pull them.

I retired miniflux because it's too heavy and inconvenient. I find having the RSS feeds dumped into email folders in a special account a lot easier to manage.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt CBC rss feeds are an example of rss behind cloudflare. I did the email thing for years. But I follow a hundred or so feeds, and even with whitelists email providers would send the emails to spam.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@fastfinge @phnt My feeds are delivered to a self-hosted email server so it all works out well for me. The RSS fetching and email delivery happens within my local network at home, so I don't even have to worry about spam filtering for it.

The spam filter issue was definitely on my mind as well...

obviously this is a configuration most people won't want to setup and maintain but as I already had a locally hosted and reliable email server it seems to work pretty great.

(This server's real public IP address is "in the cloud" via a VPN and not blocked by email hosters -- yet)

trying hard to own my communications as much as I can. Especially for important/sensitive things. Ideally those go direct to my own mail server if possible, so the company/government mail server made a direct TLS connection to mine and e.g., Google will not be able to read it and further build a profile on me.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt If my choice is to selfhost email, or go to prison, I’ll take prison. Okay, I’m joking. Mostly. But I ran an email server for 10 years. You can have a perfectly clean IP and Microsoft or Google or someone will just decide to drop your email. Even when their own delivery reports say everything is fine. And now there’s DKIM and SPF and reverse dns and dnsec and on it goes. I own everything else, but not email. Never again. I’ll happily pay someone for that. They’re earning every penny.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@fastfinge @phnt oh I don't blame you at all, I had trauma from hosting email as a job for several years so I avoided it. But I'm back now.

DKIM, SPF not hard.

Reverse DNS, simple.

Spam filtering? rspamd seems to do better than Fastmail or Gmail did for my needs and it covers dkim for me too.

Actual storage (IMAP): I'm a huge fan of Archiveopteryx (aox.org) and have been for many years. Postgres storage, heavy deduplication, fast. Mails can always be undeleted up to X days you've configured -- or forever. Retention policies on specific email folders available too.

Postfix for the MTA. Simple, reliable.

IP reputation: 100% hardest thing to maintain. I've now setup custom monitoring that will send me push notifications if my IP or domains show up on any lists. That's about as good as you can get.

But I still maintain a Fastmail account because I need a reliable email account as a backup for worst case scenarios. And so my wife can still access her mail account if I get hit by a bus and my server goes offline. Some bank/finance accounts use that as the recovery email stuff too. Just trying to cover my bases, I'm a squishy meat bag after all...
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt But if your paying fastmail anyway, why not just use it? IP reputation is the exact opposite of fun. Not to mention that if someone hacks anything else I host they can annoy me and make life miserable. If someone hacks my email they can empty my bank account, steel my other accounts, mess up my taxes, get my healthcare info and worse.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@fastfinge @phnt
But if your paying fastmail anyway, why not just use it? IP reputation is the exact opposite of fun.
That's why my intention for the self-hosting is limited in scope to things like:

- less important online junk. Signing up for sites/services.

- mailing lists for open source projects

- receiving mails I don't want stored on Fastmail (like my mails from the gov/IRS, or a bank statement)

Self-hosted mail server also hosts my mail archives too which I've retained nearly in full going all the way back to the late 00s. Not junk mails. Just real communications with friends and families, mailing lists, online and offline purchase receipts/invoices (useful for searching to find stuff)

I don't want all that sitting on their server and I do still want access to it from multiple devices.

Bank login/recovery (but not statements), credit cards, insurance, rent/mortage, utilities, and the email address I want friends/family to reach me at go to the Fastmail hosted address. No spam or other junk will accumulate there because I don't use that address for online purchases or logins to random websites. And my wife has access to that account too in case somehow hers isn't linked to the important thing she'd need to access without me around.

Hope that makes sense. It has been an effort to segregate all these things but so far it's worked really well.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt I have every email I’ve ever sent or received going back to 1996! Data hoarders unite! I just keep 90 percent of it in mbox files in cold storage that I check on either once a year or whenever I want something.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@fastfinge @phnt I lost all my mail correspondence with my wife back when we were dating. It was on Hotmail. Wish I would have known how to archive it...
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt I’ve actually never used webmail. When I was growing up my dad always insisted everyone use the ISP email offered by whatever dialup isp we had because “we’re paying for it!” And he’d change isps every few months for a better deal. And most of them only offered only pop3. And we had limited dialup minutes so we had to download or email and disconnect. So even today I just don’t think of a mail server as a place that will store things for me. In my head once I download the email the mail servers job is done.
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feld @feld@friedcheese.us
3w
@fastfinge @phnt were you able to get your own address from your dialup ISP? The ones we had only offered a single address and it was meant for the primary accountholder so there wasn't any way for me as a teenager to get an email address except via webmail
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt Yeah, the ones we had usually offered 3 or 4. We always used the small local ones. We lived in Toronto so there were a lot of small fly by night options. I’m pretty sure my dad would ask for 2 more emails and they’d agree. Sometimes I even got a whole 3 megs of web space! Once I even had a shell account. No background processes though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
3w
@feld @phnt That’s actually where my username came from. I wanted fastfingers, but that Unix system only allowed 9 character usernames. But the username stuck. I discovered I could put files in a special hacker folder called cgi-bin and if they ended in .pl I could “trick” the internet into running programs! At 9 I was sure this was some sort of illegal loophole I’d discovered.
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