Email provider for home server alerts
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FastMail is nice.
or (I don’t recommend it) you could learn to:
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Self hosted ntfy and mailrise. Mailrise is a wrapper for apprise that let's you send emails to it and in turn converts the email to the desired push alert.
For password resets or account creation welcome emails I'd use a SMTP service. I use SMTP2GO for those. Free plan is something 1000 emails a month. I've been using them for a year and think I've sent maybe 5 or 10 emails.
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Find out if your ISP provides an SMTP smarthost.
Worth noting that in Finland they are also by law required to log metadata of delivered mails.
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Given it seems to be a single guy doing his thing I don't expect them to get bought out.
It's a great service and incredibly cheap. With advanced pricing I'm only paying ~0,40€ per month. My domain + purelymail is less than I'd pay for other providers email only.
Edit: If Amazon increases their prices they'll have to pass it on, but those should be pretty consistent.
If you use your own domain (or an alias service) switching email providers is simple anyway. -
Email is like, the worst possible option. Check out Apprise. Super easy to setup Telegram or Discord notifications via webhooks. Takes like a minute.
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I have no idea what any of that means…
That checks out. You conveniently skipped the part where I requested a single messaging solution which works with either modern android/ios devices or with anything you'll find in your dad's(or grandads I guess) drawer, can manage multiple recipients, escalations to sms/home automation bells, works reliably even if the uplink goes down for few hours and so on.
And no, you very much can not run mastodon server on a Commodore 64.
But you seem like a young and enthustiatic individual. I was one "a few" years ago. Keep it going, but that arrogant attitude won't get you anywhere. Email has been a thing since the 1970s and there's a reason why it's still going strong. Things like XMPP has been around for a good while and there's a reason why they're not even close of overtaking email as a primary communication technology around.
You'll live and learn. My guess is that when you reach my age, email is still working just fine and majority of the hot stuff which is around right now has faded to the history.
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You conveniently skipped the part
I didn't skip anything. The solutions I listed support all of that, with the possible exception of running on old shit which...why is that even remotely relevant?
you very much can not run mastodon server on a Commodore 64.
You absolutely can. There's an entire community dedicated to running Mastodon servers on old hardware.
Email has been a thing since the 1970s and there's a reason why it's still going strong.
Is it ignorant old farts refusing to embrace new technology?
Things like XMPP has been around for a good while and there's a reason why they're not even close of overtaking email as a primary communication technology around.
Because it came around after email and all the old farts were too committed to it to learn something new? Is it because tech oligarchs learned from their lessons and embraced, extended, exploited, and abandoned open standards? What is the reason? You tell me.
email is still working just fine and majority of the hot stuff which is around right now has faded to the history.
It doesn't work "just fine", it's fucking awful. Outside of trying to host it, just using it is a nightmare. Trying to find any information is a nightmare because there's no common communication thread, and the emails are chock full of unnecessary bloat, and everyone has a fucking signature that's a mile long and full of giant images. You can't send videos. There's a bunch of tracking features built into it. It's insecure. Like, the list goes on...
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you very much can not run mastodon server on a Commodore 64.
You absolutely can.
Ok. Send me the link of disk image of that. I have C64 laying around with 1541 disk drive. I'll set up a public mastodon instance running on a C64 with a webcam stream of the setup.
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I don't know where to find that information. I've just seen it running.
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Commodore 64 is a home computer released at 1982. Modern expansions for it allows the thing to actually have tcp/ip stack and it can run things like telnet, but your single mastodon server, in comparison of what was available in 1980s, is pretty much equal of the whole bandwidth and storage of the internet (or arpanet, depending on how you want to time things).
Mastodon server requires (roughly) at least 2 gigabytes of memory and 20 gigabytes of storage. And with that it needs at least dual core 2GHz CPU to run it.
Commodore 64 had 1Mhz. A million hertz sounds like a big number, but we're talking (at minimum) of two processor cores running with 2000 million hertz. Also, C=64 had 64 000 bytes of memory while the absolute minimum to run mastodon instance is 2 000 000 000 bytes.
And then there's the storage. Your minimum mastodon instance should have at least 20GB of storage. 1541 used 5,25" floppy disks which could store up to 170 kilobytes. So you'd need someone to change disks as needed on a over 400 meter tall tower of floppy disks.
So, please tell me again where to get disk images to run mastodon server on a C=64 and how you just know that plain old email is garbage and old people just don't know what they're talking about.
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I use gmail. You just have to set up an "app" password. I always have to search for how to do that, but once you have an app password you're off and running.
I also just started hosting my own nfty and have been moving as much as possible to that. So far I've replaced two email notifications with push notifications, which is nice.
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I know what a Commodore 64 is, brother. And you can ask all you want where to find that information. And I can keep telling you I don't know.
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Under things me and my users notice aren't working right away, at the top of the list is email. So I notice when those alerts aren't able to get through, because if email is down I have my phone ringing off the hook because my dad can't get to his online auctions to see if he won that toaster for $5. So email is like, the best option.
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I do this with my home network using FastMail. You can create App specific passwords for each service you add email notification support for. This means you don’t risk compromising your full accounts passwords. You can also put constraints on each app password, such as limiting it only to sending emails but not reading email or looking at your contacts and files. This is nice in case any of my passwords are leaked.
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I've been pretty lazy with this.
I used to use my hotmail account, but they disabled password auth for smtp and many programs dont support 0auth2.
With that change, I just moved to using gmail. You've gotta create an App Password for smtp, but other wise works fine.
I've just been too lazy to move out of gmail+hotmail. Maybe one day
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it’s easy to use, pretty damn reliable
Unfortunately not when you’re self hosting… Can’t rely on it when you’re supposed to receive an email (account validation, reset password email,…) which never arrives and you’re stuck clicking on « resend the email » on the website with no hope…
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I meant that the technology itself is reliable. And you can do self hosting just fine too, I've been doing it since 2010 or so, but running a local smarthost which sends messages via reputable SMTP provider works just fine too. Or even directly interacting with the SMTP provider from all the applications you're running.
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i use https://www.mailjet.com/ they gave a free tier that goes a long way for mails like that.
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Install dovecot and set up your email client to connect to it. Email is trivial if you're not sending to other hosts.
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It's not really that privacy friendly, but I use zoho. You can send emails free from aliases with your own domain name so I have emails coming from nextcloud@mydomain pve@mydomain etc.
