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This is an amusing thread for me as my day job used to be unfucking postfix and exim servers daily for a fleet of vps and dedi boxes.
unfucking postfix
This is not a task for the feint of heart, nor was it ever, even back when the technology was first invented. I salute you.
Tbf most of the time you just had to clear ssd space and rebuild indices after restarting services as mostly the mail was there but stuck in queue
I stopped hosting my own email servers many years ago, even when I was being paid for it. Any time anyone mentions DKIM or yahoo throttling or anything of that nature I get a thousand yard stare and and start to hyperventilate. I’m sure it easier when you aren’t sending 5 million messages a month, but who needs the headache.
What kind of operation was this? That’s 170,000 emails a day!
Spam farm.
Long ago I think it was 2006, I worked in a computer store/corporate it support that used to also be a 56k dial up isp. When i first got hired it was supposed to be like a paid internship. 2 weeks in the guy “mentoring” me was fired. Only other employees was the owner was had a PhD in information technology from 1984 and never kept up and his wife who did the accounting.
Over the next year he hired and fired probably 15 people and then decided he liked me enough to make me full time. He had no idea what he was doing and neither did I. Basically I was responsible for 8 business networks(including a 150 employee credit union), any computers a customer brought in, and our own internal network.
One day it was slow so I was browsing various web comics. The owner comes on at 1030(we opened at 900) furious with me. He claimed I was “reading a page with black text on a white background” which meant I was reading how to operate a spam business. That was his proof, a page with black text and a white background which he could not find my history.
He had received a letter from his isp that we were sending 2.5 million emails a day, we had 72 hours to resolve the issue or we were to be cut off. I argued that I didn’t run a spam operation, he had no proof and there were simpler explanations. It got so heated I quit, keep in mind I was only employee.
Next day the credit union was having a server issue and he had no one to fix it. He called me asking for me to return, I negotiated a $1 hour raise, an official written letter of apology, pay for time the previous day and that day and told him I would be back the following day.
I went in, solved the server issue(eventually found out cleaning crew was unplugging the power strip to plug in their vaccum over night and the server was configured not to restart when power returned). Went back to the office and talked with the owner. He showed me the letter and it identified 2 ip addresses as being the source. Neither was my computer and I didn’t recognize them. There was a command you could send over the terminal to open the CD tray based on ip address. I ran the command and basically walked around looking for a computer with open CD trays.
Turns out there was 2 servers, outside of our firewall directly facing the internet and yes for the memes they were originally dns servers from the 56k isp days. They were running original nt4, completely unpatched, with no security software installed and permanent outside facing ip addresses. I ran a virus scanner on it, I stopped when it detected over 100k infected files. Disconnected the servers, waited 10 minutes, called isp and effectively all email had stopped (the boss and myself both sent 1 email to confirm it was still working).
Backend provider for Realtors. New listing alerts and updates on properties that potential buyers were tracking.
that third one killed it for me. I hate what the Internet has become. We need to setup a second Internet that somehow can’t be monetized.
It’s called the i2p network
Correct. Come to I2P and experience 90s internet again. It’s slow but has character, if by character you understand I mean anonymous Geocities.
Honest question: is there also a boatload of sketchy stiff to avoid if you just wanted to have a nice SFW time? Early 2000s internet before Google indexed everything had some pockets of unsavory.
Also, is it just a bunch of middle aged dudes in mostly text forums? That’s like 85% of my experience with 90s internet.
To avoid? Remember when you had to go to Yahoo! Directory to find the few websites which exist? It’s like that.
I haven’t stumbled upon much sketchy stuff, you’d need to know where it is and discovery is still fairly manual though indexing services exist. Of course you need to find those services in the first place…
Anonymity is more of a focus than 90s internet, so it’s hard to tell who anyone really is but you’re probably right. There are active Russian and Iranian dissident text forums though.
However, for me, it’s the people just hosting personal websites e.g., a darkwave radio site, or a cryptography blog. Obviously the barrier to entry means it leans fairly techy.
Cool, thanks for sticking with me and explaining.
How would you recommend someone start exploring i2p?
If you’re not yet on I2P, start with https://geti2p.net/ and then set up an I2P router. Once you’re on I2P, personally I use notbob.i2p to see what’s up.
So it’s slow, barely contains anything, and near useless. Got it.
With black jack and hookers?
I’m locked in a contract with a company that enshittified their services a little and assigns restrictive IPs to non-Business customers that have been using port 25, but am switching to a more libre ISP as soon as it ends. I basically snoozed and didn’t realise the ISP hadn’t been rated the best for several years.
Mailcow internal on Debian VM.
SMTP2Go free external relay.
Have had the occasional issue after an upgrade or reboot can’t find my LetsEncrypt cert and will bork the system until I manually fix it. Perhaps my latest script update finally resolved that.
Otherwise, not that bad. Been running my own email for about 5 years or so. I don’t sign up for many outside services with it. It’s mainly for internal alerting or testing purposes but still works very well.
How do you handle backups?
The other side of email is that it has become the default identity provider for the Internet. If that VM becomes unrecoverable somehow, how would you get access to your past emails?
I still self host. Since 1997.
Since 2000, nothing beats mimedefang on sendmail to this day.
I work for a web hosting company. Do we offer clients mail services? Hell no.
ai image… with positive vote??? on myfediverse??? what a shame
I downvoted it the moment it popped up.
Because it’s hard to notice it.
It really is. I used to be able to tell the difference, but where do you people see that it’s AI in this image?
The Uncanny Valley hit me in the face directly, when I opened the image. That tie pattern makes no sense, the ring on his finger is at least 4 sizes too small, and the image makes very little sense either, like what would this have looked like originally without the badly shopped in text if it hadn’t been AI slop. Like what part of that sign is that dude on the left staring at? What is the other dude pointing out?
If you’re in doubt, zoom in. There’s probably more, as some background detail are blurred enough for the AI to be allowed to be sloppy there.You don’t need to look at the details in this case, even. The whole sign-thing is distorted in an unnatural way
I still don’t see it. This just looks like one of those schizoid gangstalker images where they circle nothing.
From left to right:
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The pattern on the tie is nonsensical and quite noisy
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The edge of the sign above and below the man’s arm is discontinuous. It’s parallel but it “breaks”
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The man’s ring is constricting the fuck out of his finger, and is also slightly offset from the finger’s position and angle
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Same as 2 but horizontally
- I have a tie that’s the same pattern
- Using a straight edge, the sign is continuous. The white block makes it look like it’s not
- He might have gained weight since buying the ring
- Same as 2.
This is pretty clearly a real image that’s be photoshopped to change the words on the sign.
His finger should be quite a different colour with a ring that tight
Ignoring that other person(?)'s garbage response, it’s a good breakdown and explanation
Honestly, it doesn’t look like AI to me. Funnily enough I think it’s exactly what the other reply said and it’s just badly photoshopped text on an existing image. But I do think their reasons for thinking it’s real are pretty terrible, and I still think the things I listed are sus, as they don’t look like typical artifacting to me.
In particular the detail on the ceiling in the background is quite clear and the spacing between the lights is consistent, and most other details seem to check out (the guy’s watch and clothes, people and stands in the background, veins on their hands, etc).
As a whole I would say it looks a bit uncanny just because of their poses and facial expressions, plus the weird design of the sign.
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it looks uncanny and i also know OP, they used to post chatgpt slop here
https://lemmy.zip/comment/19712446
Reminder of this:
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-08-30/you-should-not-run-your-mail-server-because-mail-is-hard/
And that mailu.io (and other similar projects) makes self-hosting email almost trivial 😁 (at least for people that can run a pre-configured
docker-compose.ymland buy their domain etc)AI slop yet again!
Al slop
Wait, why? I thought I was generally gold at spotting these things, but here I’m struggling. The only thing that looks a little out of place to ne is the ring on his pointing hand, but that might genuinely be a dark band + shadow. What else have I missed?
The tie is the most egregious part, if you zoom in the pattern makes no sense at all.
Mostly to me it’s about the quality. Everything in focus is incredibly smooth, more so than you’d get with a normal camera or phone, while the background is blurred. This looks like a convension setting of some sort, they would’ve taken the photo with their scratched phone camera and posted it immidiately without trying to edit anything.
Also, the text is different on every board. The top 2 texts are oriented straight at the camera, while the bottom texts are angled a bit, but not angled equally. Indicating it wasn’t just copy pasted, but an attempt to get a new angle every time. This could just mean badly edited, but I’m going with AI on that part too, because someone badly editing a joke like this, would simply copy paste the first textbox after getting the angle sort of right.
Give it up, dude. The models that just recently came out are so good you are kidding yourself if you think you can tell them apart from photographs.
@xia@lemmy.sdf.org guess i’ll block this person, most of their posts are slop
Hosting email is bad because the few companies everyone tells everyone to use run email. It is fine if hosting email isn’t for you but discouraging others to not try is exactly how we lose ground ona completely open protocol. Everyone who is willing should host email. There are “distros” like mailinabox and mailcow that make it very easy. The more folks that host it the more the larger hosts will have to start to be more of a tram player.
I do fine.
I sorta self host my email. Technically aws hosts my email but I’ve a local postfix and dovecot to serve devices.
That simplifies ip address reputation, dkim, spf, etc. It also provides a backstop if my homelab goes down as messages buffer to s3. I pay a few cents per 1k messages, which effectively means zero.
I’ve actually been having a great time with simple-nixos-mailserver.
Running with a dedicated ipv4 at a highly reputable hoster, to my knowledge, I haven’t landed in a spam folder yet!
