I have an email address for you

Published on 2023-09-08

The email address and the fallback Matrix ID can be found on the about page.

I have a draft lying around forever that never got into a publishable shape. The draft was titled I don’t have an email address for you. It tries to explain why email is broken¹, and that consequently I’ll never provide an email address for readers — if there’s any, so to speak — to reach me. But opinions change over time, especially for fickle-minded individuals like me. After setting up some communication services, including an email server and a Matrix chat home server, I just kind of couldn’t leave them as-is as toys. So, however questionable the decision is, these services are here to stay, to become means of communication to this online identity.

A rationalization for my decision is that email is not so different than other federated (or decentralized) protocols such as Matrix and ActivityPub that have been on the hype lately. These shiny new protocols are just as vulnerable as email to big players entering the scene and following the EEE playbook to undermine healthy federated systems, and such threat already exists as Meta potentially federating with the rest of the world. Thus, because I’m cool with self-hosting Matrix and ActivityPub servers, there’s no excuse for me to not add email to that list as well.

To be clear, I don’t want to hoax you into hosting your own email server. It’s pretty hard to gauge whether or not it’s a good idea to self-host an email server for personal use, and on the other hand it’s trivial to find evidences supporting both sides of the argument on discussion forums. Be aware that big providers (namely Gmail and Outlook) have the almighty power to arbitrary mark my mails as junk (or worse, blacklisting and blackholing whole IP blocks) with no recourse. Be aware that setting up an email server is a major hurdle involving multiple pieces of software and several extra DNS records. And meanwhile, be aware that there are providers like Fastmail and mailbox.org that host email on custom domains for a few bucks per month, which is a nice middle-ground for ownership over digital identities for those who are (rightfully) scared of selfhosting.

How I’m hosting email & Matrix for the moment

To add to the questionableness of the decision, the services are hosted with mox and conduit, both of which are pre-release software. The choice was made, hopefully not out of my stupidity, but rather by these implementations valuing important traits that I highly admire:

1. They aim at consuming low hardware resources. Federated (or decentralized) software has to require low resources, otherwise few people will be hosting them, which leads to dangerous centralization.
2. They are deployable as single executables.
3. They are easily configurable via single text files.

As a bonus, mox printed out detailed instructions to guide me to set up all the necessary DNS records for SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, which made it a pretty painless process without any deep understanding into what these authentication mechanisms are.

I have just started my naïve journey on selfhosting communication services. Wish me luck, and drop me some mails / matrix messages (which make precious opportunities for me to test my services!) if you feel like.