Jul

Pop is download only (and optionally delete on server when downloaded), IMAP is sync so read states, moves, deletes, etc., will sync to the server and between all clients.

But both exist still, just most email providers want you to leave your email on their servers so they can charge you for storage, scan it for advertising, etc., and most people want the state to sync across devices, so a lot of places just don’t implement it anymore and just allow either web-only or IMAP-only (usually paid since they don’t get to show you ads).

And yes you can set up a local software to download email from another server offering POP or IMAP and then either use a client application or self hosted web application to view them. This is not too common so it might be harder to find instructions, but it’s doable.

Which part are you concerned with. The biggest issue with email servers is trust. Many companies will refuse to connect to your SMTP server to send you emails or reject your emails your SMTP server is sending to them if you aren’t on a whitelist or if your IP address has been used for spamming in the past and it’s on a black list. The easiest way to get around this is to subscribe to an SMTP proxy service.

The other issue you may find will happen no matter if you selfhost or not. When using a custom domain, some servers have whitelists of domains in addition to IP addresses and if you aren’t on it they will silently reject emails you send or that they were supposed to send to you. I have a couple of places (health care and financial companies mostly) who do this, so I have to use gmail, which ironically means the email is less secure, especially with Google’s recent changes in policy about reading your emails.

Definitely agree on that part, if only the tools themselves weren’t so unethically created and a continual heavy drain on so many aspects of society I might consider using them for small, tedious tasks outside of work where I’m forced to.

Also, they don’t do much to aid my work and actively slow me down quite often since I don’t think in words, so I have to translate my logic into a conversational essay for the AI to understand and then debug code someone else wrote. It’s so much faster for me to translate my logic into programming languages directly which follow logic, not conversational norms. I see how it’s useful for people who can’t think in logical steps, though.

I think I tried that one when I was evaluating a few. I really like that Keycloak makes it really easy to configure custom workflows inside the web UI. I have custom user/group permissions flows and some other more complex logic for assigning specific permissions for specific apps built into workflows over the years. So I definitely don’t want to switch, but yeah, I’d like a read-only LDAP system that just generates LDAP responses using the existing user data basically like Authentik does. But Authentik was too unstable for my tastes when I tried it for a few months so I ended up back on Keycloak. It was down way more often than it was working and that was without any real major customizing. Plus it wasn’t well documented with examples for more complex setups.

I like Keycloak. It is very configurable, easy to set up, has lots of available examples of configs out there, and has been the most stable for me of any I’ve tried.

I only wish it had mock-LDAP so I could use it with things that don’t do OIDC like OpnSense. Keycloak can use an LDAP server as a source and sync with it, but I don’t want want to run a separate LDAP server for one or two systems. They’re too much trouble to setup and manage.

I have one from Evatek, (Taiwanese company) that was less expensive but has lasted for my home PC and work laptop dock, but it seems they are no longer making anything, not sure if they finally died off or what, but even the photo on the Amazon page of the device I have shows different branding (Greathtek) though the particular one I have is out of stock. Not sure if Greathtek, which seems to be a Chinese company, bought their KVM product business or what but seems that’s all they make and the company seems to be deeply connected with Amazon somehow. So I’m definitely not convinced the quality will have transfered over.

I’ve been getting exe’s and such since I’ve been using the tech for a decade or more, though it does seem to be more common lately. I only wish sonarr would have an option to automatically blacklist and search. But at least now it does have an option to fail the download before even attempting to import it.

Even ignoring all of the functional issues with LLMs/“AI” related to their design to never admit to not knowing and preferring to make stuff up instead (hallucinate), I have an ethical qualms about the way they are trained. Two primary issues are that they aggressively scrape data from sources that explicitly do not consent to sharing their work and the data centers which have made hardware impossibly expensive for everyone but them and are so impactful to our underfunded electrical grids that they cause brown outs that keep people from heating their homes among other things, cause major spikes that cause house fires and destroy home appliances, and create an excuse to generate power using the worst polluting generators that we had finally gotten shut down to slow climate change (personally I’m tired of the wildfires and extreme storms from climate change).

So, I personally consider it extremely unethical to use the technology for that and several other reasons which are hard to touch on exhaustively in a post like this.

Pay for the unbranded version, or set it up and replace the image with whatever you want. It’s open source and is trivial just to replace the image. I see it with different images all the time on other sites. Name and other branding is a little more work to replace, but can be done and that’s what the paid version provides.

Sure, it’s no change for self hosters currently, but it’s one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I’ve been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven’t hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I’d love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I’ve thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don’t have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS’s.