Postmaster

Postmaster

Hello from aron@petau.net!

Background

Emails are a wondrous thing and I spend the last weeks digging a bit deeper in how they actually work. Some people consider them the last domain of the decentralized dream the internet once had and that is now popping up again with federation and peer-to-peer networks as quite popular buzzwords.

We often forget that email is already a federated system and that it is likely the most important one we have. It is the only way to communicate with people that do not use the same service as you do. It has open standards and is not controlled by a single entity. Going without emails is unimaginable in today’s world, yet most providers are the familiar few from the silicon valley. And really, who wants their entire decentralized, federated, peer-to-peer network to be controlled by a schmuck from the silicon valley? Mails used to be more than that and they can still be. Arguably, the world of messanging has gotten quite complex since emails popped up and there are more anti-spam AI tools that I would care to count. But the core of it is still the same and it is still a federated system. Yet, also with Emails, Capitalism has held many victories, and today many emails that are sent from a provider that does not belong to the 5 or so big names are likely to be marked as spam. This is a problem that is not easily solved, but it is a problem that is worth solving.

Another issue with emails is security, as it is somehow collectively agreed upon that emails are a valid way to communicate business informations, while Whatsapp and Signal are not. These, at least when talking about messaging services with end-to-end encryption, are likely to be way more secure than emails.

The story

So it came to pass, that I, as the only one in the family interested in operating it, “inherited” the family domain petau.net. All of our emails run through this service, that was previously managed by a web developer that was not interested in the domjobain anymore.

With lots of really secure Mail Providers like Protonmail or Tutanota, I went on a research spree, as to how I would like to manage my own service. Soon noticing that secure emails virtually always come with a price or with lacking interoperability with clients like Thunderbird or Outlook, I decided to go for migadu, a swiss provider that offers a good balance between security and usability. They also offer a student tier, which is a big plus.

While self-hosting seems like a great idea from a privacy perspective, it is also quite risky for a service that is usually the only way for any service to recover your password or your online identity. Migadu it was then, and in the last three months of basically set it and forget it, i am proud to at least have a decently granular control over my emails and can consciously reflect on the server location of The skeleton service service that enables virtually my entire online existence.

I certainly crave more open protocols in my life and am also findable on Mastodon, a microblogging network around the ActivityPub Protocol.