so, rather than having a scattering of dynamic dns names across the internet, i’ve decided to bring it all under one umbrella.

Domain dooda

this results in me needing to buy a domain, i went to namecheap, by god it does what it says on the tin.

interestingly the longer you buy the domain for, the more expensive per year it gets. I guess that’s to keep you coming back to their website… increasing the chances you’ll buy something else?

Email

i’ve done it!! sort of. More started the process..

I purchased an account from protonmail, in order to get a custom domain. It turns out that they take bitcoin, this could be a useful way out of that disaster.

All my gmail gets forwarded to proton mail and archived.. i still collect it to my pop archive from gmail.

now people can email me at my domain, and i still catch any attempts to reach me at the previous one. Most people i will update with the new email address, some i will log back into gmail, until i no longer need to.

Proton Mail Bridge

I fucking hate this, but it is a nessacerry evil. proton mail sell 0 knowledge encrypted email, so it has to be correctly processed on my computer in order to send.

it provides IMAP and SMTP access on your machine so your mail client doesn’t need to know shit about encryption, i can see the benifits. Especially for non-technical users.

so how do i get my servers to send via proton mail?

Butchering Proton Mail security

ssh port forwarding, i set up a local port on each server, then forward that to my bridge server and redirect it to the proton mail smtp.

loloops generic smtp capabilities that the bridge is not aware is coming froma different machine..

i figured this would be better than exposing smtp to the ip of the bridge-server and letting any of my machines hammer it, because it feels more in tune with what proton mail are doing.

It does feel wrong relying on a “desktop” application for server role tasks.. but that was the only choice given to me

soo, yeah.