Another Small Step For Maddy
Another giant leap away from Gmail.
Today's been a busy day for my email. I've been using maddy as my self-hosted email server option for some time now, but up until the present it's only really been able to *send* email, not receive them. Today I fixed that.
- BIG OL' DANGER WARNING:* All communication with my maddy servers is done over a VPN, so I've neglected to set up TLS certs and strict access controls for my maddy endpoints. If you are using my configs then be mindful that all communication, including your username and passwords, is probably being sent in plaintext over the wire, and probably anyone can hit your endpoints.
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There's two maddy servers involved in my setup. The primary one exists on my home server. Anything which is sending or receiving emails is interacting with that server specifically. I've tried very hard to keep the bulk of the logic contained to just that server, because that's the one I have the most control over. This includes authentication, access controls, retry logic, and storage.
The other server exists on a Vultr VPS I rent, and essentially only exists because I can't send or receive mail publicly on my residential internet. So my homeserver forwards all outgoing mail to Vultr, which then forwards it to its destination, and vultr forwards all incoming mail to my homeserver, which stores it on disk.
You can view the full (redacted) config files here:
As a final step, I've set up forwarding on my GMail account so that all incoming (non-spam) emails will get copied to my maddy inbox as well. I'm going to start playing around with doing all my email via maddy using NeoMutt as client.
There's still a long way to go before I can ditch GMail. For one, I'm not super comfortable having all these endpoints without TLS. Secondly, not all of the devices I use are actually on my VPN, so I can't really access my inbox except in specific circumstances. But it's progress!
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Published 2022-06-03
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