Dimly Lit CornersConvince your friends to host their own email server a home and do help them set it up…
Then set up NNCP routes to and from their email server to your own self-hosted email server(s) and any of your mutual friend's self-hosted email servers
Dimly Lit Corners@orsinium I know, they stole email from us claiming to combat spam and somehow there is still spam
==Email==
Maybe I only need to receive email over SMTP.
Otherwise email transfer using NNCP with known-trusted-hosts of friends and family?
Perhaps #FOAF even?
Perhaps as part of NNCPNET?
Maybe (text-only) #USENET also via NNCP?
Edit: bc I just found #NNCP and #NNCPNET and think this could be a solution
==Webdev==
I can use #RubyOnRails as needed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Neale@spacehobo This sent me down a rabbit hole and now I'm all jazzed up about #NNCP.
John Goerzen@karen With #NNCP, we break the tyranny of online with delay-tolerant networking. https://www.complete.org/nncp/ The new #NNCPNET is an email network running atop it -- with bridges to the public Internet. https://salsa.debian.org/jgoerzen/docker-nncpnet-mailnode/-/wikis/home
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NNCP
What is NNCP? NNCP lets you securely send files, or request remote execution, between systems. It uses asynchronous communication, so the source and destination need never be online simultaneously. NNCP can route requests via intermediate devices – other NNCP nodes, USB sticks, tapes, radios, phones, cloud services, whatever – leading to a network that is highly resilient and flexible. NNCP makes it much easier to communicate with devices that lack Internet connectivity, or have poor Internet.
@ireneista Oh interesting! I'd enjoy hearing some about your project.
These days I am mostly working with its successor #NNCP but UUCP still is fun to work with also. Especially over slow radios like #LoRa.
I have a new blog post: "I'm not very popular, thankfully. That makes the Internet fun again."
I muse that not having to care about subscriber counts lets me write about the things that interest me, from non-square DOS VGA text mode pixels in Linux to #NNCP and such. I couldn't do that if I cared about advertisers and subscriber counts and so forth.
Vagrant CascadianSimply configuring #NNCP to only run nncp-* commands as a user seems to work well enough for nodes not running a listening nncp daemon.
For a system running nncp-daemon I am still running as the "nncp" user and so "sudo -u nncp nncp-*" seems to work pretty well.
The second issue I am struggling with #NNCP is permissions...
I need to keep the nncp.hjson configuration file private, as there is secret key material in there...
The README.Debian suggests owning everything by user and group nncp, which makes sense...
But then if I want to use nncp-file as a normal user, I cannot read the configuration, and if I "sudo nncp-file ..." files in /var/spool/nncp end up owned by root and breaking things for the daemon running as nncp.
So, I have been exploring #NNCP lately, and have it kind of sort of working...
But I struggle with a couple things:
How do you support multiple ip addresses from nncp-daemon?
https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/nncp_002ddaemon.html#index-nncp_002ddaemon
Passing the -bind argument multiple times seems to be a last-argument-wins situation. It is unclear if wildcards work, if any. I have both #IPv4 and #IPv6 addresses, as well as multiples of each...
Run the daemon multiple times listening on different ports seems kind of excessive...
@kelbot I'll also call out #UUCP. It was one of the last 2 large-scale asynchronous communication methods we had (the last being email, which still survives in that form). Could talk over anything. #NNCP is a worthy successor and, while it doesn't do modems, it does do #encryption and USB drives.