Guillotine Jones, Flâneur
Okay brilliant and accomplished Mastodonians and Fediversians, it;'s time I consult the hive mind about self-hosting.
I've started to read up on this topic, but I haven't seen a clear answer to THIS question yet:
If I self-host from a desktop computer, must I keep it on all the time, or can I turn it off when I'm doing other things.
Specifically, will incoming emails get lost if they can't be delivered in a timely fashion?
My thanks again to all you wonderful souls.
#SelfHosting #FediverseHiveMInd
Apr 1 at 7:41pmWeb
Show thread-dsr- (not a dog)22h ago

@Guillotine_Jones

An email server which can't reach the only legal destination for a message can hold on and attempt redelivery.

In practice, GMail is likely to declare you don't exist at all, and anyone else will try again in a few minutes and then in a few hours.

You can amend this by designating some other cooperative mail server as a secondary MX for your domain; that mail server will accept delivery and try to deliver to your mail server later on.

It's a nice service to exchange with friends.

Show threadGuillotine Jones, Flâneur22h ago
@dashdsrdash
Thank you for a very intriguing response, --dsr=.
Your very helpful reply deserves careful scrutiny and sounds like it might provide a solution.
Show threadWill Pettersson22h ago
@Guillotine_Jones in the old days, email servers sometimes did retry for days, but these days timeouts are limited to minutes, so you'd probably lose emails. See RFC5321 at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#page-66
RFC 5321: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

This document is a specification of the basic protocol for Internet electronic mail transport. It consolidates, updates, and clarifies several previous documents, making all or parts of most of them obsolete. It covers the SMTP extension mechanisms and best practices for the contemporary Internet, but does not provide details about particular extensions. Although SMTP was designed as a mail transport and delivery protocol, this specification also contains information that is important to its use as a "mail submission" protocol for "split-UA" (User Agent) mail reading systems and mobile environments. [STANDARDS-TRACK]

IETF Datatracker
Show threadGuillotine Jones, Flâneur22h ago
@w_pettersson
Thank YOU, Will Pettersson!
So, absent some solution of which I am not yet aware, my suspicion is that this plan of mine will put me in danger, Will Petterson.
(I see a response below (above?) from @dashdsrdash that may offer a solution.)
Show threadbazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵22h ago
@Guillotine_Jones yeah I wouldn't advise on it unfortunately! maybe it's better to hire a VPS (albeit more expensive)
Show threadcircus_maximus22h ago

@Guillotine_Jones When it come to emails, remote servers delivering mails to your might get picky. On/off for a mailserver is nothing I'd suggest even though SMTP can cope wit unreliable connections.

Starting with the basics can give you a glimpse what you have to keep in mind, for example hosting your own tandoor server (just a guess from my side, I dont use it). From there on arise questions about connectivty (local only, vpn, remote HTTPS access), where and how to host.You might touch... 1/2

Show threadcircus_maximus22h ago

@Guillotine_Jones 2/2 a varying amount of these buzzwords. Some of them will solve problems you have never thought of, and some may solve problems you'll never have 😉

When you're about to expose things to the internet you should have some basic knowledge about what you're doing otherwise in the worst case your data or even your network may get compromised

Show threadG̸u̸a̸l̸t̸i̸e̸r̸o̸21h ago

@Guillotine_Jones

Depends on what you are self-hosting and how. if you only have 1 pc to work with, and you self-host lets say a mastodon instance, that should be kept on all the time, as otherwise it would not be connected with the Fediverse, hence missing updates. if you self-host Joplin, a notes taking web app, you could turn it off as it will be only you using it. So, public available instances = always on. Private web apps (notes, photos, music) up to you. Hope this helps 🤝