It took me a while to learn that:

Reverse proxy= your page lives in your basement but only your DNS knows. From outside everyone goes to “my page is cool.com”

VPN= LAN but in WAN…go to Starfucks and you can still get your files from your basement’s NAS

I’m sure they got other meanings, but this frame helped me a bit. Hide your IP!

I second this. I didn’t understand that until…you know, like you install the latest python or something and then your website is proof! Gone. Dockerization gives it a little bit of stability.

Probably Joplin is the easiest to use. Looks like OneNote but it’s different in many ways.

Even without all this DNS thing, you can always reach your own IP from outside. The issue becomes a security issue. You will need to route your PC’s specific Navidrome port. You can use any port you like, but you’ll need it exposed thru. So that opens your system up for attacks from outside. With the cloudflare thing you can safely access your computer from outside without opening ports.

However you can sort of do this too by adding a couple more pod apps and using a dynamic DNS service. Portainer or cockpit, Pihole, and Ngnix Proxy Manager.

With portainer or cockpit you can organize the pods so they start-up automatically for example. Using your router, split your network into two separate ones … One for yourself and another for your exposed stuff. Then use the pihole to protect them. Next set-up Ngnix proxy to route to different ports. If you get to my music.com, then it will route the name to a port. Without DNS you can also just route from your outside IP to a local host name. For example 56.45.35.76:657/music could route to NABODROME the local host name or simply to 192.168.7.12. there’s a ton of tutorials on how to set these up on YouTube so go have fun. You might choose not to get into all this because it’s a little complex. But you could, like many of us, really like it, and then you enjoy a little freedom.

Navidrome server. Use podman. Buy a Fully qualified Internet address first, then go to cloudflare and proxy your IP to the new. Address. Finally in android install Ultrasonic or Subsonic and go to your server.

You don’t need to have a Fully qualified Internet address. But I like it better than having to remember 55.655.67.533. but the IP address still works fine. The thing about the cloudflare proxy is that it never reveals your IP. So in case someone might be snooping around, they gotta get past cloudflare first.

You’re right. I was just trying something different. My thinking was…hmm I don’t need a full SMTP IMAP system, Thunderbird can do that. So I searched and found a dockerized Thunderbird. But it turns out to be an idiotic implementation. Why would I install a full OS system to VNC into it to use an app inside of it. But maybe that’s easier for some people than to try and come up with a better way to send and receive authenticated emails?

I just posted this latest email about a traffic violation apparently. It’s just a scam. A fantastic scam too.

But then I don’t get all the previous mail forwarded. I have to go get zip files and such.

I’m going to try using round cube. If it can go into my own SMTP and IMAP it should be able to go into Google’s. But how do I archive/retrieve emails so they live only on my server after extraction from Google. I want to keep IMAP but not share my IMAP folders with Google.

This was the biggest let down ever this weekend!

I think I’m going to set up my mx record and get docker mail server setup. It’s not very clear what I can actually do. Like I don’t need an alias. Mostly what I want is to send and receive emails without Gmail in the middle asking for money and scaring the shit out of me with deleting emails, archiving, loosing fidelity, whatever they do. I can come up with 15gigs of free space on my server a bizillion times over, I don’t need that heartache in my life. This sort of blackmail should be totally illegal. I consider my self a savvy person but damn, this is hard. Now imagine my mom or my wife or even my kids. It’s fucked that we can’t escape the G grip easily now that everything revolves around email authentication. It’s a tax on everything… banking, joining a forum, keeping pictures from your phone hacked up. Everything! Gmail has got to go.

Here’s a good example of why I’m getting out of Gmail:

https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/encrypted-email-service-ctemplar-announces-closure

Since the government already has their sights on breaking them up, it would be a good idea to GTFO way before they implode:

This sounds like what I want. Did you make it work or are you still working on your PhD dissertation to qualify for email server setup training like me? 😕

I’ve found some interesting options here, but everyone wants to own your data. Just put it all in our servers, c’mon! It’s free or low price, we’re you centric and not as centric…

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/migration-away-from-gmail-to-another-free-service-with-imap/15297/2

Sure. But I want my stuff in my basement server and not in their basement server 😭.

Looks good but it’s basically another place for my emails to be be stuck at for decades. Maybe I’ll look at the way they route email.

It’s an easy fix, if I and everyone else can’t setup our own servers safely, then why use email at all? Just stop using email and let Gmail add a few thousand more hoops…portggf, sspf, dkjg, Chddth, Chat-GPT. Whatever they want so it is super super “safe”. The rest of us, are we stupid? What about this message? How come this is easy? Setup my own instance and bam I can talk to other people with very little spam I literally have to work to get any attention at all on the fediverse. Why isn’t there a file/text sending app for the fediverse yet? Or maybe there’s one and I just haven’t seen it yet?

I hear you. However I’m a practical person. I understand that spam has made it difficult for everyone to use email. How can I put this. Basically I got a ton of emails trapped in Google servers. I like the idea that someone proposed of using paperless since I already use that. But also I guess email is worthless so I shouldn’t keep trying? Maybe you’re right. It’s time for email to not be used. Any suggestions for what I should use instead of email which are a few clicks and done?

In the end, I want to have my emails self hosted from my house. Meaning that I can go to my local computers or my phone locally or remotely to the mailu interface, I can send and receive emails using my user1@mysite.com email and none of that email ends up on a Gmail or protonmail server stuck there forever. I can’t download all my Gmail to Thunderbird on my computer because then my phone would not have access to it. So to me that just means that I need to host the email server at home, but how to safely access it is the ideal solution.

Yeah, currently I am running a few dockers. Photoprism, cloud key for my network, house inventory app, house scan app and a couple of other things. I’m using some tiny think centres and a larger one for the photoprism. The most demanding part of photoprism is the indexing stuff. That’s really where I think I could use dual processors.

In addition to that, I do blender rendering for optical systems and FEA using PrePoMax which uses calcilulix. I think I could do modeling work on my desktop and then set up the loud machine in the garage to run refer jobs or FEA solving jobs. My desktop is an AMD Ryzen 5 5600 I think, it’s not top of the line. It looks like the server I picked might have about the same amount of computing power?? Plus some extra. As is, the servers chug along but photoprism seems to reboot the computer every month or so, and I think it’s either crashing from peak use or maybe Ubuntu is auto updating and the computer is not set up to restart after power cycling.

I noticed the server hardware has really good networking and I want to take advantage of that running all my little services around.

Yeah not required. It will basically act as a heater and then my central heater will just work less.

I have an instance that runs half stably on an old PC. I will upgrade to an old server and then move to immich.