I’m so mad. I bought and installed the thing in my wall before it was owned by Google, then they bought it and shut it down while it’s still working fine. It would cost them almost nothing to leave it working. It just does t collect quite as much creepy stalking information as the newer models, so now it has to go in a trash can.
I have learned from this experience to literally never buy anything that relies on an external server ever again in my lifetime.
Google is getting as bad as Microsoft with unusable old hardware. I mean fine stop supporting the older hardware but release the code/api to allow them to still function with people who know how to do it. Or at the very least allow the old hardware to be unlocked for third party firmware.
for no particular reason last night, I pulled my 2009 windows 7 laptop out of the grave and fired it on, and after I got through the wave of Smart errors and CMOS messages, When I opened up Chrome, not connected to internet, the cached version of google was still using its late 2000s early 2010s appearance. and it made me very sad.
Being an ad-driven company annihilated old google. Instead of developing precise and efficient tools (like they used to) all effort goes to convincing users to care about random crap, because the crapmaker is paying up.
As a programmer who enjoys a beautiful solution to a hard problem, this irks me every time I’m forced to interface with google.
Fuck google. They don’t even index shit anymore. They index nothing. It’s not a search engine, it’s an ad engine. Everyone is stuck with Gmail now.
Resist! Host your own email!
As someone who hosts a lot of things: Fuck email hosting. Just get your own domain for a few bucks a year, and use an established provider to host it.
Honestly - it’s not impossible. Not as simple as spinning up a webserver, but definitely doable. I should probably write something up at some point.
I can help.
—- START —-
Hello! Are you thinking about hosting your own email? Do you enjoy having a life? Do you want to deal with spf and dkim records? Having to add more storage space? Backing up said emails following the 3-2-1 guide? Finding out your residential ISP blocks port 25?
I didn’t think so, and neither do I. Go pay to have someone else host your email.
—- END —-
Edit:
So what you’re telling me is that…
I have to use DNS for email to work?
And if I ever need more storage, I have to plug in a disk?
And If I want to keep my data I actually have to back it up somehow?
And I need to forward a port or if that’s not possible directly though my ISP, use another service that offers it?
Sorry, none of that is much of a revelation.
Sarcasm aside, while hosting your own email is not as easy as a lot of people make it out to be, it is definitely not as hard as you are describing either.
If anything the hardest part is not even in your list, it would probably be getting enough people to mark your domain as not spam to get yourself lifted out of automated spam filtering systems.
Yea, I should definitely write something up so bollocks like this does not proliferate.
Please do.
Be sure to also put how much time people can realistically expect to spend on each step (including offsite backup and recovery).
Been running my own server for 15 years. I need to put about 20 hours maintenance a year in for updates. I have the whole thing automated as a helm chart using PVCs with cert-manager for auto-renewal and the node just runs k3s as a single node.
That’s a lot of extra layers, but the layer of seperation between the host and the services makes it very easy to automate all the pain away.
