Can confirm. Back at the beginning of my IT career (mid 1980's), I worked as a temp for a computer manufacturer in their refurb repairs department. In those days, kit was so expensive that everything got repaired if it went wrong, and one of my jobs was repairing keyboards - PC keyboards, and dumb terminal ones - and the first part of the process was stripping and cleaning them. There was a lot more room for crumbs and dust back then, too, and man did they get full. Crumbs, staples, paper clips, hair grips, all sorts. I had literal mould growing in some of them. I remember the ones coming in from Italy were the worst for that for some reason.
cybervegan
joined 1 year ago
Well, it depends what you call spam, how well known your server is (are your email addresses spread far and wide on the web or only known to a couple of people) but a lot of spam is automated and algorithmic, so most servers will be showered with speculative mail addressed to likely mailboxes - which your server still has to process, if only to bounce the message; if you have antispam measures, your server can just drop the connection when it detects a spammy sender (e.g. from an address on a black or greylist). I'm not currently running any mail servers, but a few years back when I did, I used to get about 80% spam incoming.
The list is immense, and I didn't want to clutter my post with all the details. So just listing off things that spring to mind (because I don't know what OP doesn't know):
- Choosing an MTA - sendmail, postfix, exim, etc. and why you might choose one over the others
- Firewall settings
- Software/package management on your chosen distro
- Learning about DNS:
- Host it - yourself via BIND
- Or via a DNS service provider
- DNS record types
- Domains
- Subdomains
- A records/CNAMEs
- MX records
- Mail authority records - SPF's
- Mail encryption records - DKIM
- Spam filtering, anti-virus
- Learning how to configure your MTA, which requires learning:
- the configuration file language your MTA uses
- what all the options mean and what they do
- what the bare minimum options are to get up and running
- how to make sure your configuration is secure and won't be exploitable by bad actors
- how mail really gets delivered
- how to setup secure smtp
- how to set up SPFs
- troubleshooting why GMAIL or Microsoft won't accept your mail
- troubleshooting why GMAIL or Microsoft have stopped accepting your mail
- dealing with blacklists/greylists when someone sends too many messages, or something that "looks too spammy"
- Mail hosting pitfalls
- Being an open relay
- Rate limiting
- Reputation management
- Vulnerabilities that let a hacker take over your server
- Resource management - disk, memory, processes, queues, etc.
- Downtime when you need to do updates
- Downtime if you change your DNS configuration
I've definitely missed some stuff, and each of those things requires knowing other stuff too, so you can see that it's really a pretty deep subject. This is precisely why not many people self-host email themselves these days - the big guys have made it harder and harder to do so, in the name of eradicating spam, which they themselves are the biggest vectors for.
I can assure you it's far from easy to get PIP, as I'm going through the process at the moment. It's degrading and stressful (which is the thing I've been told to avoid) and seems entirely arbitrary. The application process is opaque and assessment is not performed by medical professionals. If someone IS getting PIP, they have jumped through MASSIVE hoops to do so. If you think they're "cheating" then I challenge you to try to get it yourself. You really seem to have no idea.
I hate your reductive "if they'd just" rhetoric, whether directed at drug use or other "simple to solve" difficulties that are, in practice, far from simple to solve. You see an outward symptom as the root cause, and you also fallaciously assume that even if that IS the root cause, that it's easy to solve. And before you assume that I'm one of those people "doing drugs all the time", I'm not.
I started working in 1985, and I've worked right up to July last year, when I got ill. Prior to that, I seldom had time off sick - I had less than two weeks off in the past decade.
I guess I'm the heretic here - I'm currently using Cinnamon DE, after recently switching from MATE, which I've used almost exclusively for about 13 years. I always preferred Gnome (even v1) to KDE, but used both in the early 2000's, but eventually settled on Gnome2 by about 2005, because it was what Ubuntu used, and that was the distro I was using back then. Later, when all the main Linux distros switched to Gnome3, about 2013, it wrecked my workflow - it simply wasn't possible to do the things I needed to do - though I tried for a couple of months. Mainly things like lack of usable support for multiple monitors, full-screen-first app behaviour, rearranged key-bindings, etc. just made it impossible to work efficiently. I tried most of the commonly supported DEs - LXDE, XFCE, LXQT, plain X-Window(!) and even an early version of Cinnamon, but eventually settled on MATE when it became supported by Debian. I felt at home with it, and stuck with it for the longest of any of them - mainly because it fits my workflow, even through its evolution through different work roles and personal projects. I wasn't really looking for a new DE, but last year, I refurbished a load of old laptops to give away on Freecycle/Freegle, initially putting Debian + MATE on the early ones. I saw a discussion about Linux Mint, and how it had matured into a really beginner-friendly system, and decided to try it out. I'm by no means scared of doing the technical work to get things running (I was doing tarball installs back in the mid 1990s) but I do appreciate convenience, and Mint was amazingly smooth.
I'd installed Ubuntu for my kids and friends over the years, and still hated the way Gnome3 works, even though it has evolved and some of my original gripes were now alleviated, so as Mint is based on Ubuntu, I was not expecting much. I was totally shocked - it was basically easier than Windoze 10 (which I was adminning for my day job) - printers and scanners, something that have long been annoying to support - worked instantly, and the Cinnamon DE was a revelation - smooth and friendly, and works well with how I like to use a DE. It runs well on old hardware - though 4GB seems to be the hard, workable minimum, and people seem to really like it.
I'd suggest you start with a simple static web server if you're looking for a good beginner project. Use something like Nginx, and just set it up on your local network at first, then work out how to harden it, and open it up to the real internet. There's a lot less to learn for this usage case, and it's less likely to get you into trouble.
I say that, because, after reading through the thread, it seems you are hoping to find an (educational) use for an old computer. I did Linux and Unix admin professionally for 15 years, for some famous brands. I would NOT recommend setting up a mail server as a first project - it's complex in ways you will never expect, and will require learning skills and knowledge that are very specific and you literally can't "start small and build up" because a lot of the things you don't know yet will get you into big trouble. Essentially, it's not too hard to set up the server software, and your hardware is certainly capable of running this task, but making it safe and secure IS hard these days - especially with all the encryption and anti-spam setups you have to learn how to do.
Listening to "Down in a Hole" by Alice in Chains whilst reading this... seems to fit. Thanks for this. Food for thought.
Yep. Currently working through Autistic Burnout, and one of my symptoms is Dissociation. Whenever I'm slightly stressed or concentrate hard on something, it kicks in. My head feels a bit "spinny", but I'm not dizzy; I feel a bit "high", but without the pleasant buzz of weed; when I move around, I kind of feel like a floating balloon on a string being pulled round by a toddler. My interoception (internal sense) is terrible at the moment, so I don't get body maintenance signals like need to pee or drink, until I'm almost desperate, and I feel emotionally numb - I mostly seem to only "feel" strong negative emotions, positive ones if felt at all are pretty distant. I also get visual snow - like TV static in my vision - and a "laggy" feeling, which is often independent of, but somehow connected with the dissociation, which feels like living in a 3D game with too low a frame rate - my perception of my movement becomes stuttered, almost like there is a strobe light on, and it feels like I'm moving through treacle. It's a bundle of fun.
Edit: I'd also intended to say, but I got distracted by my cat asking for food, that I hope you feel better soon. I'm sorry you are having to live through this. I find for me, it takes a few days to a week to wear off after I've been stressed - it seems to peak a day or so later, and then peter out over a number of days, as long as I avoid stress. I hope you can avoid your trigger.
It didn't quite work like that. They used to arrive boxed in batches. The keyboards were worth about £100 back then - so would be worth a lot more in today's money - and they were looked after with care whilst in transit. It was the end users (in offices) that put the gunk there.