think tank forum

hi, everyone!

what service do you use for email, calendar, and contacts?

i'm currently on google, but i'd like to migrate off, so i'm evaluating my options.

in the past, i would be willing to run my own dns/smtp/imap services. but i don't have the time to ensure the quality of service i require. i'd probably be fine with something like rackspace email hosting. i want to use an efficient web interface as well as standards-compliant apps. any suggestions?

lotus notes.

(truly horrible. i know. it's not up to me - work. i just felt like answering the question.)

nestor, are any EMBA programs respectable? I was looking at Brinkster for email hosting, but then I saw that their CEO wasted his time on an EMBA from Grand Canyon U., a private school in Phoenix, AZ. Oh well, they look like a Microsoft shop, anyway.

I've started using fastmail about 2 months ago. Seems to work pretty well... It's $4/month IIRC, and I also get (static) webhosting, which is useful.

My calendar is Vim ... I don't have to many appointments ...

> in the past, i would be willing to run my own dns/smtp/imap services. but i don't have the time to
> ensure the quality of service i require

Yeah, that was also my problem, while it was certainly educational at first, after a while it just got bothersome. There are more interesting things to do in life than upgrading postfix or mucking about with SpamAssassin.

> nestor, are any EMBA programs respectable?

the vast majority are not, no. cash grab from schools in my view (as is the majority of business education out there)

email is with the same people as my domain and dns service: gandi.net.

calendar and contacts are on a radicale server on a 5 usd/month debian vps. cal- and carddav support are spotty and I think you still need caldav-sync and carddav-sync on android to make them work. works fine with the built-in support on iOS though. it's easy enough to set up if you have a working knowledge of linux. backup is as simple as copying a couple of directories.

I can't say much re: web interfaces. I edit all of my contacts and calendar stuff on my phone and do mutt or my phone for email. gandi has a roundcube web interface for email too, which I've used maybe four times.

jabber is on the same vps. I'm almost google-free!

oh, cool! i've been looking for something like radicale.

here's what i'm thinking now: three service levels.

mission critical -- i wouldn't host these myself
dns
email (smtp, imap, spam, virus, web interface)
critical backups (web, svn, contacts, calendar)

critical -- i would host these myself remotely
web (including backend dbms)
svn (accessed through https)
contacts
calendar

non-critical -- i would host these myself at home
torrent
archival backup

i don't really like radicale's philosophy on laziness.

i'm liking the look of baikal better, so far.

I kind of like that it assumes clients are perfect. anyway, the developer was pretty responsive about fixing support for apple devices. php and db requirements for baikal :/. I'll stick with radicale for now.

that's almost exactly how I have my hosting split up right now!

what would you all think of a shell script that automatically sets up prosody (xmpp) and radicale (dav) (and maybe postfix and dovecot in the future, or baikal as an alternative to radicale, but that would require apache and php...) with a postgresql authentication backend and a simple web interface for adding users and setting passwords and restarting/configuring services and such? ideally this would work on bsd/debian/rhel, installing binary packages and doing the database configuration and deploying a locked down but functional config for everything. alternately I was thinking of making all management function cli-based, so you could just do something like script.sh xmpp restart or script.sh user add $username or whatever over ssh. this would save me from having to make a web interface, which I hate doing.

I'd also like to handle the certificate setup in the script, or at least walk the user through it asking them for a path to the key and cert files so they can be copied to the appropriate locations.

on second thought I might tailor this to a particular OS, probably debian for its wide availability from VPS services. otherwise I'm going to be wrestling with slightly different version of all the software (I already considered compiling from source which introduces its own annoyances). I guess I'd like the script to also do a basic iptables setup, only allowing incoming connections on the tls ports for the enabled services.

on a larger scale something like puppet might make sense for this but I want it to be easy for a user to just drop on their VPS of choice and run through a setup process to get up and running. little stuff like email notifications of configuration file changes (and some kind of version control or backup) might be nice too.

why do you want to make it? for yourself to use on multiple servers, or for the public to use?

i don't have any interest in xmpp. i might run radicale/baikal at some point. but i'd probably like to set it up by hand just to see how it works and where it lives and such.

both. why no interest in xmpp?

i don't really chat much, and i don't know who uses xmpp.

I hear you. I talk to maybe four people regularly on it. it's nice for otr. would be better if there was a decent iphone client so I could use it instead of text messaging.

I've made a bit of progress on scripting this setup on debian 7. I'm centralizing authentication in a postgresql database with blowfish-hashed passwords. I made an auth module for the prosody xmpp server so far, and am working on getting something similar working for radicale in python. I'm thinking of making a simple web interface in web.py for people to request usernames and for an admin user to approve them and manage passwords and such. maybe I'll tackle email after all this is working.

the issue I'm wrestling with right now is what web server to use. I'd like to avoid apache and try something lighter, but I think apache would make moot writing a custom auth scheme for radicale (I could just use http auth with a sql backend) and probably be a more secure/well-tested setup anyway. hrm.

> i don't really chat much, and i don't know who uses xmpp.

It would appear that Google Chat (Or Talk? Or Hangouts? Whatever it's called now) dropped XMPP support and switched to some proprietary piece of shit. I now have to create a Google account just for one or two chat sessions I need to have with a customer.

The `Download hangouts for your computer' links just redirect me to the Chrome download site. Who wouldn't want to use Chrome? right? Pretentious fucks. Google is the new Microsoft.

tell me about it. once you "upgrade" your account to hangouts I think it shuts off s2s xmpp for you.

... and Big SaaS (and to a lesser degree, PaaS) is even scarier than Big Software run in-house.

i need to distance myself from joker.com's email forwarding service quickly. they apparently delay mail significantly sometimes. i should really get off of joker.com dns service, too.

i'm thinking about pobox.com for forwarding service.

luckily pretty much and cloud dns provider offers dyn-dns type features. that is, a rest api.