Post by MinerPost by Ishmel Rowe DentThe same could be said about your inability to use a reliable
email service. Your request is extraordinary, and unreasonable.
You are exuding crank.
Ishmel Rowe Dent, where did you disappear to? Now it's your turn
Please, define the term "reliable email service". Give me a list
of "reliable email service". Tell me how to use them without
caring about commercial interests of a third party?
Grant, you are welcome to assist Ishmel's.
A list of "reliable email service" --> (1) run your own MTA server.
Mail servers are free. You have numerous open-source options to choose
from. You can run it on a cheap VPS, a Bitcoin compute instance, or a
old computer in your basement. My first email server was set up 25 years
ago on a aged Dell tower that my employer tossed out when the new
servers came in. It cost me nothing. I had zero experience administering
mail and DNS yet I managed to have it set up in a few hours.
Today I run my own MTA on my own rented server. I manage my own DNS and
MX records there so I know it will be reliable. The server costs less
than $20.00 USD per year. Each domain name costs from 9.99 to 16.00 per
year. That's cheap. It hasn't had a hiccup in the last eighteen months
or so.
Your objection of "commercial interests of a third party" is out of
place here--it's non-sequitur. One must pay for an Internet connection
and that generally costs much more than a mail agent installed on a
cheap VPS. Even if you access through a cell phone, the phone bill for
one month is more than a year for a VPS and domain name.
If you think you're getting one over on the man by saving $30, you're
not quite grasping how this all works. There is nothing wrong with
commercial interests providing basic access services for dirt cheap.
Before the Internet was "commercialized" it was a walled garden open
only to the elite and their academic slaves and totally controlled by
government and academia. They've been trying to put the genie back in
the bottle for 30+ years with the panopticon. It's not ever going back.
The panopticon will fail in the end.
When you pay someone for a useful software-as-a-service you are not
merely "caring about commercial interests." You are funding the
maintenance of infrastructure that saves all of us a lot of hassle. But
no one is requiring a paid service to peer with your NNTP node. They're
just requiring an email address where they can be sure to contact you.
I will go on further to say that email is *never* going away. In 100
years email will still be the fundamental contact bridge on public
networks, if we haven't blown ourselves back to the stone age by then.
Email's design, although flawed and subject to improvements, is
fundamentally the right fit for every scope of infrastructure that has
come after. A email address points to a domain, then a user folder on
that domain. This is the fundamental concept of everything as a file
path. What email really is is a virtual filesystem bridge between
domains. My email message to you is a file, that gets copied by me, to
your folder (inbox). This was the case even before the Internet was open
to commercial usage.
If you want free email there's always elude.in, riseup, danwin1210.de,
tildemail, vivaldi, and many others.
You said you already run a INN server, so why not install dovecot or
exim and set up some MX records for your own mailer? Generally you must
install a MTA to install INN anyway, so you're already 2/3 of the way
there. If you use a admin panel like webmin or hestiacp, all the heavy
lifting is done for you in a graphical interface so you never have to
edit bind or server configs by hand.
Over the years I have seen peering discussions of totally anonymous
persons who have successfully gotten peered, even though the other
admins don't know their real identity. If you are concerned about doxing
your identity, use a prepaid credit card to get your VPS and domain
name, and set up your mail server that way. You may use a pseudonym.
Nobody really cares. What they do care about though is toxicity and
pointless accusations that are not even tangential to the issues. If you
show that you are making good faith contribution to the white hat hacker
culture, nobody cares about your real name. But if you are acting shady,
hackles prickle up.
I myself am eventually going to set up a NNTP server using a pseudonym
and I'd wager I won't have any problem getting several admins here to
peer with my node. Once they see my pseudo and my git repos, they'll
know I've been involved in 'the scene' with good intentions and we'll
just move forward.
You came in here with an imperious attitude, with strange expectations.
When this is pointed out, rather than learning from it, you want to
double down. You're not teachable. Everyone needs to be open to
correction--even the most talented hackers make mistakes. The best learn
from those mistakes. The worst mistake is a bad attitude.
--
Ishmel Rowe Dent