System Administration
Week 8, HTTPS & TLS
After discussing HTTP in the previous week and seeing how we used STARTTLS in the context of #SMTP, we are now quickly reviewing HTTPS, TLS, and the WebPKI. While we don't have a video segment for this, here are slides, including this handy diagram illustrating the CSR process:
System Administration
Week 8, The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
Shared by a student of mine: Email vs Capitalism, or, Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a talk given by Dylan Beattie at NDC Oslo 2023. Covers a lot of our materials and adds some additional context.
System Administration
Week 8, The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Part III
In this video, we look at ways to combat Spam. In the process, we learn about email headers, the Sender Policy Framework (#SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (#DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (#DMARC). #SMTP doesn't seem quite so simple any more...
System Administration
Week 8, The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Part II
In this video, we observe the incoming mail on our MTA, look at how STARTTLS can help protect information in transit, how MTA-STS can help defeat a MitM performing a STARTTLS-stripping attack, and how DANE can be used to verify the authenticity of the mail server's certificate.
Didn't one of y'all write an ebook on hosting your own mail server? Or have a blog series about it or something? #hostyourown #smtp
Hey #Sysadmin|s of the fediverse, I want to ask you for some recommendation, I want to get rid of my old and molden mailsystem.
I just need Mail for a couple accounts and domains for myself and some friends. Would be nice to have a WebGUI, but is not a must.
System Administration
Week 8, The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
In this video, we begin our discussion of E-Mail by looking at the components of the larger mail system (the Mail User Agent, Mail Transfer Agent, Mail Delivery Agent, Access Agent); we observe the packets involved in a simple #SMTP exchange and track an email from one system to the other, both through the logs and on the wire, before we then learn to speak SMTP via telnet(1).
My self-hosted API #CuckooPost for sending mails without storing SMTP credentials in my projects has got an update.
Thank you @risottobias for your input on the project. I implemented some of your ideas, and now there is a mail log and recipient whitelist in the admin panel.
Find out more about CuckooPost on GitHub, or try it and host it yourself.
Hi there. I'm self hosting my SMTP server for years, and I have 10/10 on https://www.mail-tester.com/
Recently, I've got 2 messages rejected by Apple server (on "@me.com" addresses), and today I've got a SPAM abuse signalement (probably automatic) for those 2 emails! I could send to those same addresses without problem before.
Do other people have had similar problems with Apple SMTP servers recently? What can we do? TIA
I thought I had seen it all when it comes to mail delivery and security issues.
But this morning I was introduced to the fact that there are Exchange admins who will implement a rule that all incoming mail from outside their own organization should be flagged as potentially dangerous and presented to the user with the option to block sender and no option to mark the message or the sender as valid.
Yes, that for every single message.
@silhouette @lil5 Oh, that shite...
Cuz I remember their #MAPI bs and #OWA being the only way to use #Thunderbird if the admins didn't allow IMAP & SMTP using a commercial addon...
What would you use these days to send out emails with auth codes for a small-ish web app? I have no interest in using Sendgrid, Mailgun, etc. I just need something to send out emails from `no-reply@example.com`
I don't even need to accept incoming email.
Despite our efforts (such as those described in https://nxdomain.no/~peter/spammers_believe_in_300k_imaginary_friends.html btw that number rolled past 3 million some time back), *some* #spam will occasionally make it all the way through to an inbox and to be read by a person.
Today I offer a prime sample: https://nxdomain.no/~peter/blogpix/20250227_keelygz@vip.126.com_root@skapet.bsdly.net_Conditioner_etc._Inquiry.txt #spamtraps #cybercrime #mail #email #smtp #scams #greytrapping
Although there are a couple more days in the month, today is a wrap for me on #Fedibruary .
To round out the month I installed #GoToSocial (#mastodon alternative #ActivityPub service) in a test environment and played around.
I'm pretty happy with it! the install was simple (barring a confusing error message or two), #pachli worked with it (once I changed from port 8080 to 443) and it has a nice little admin portal to manage the deployments website.
There are a bunch of settings related to #SMTP and #OIDC which make it attractive as a medium term deployment project when I want to run my own server for reals.
Shout out to #Postfix for being the most solid piece of software that just keeps on ticking. I've been self-hosting my own email for 20 years and I can't think of a single time it gave me trouble.
My ISP has dropped our email address support silently YEARS AGO, without telling us, the clients!
Typical dispicable monopolistic behaviour! I found it through this site which offers certain services that the ISP used to offer
Some services in my homelab can send out emails for different things and obviously require an SMTP server. I still use my old gmail account for sending out emails like this, but it's rather icky.
Has anyone found a good solution for doing the same without Google or similar, like a reliable independent provider to use? (If Proton could be used like this I would be very happy) I don't want to host my own email server for this purpose if at all possible.
Announcing Email-Simplified (and Flask-Email-Simplified), a library for creating and sending email in Python. I blogged about it here: https://davidism.com/email-simplified/
Sets up TLS trust correctly, handles international domains, HTML with inline attachments, converting to/from MIME. Works in plain Python, has an API for integrating with frameworks, and an API for writing new service providers in addition to the built-in SMTP provider. And much more! #python #email #smtp
