Oh no! I'm sad to see that you've run into troubles :(.
There are other "fully put together" solutions like mailinabox and mailcow, that could be worth looking into for you. I haven't used them personally, but you might find them worth looking into. I'd never heard of mailu before, actually.
Totally understand the desire to just move to a hosted solution after running into these problems, but even if you do that I think you should keep running a mail server in the back of your mind for the future --- you've already learned a lot about it I'm sure, and maybe with a bit more experience you'll be ready to tackle it again :).
I don't actually use any of the fully assembled solutions like mailinabox, and I wonder if in the future it might be a good idea to try configuring everything manually. You already have some familiarity with how mail works at this point, and having more control over the setup and how everything fits together might actually work out for you. Personally I'm running an OpenSMTPD + Dovecot mailserver and having a great time. I'd recommend it.
They usually get it sorted out pretty well, but their response times can be a little slow. It’s potentially not a huge deal for you, and overall they’ve been okay… this is sort of understandable because they’re in New Zealand and seem to want to make sure their support staff are paid well (though they were bought by a larger company recently, so I'm not sure if this still holds, seems like it did as of 2019, though):
This makes them seem like a cool company, and I'd like to support them... But despite that I do feel a little disappointed paying more for a worse service, and I think they really need to invest in providing interfaces for some of the more advanced DNS settings, particularly if their customer support is going to be limited by their own admission.
They also have some blog posts about customer service that give me some weird vibes...
Definitely in support of their customer service team in this example, and don't want them to be treated poorly or sworn at or anything... But it's a little weird to put this on blast like this and I think it'd be a better look to just leave it at "these are the things that would help us help you, we need to make sure accounts are secure so we can't just ignore passwords, etc etc"
And it's also a little weird that they have this post complaining about some web-hosts poor interface and customer service too:
Neither of these are particularly bad, but I guess it makes me a bit disappointed that I've run into similar problems with them, and I'm not sure they're doing enough to address things on their end.
I don't think I'd tell anybody not to use them because they have been good for the most part, but they're not as fully featured as other registrars in my experience, and they're more expensive.
It’s pretty common to be able to use your own nameservers. The only registrar that doesn’t allow this afaik is cloudflare. I’m sure there’s probably others that don’t allow this, but most that I have seen seem to allow you to use your own nameservers.
Why do you say you can only have 2 nameservers? I’m sure not all registrars / TLDs will support it, but you can certainly have more than that. I’ve personally had 5 before, but I’m pretty sure you can have even more.
I believe Hurricane Electric allows you to do zone transfers to their nameservers, so I think in theory you can use their nameservers as additional backups. The SOA records will match too because of this, but even if you did something crazy like manage RRs on different nameserver providers without zone transfers I don’t think this would be a problem (well, aside from it getting out of sync unless you’re really careful). The SOA records are mostly used for zone transfers afaik and resolvers won’t really care about them, so even if they don’t match everything should work, no?
I was wondering if somebody was going to mention the he nameservers :). I couldn’t figure out how to get them working, but it seems like a good option! I want to figure out if I can use them as backup nameservers in addition to my own at some point…
I use them right now, but I’ve been disappointed lately and I’m considering moving away. They’re more expensive than other options and you have to contact customer service for some things, but their response times are pretty slow. E.g., they don’t have an interface to add glue records, so you have to ask them to do it… when I did this it took them a couple days to get back to me, and they forgot to add the IPv6 records too. My other domains are registered elsewhere (for cheaper) and they just had an interface to do this and it happened instantly. I keep running into problems like this with iwantmyname and it’s been kind of frustrating. I had problems with their name servers dying for a bit recently too… I was happy with them for years, but they’ve caused enough problems for me lately that I’m wondering why I’m paying extra for them.
Both Valve and Epic are private companies. I still trust Valve over Epic, but I think technically Tim Sweeney has pretty much full control over Epic as well (for better or for worse).
I’ve been running nsd and it’s great. So sick of using web interfaces to manage DNS records. I think you need a bit of extra magic for dynamic dns with nsd, though.
If you’re at the point where you’re hosting your own server / VPS with a static public ip, though, you might be better off setting up a VPN like wireguard to connect to your local servers, and if you want things exposed to the public internet you can always proxy over the wireguard connection on the VPS. Then you wouldn’t need dynamic DNS at all, and you can limit the exposure of your services to the internet if you so choose.
For sure, though I would not be entirely surprised if the class of problems we care about on a daily basis changes if it ever becomes commercially viable. But currently people mostly care about breaking cryptography which… boo.
That’s not really something that’s on the horizon at all. There’s some experimental quantum computing stuff, but it’s not really practical for anything yet (and certainly not in a personal computer!) It’s also likely not going to be better at the stuff we use normal CPUs for. Eventually they might be useful for certain classes of problems, but probably in more of a coprocessor like capacity (kind of like a side unit like a GPU that’s good at certain tasks). Obviously it’s unknown what the future holds, but I don’t think quantum computing is going to replace silicon any time soon.
That all makes a lot of sense. If I’m reading you right it sounds like you do make a profit, but you’re making much less than minimum wage? Or has it been not profitable at all and a loss in that sense? You at least mentioned that new authors go in expecting it to be a total loss, which makes it sound like it could be sensible to put the writing online (basically free self-publishing), at least if the point is just to have people read it, and you’ll make a loss from a more properly published thing anyway (although it sounds like your biggest costs are editing / audiobooks / covers which maybe you consider an important part of the work in the first place). That said I feel like the internet has changed quite a lot and people don’t really follow specific creators and their websites so much anymore.
FWIW there is a free version on their website. It’s worth looking into. It doesn’t have the fancy steam graphics and interface which made the game much more accessible to people, but it’s an option if you want to see what it’s all about!
I'm not an Android dev, but at first glance it looks like all this does is try to allocate all of the free memory in the system, and walks through the pages and uses rand() to fill in all of the bytes. Technically it's possible for the pages returned by malloc to contain old data, but only if it was allocated by your process in the first place (maybe that's not the case on Android?)... So I guess the idea is that if Molly itself is compromised and an attacker is able to allocate memory in the Molly process they could conceivably get an old page from memory and that page might contain secrets from the Molly app itself... But at that point, surely you're fucked anyway, and the attacker can presumably read all of the currently allocated memory which is certainly far more of a security concern anyway? I just don't think it's worth the cycles.
Often times when people complain about this there is some misconfiguration somewhere, which is admittedly hard to notice a lot of the time. One big gotcha with DKIM, for instance, is that TXT records have a limited size in DNS, so if you have a large key you likely cannot fit it within a single TXT record (an RSA 2048 key is too big, unfortunately). In theory you can split the key in DNS, but I'm not sure if every mail server will handle this correctly. Anyway, people will make an RSA 2048 key (or larger) and try to stuff it into a single TXT record and they might not notice that it doesn't fit (e.g., their DNS provider's interface may truncate the record silently). So, it's good to confirm after the fact that the records are good and working (there's a number of free services that will do that, e.g., https://www.learndmarc.com/).
The other thing that's a bigger deal than I think it should be is rDNS. The rDNS on the mail server really needs to be the same as the MX record or certain spam detectors flip out. If your MX record is mail.example.com, it seems like the spam detectors really want the rDNS to be mail.example.com and not example.com, for instance. You'll see some advice online that suggests that the rDNS record just has to exist and doesn't have to match exactly, but this has not been my experience.
Beyond that I have also registered for Outlook's SNDS and Google's Postmaster services, and I've also added myself to the whitelist here: dnswl.org/. I'm not sure how much of difference that makes, but it's something else you can try.
Oh no! I'm sad to see that you've run into troubles :(.
There are other "fully put together" solutions like mailinabox and mailcow, that could be worth looking into for you. I haven't used them personally, but you might find them worth looking into. I'd never heard of mailu before, actually.
Totally understand the desire to just move to a hosted solution after running into these problems, but even if you do that I think you should keep running a mail server in the back of your mind for the future --- you've already learned a lot about it I'm sure, and maybe with a bit more experience you'll be ready to tackle it again :).
I don't actually use any of the fully assembled solutions like mailinabox, and I wonder if in the future it might be a good idea to try configuring everything manually. You already have some familiarity with how mail works at this point, and having more control over the setup and how everything fits together might actually work out for you. Personally I'm running an OpenSMTPD + Dovecot mailserver and having a great time. I'd recommend it.
https://poolp.org/posts/2019-09-14/setting-up-a-mail-server-with-opensmtpd-dovecot-and-rspamd/
Either way, I think you should keep using a custom domain for e-mail because then you have options in the future :).