Email and XMPP

today i spent about 4 hours attempting to set up mail server on my VPS.

first i was trying to set it up using stalwart an “aio solution” to email and webDAW/etc. seemingly simple setup turned into struggle with figuring out how to access it, binding it to localhost, yet being able to access the web config through browser after that, figuring out how to put it behind nginx and finally giving up after being frustrated with the docs.

my domains are bought through namecheap so mistakenly i thought that simply by going to the DNS tab and adding an A record to mail. subdomain i would be able to simply point the subdomain to my VPS and get emails running in little over half hour.

i turns out that mail servers have their own DNS records… the whole email technology is probably older then my grandma, it was originally designed with the username@host where host was an actual domain and sending email was literally just a service that sent the textfile into another user’s ~ directory…

i was reading through an outdated tutorial which was for ubuntu for version with older version 2.3 of dovecot (as opposed to the Debian 13 version of dovecot - 2.4) so i also had to read the migration guide with this i was able to slowly walk my way through how to set up postfix and then struggle with figuring out how to make the systemd service restart without exiting with error code because of wrong config params. when i tried to consult the magical “““artificial intelligence””” (read text prediction machine) i was given the same outdated config advice like on the tutorial website. after a lot of struggle with dovecot and postfix i also tried to install postfixadmin…… critical mistake… so anyways after installing newer php and it needing more php packages (why isn’t a php unicode normalization library installed by default?) i had got it working… only to be unable to set up the rest.. so i deleted all the configs and uninstalled all the packages…

doesn’t it sometimes feel hilarious how much useless things humans sometimes do?
why is it the case that we need to use ancient technology that was created in 1930s and is annoying and confusing to set up, impossible to easily proxy, you can’t simply use cerbot with nginx on all ports,….

another thing i had found out is that most webuis try to bind to port 443 by default forcing the user to change the port and make the program bind only to localhost… only to then find out that mail server and webui is a completely different thing….

most people use gmail or outlook or whatever. so it doesn’t matter, nobody cares.. it works so why boher with anything else, also the whole thing is free and fast and has a nice UI. so why boher using anything else.. and so it comes as premium - get premium email hosting now for only 4 dollars a month… for every month, forever.. to look proffesional to your customers etc. if you don’t manage your own server you don’t care about 4 dollars additional expenses and so the few people that know this ancient magic of emails can make either slop code that is expected to be run in a massive, cpu eating, container or an obscure, confusing, 20 step set up……… or you could just pay $50 to a guy on fiver…..
you ever just feel a sense of bitter throughout your whole self?

prosody - the superior xmpp server - needs about 5-10 commands in total to set up, of which most are completely self-explaining. almost every xmpp client has encryption by default, federation is simple and doesn’t need more setup, you need a single DNS A record to use a custom domain.

email also is the reason why most sites don’t have a simple to subscribe to RSS. (because automated spam mailing list senders exist)

just like my futile and miserably long attempt to set up email this text has no satisfying end.

death to email.