Nextcloud, Qbittorrent, Truenas and loads of other svcs take optional email credentials for sending alerts and other features (eg. password recovery for nextcloud).
What email providers do people usually use to make this process simple to set up? For example, Microsoft doesn’t allow basic auth anymore so it’s supposedly not possible to use via most of these setups, and some other services seem like they have a low inbox size (does this matter?)
Email is my biggest frustration in self-hosting. So many services are dependent on it for reasons no one seems to be able to explain. It costs money to run it. And just the experience of email is atrocious. I don’t understand why we haven’t moved on from it. We have browser notifications, we have app notifications (both via big tech and NTFY), we have a thousand other chat platforms you can communicate through. It just boggles my mind that we haven’t moved away from this archaic technology.
None of the alternatives are as standardized as plain old email. You can use whatever you like to read them, you don’t have to rely on a single company like Meta with WhatsApp for communication, it’s easy to use, pretty damn reliable and fault resistant and just ticks all the boxes you’ll ever need for a simple message delivery.
Personally I would absolutely hate if software started to offer notifications only on slack or signal or whatever. Just let me have my email and I can then read it with a browser in library, on my cellphone, on my desktop and laptop and on pretty much every other internet connected device on the planet. And if I want, I can pass that trough to teams, sms, all the messaging platforms and even straight to my printer should I need to. With other message delivery options that’s often either pretty difficult or straight up impossible.
Decentralization is not a concept that is reserved for SMTP
No one suggested such a thing. I suggested several other alternatives that aren’t reliant on any particular company or service, and are easier to run and manage without requiring approval from your ISP or whatever else.
With other options you wouldn’t need to because they already provide the features you’re looking for in those apps.
What other than email provides that? Browser notifications generally don’t work on mobile. Most of the common instant messengers rely on a single instance running the thing if you’re not suggesting sending messages via IRC or XMPP (or matrix or…) which have their own problems. App notifications require that you have the thing which app is running to be available and online and they more often that not require some spesific device. Also even if you had linux desktop “app” it requires that the software is running.
Also I have not met an ISP which would block sending email via gmail/amazon/protonmail/whoever. Sure, my current ISP blocks tcp/25 to the world by default, but you can request to open that too if you really want to and ports 587 and 465 are open, so you can work around that if you don’t want a smarthost for some reason.
Which other protocol allows notifications at the same time on all the mobile devices, all the workstations and allow easy way to send the very same message to arbitary amount of recipients to all of their devices? I had email on a palm pilot device at 2001 or so, over mobile data with IRDA and you can read email even with Commodore 64 if you really want to (well, to be more spesific, use C=64 as an terminal for *nix server to access email, I think there’s no actual IMAP/POP client for it). There’s just no way for any other modern service to even try to compete with versatility with email.
And then there’s the more sopisthicated approaches like pushing email trough however complex procmail/perl/python/whatever scripting you like where you can develop quite literally whatever you can imagine. Set up a old fire alarm bell, hook it up to your home automation, process incoming emails and if it’s severe enough turn the bell on. Sure, at least a some of that is possible via instant messengers too, but with email I can be pretty sure that if I write a script today for it it’ll still run quite happily for the next 10-15 years.
Please do tell me which of the modern messaging alternatives offer all of that.
Matrix? For one?
…of course they do?
Among others. Email has much bigger problems.
I have no idea what any of that means…
Which makes no difference when self-hosting…
See above.
I…don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. You want to argue that email is superior because it’s old? You can run a Mastodon server on a Commodore as well.
Yes? There are a hundred ways.
…why wouldn’t you just send the signal directly to the server?
That checks out. You conveniently skipped the part where I requested a single messaging solution which works with either modern android/ios devices or with anything you’ll find in your dad’s(or grandads I guess) drawer, can manage multiple recipients, escalations to sms/home automation bells, works reliably even if the uplink goes down for few hours and so on.
And no, you very much can not run mastodon server on a Commodore 64.
But you seem like a young and enthustiatic individual. I was one “a few” years ago. Keep it going, but that arrogant attitude won’t get you anywhere. Email has been a thing since the 1970s and there’s a reason why it’s still going strong. Things like XMPP has been around for a good while and there’s a reason why they’re not even close of overtaking email as a primary communication technology around.
You’ll live and learn. My guess is that when you reach my age, email is still working just fine and majority of the hot stuff which is around right now has faded to the history.
I didn’t skip anything. The solutions I listed support all of that, with the possible exception of running on old shit which…why is that even remotely relevant?
You absolutely can. There’s an entire community dedicated to running Mastodon servers on old hardware.
Is it ignorant old farts refusing to embrace new technology?
Because it came around after email and all the old farts were too committed to it to learn something new? Is it because tech oligarchs learned from their lessons and embraced, extended, exploited, and abandoned open standards? What is the reason? You tell me.
It doesn’t work “just fine”, it’s fucking awful. Outside of trying to host it, just using it is a nightmare. Trying to find any information is a nightmare because there’s no common communication thread, and the emails are chock full of unnecessary bloat, and everyone has a fucking signature that’s a mile long and full of giant images. You can’t send videos. There’s a bunch of tracking features built into it. It’s insecure. Like, the list goes on…
Ok. Send me the link of disk image of that. I have C64 laying around with 1541 disk drive. I’ll set up a public mastodon instance running on a C64 with a webcam stream of the setup.
I don’t know where to find that information. I’ve just seen it running.
Because it’s universal, it works, it’s multi-platform, device agnostic and it’s simple to use user side.
Nothing else available really fits that criteria.
The closest in todays age is probally discord or teams, but neither of which are decentralized. XMPP could work for it, but nobody really uses it anymore and to be honest the standard is ugly as hell to implement.
Browser Notifications are ineffective and have a high probability of failing or not being seen, they are more meant for real-time notices not historical notices not to mention locked to that browser.
App notifications would be amazing for things with apps, but not everyone wants to be forced into using their mobile device for everything, and it would again only be available from said app(unless you do use something like NTFY), which would generally be locked down to a device
Email sucks admin side, but there’s a reason its used.
This is also ignoring the multi-use case that email allows for such as authentication as well, so if its already being stored for accounts, might as well use it for notifications
I already listed a handful of other platforms that check all those same things without being a pain in the ass to host, being sucky to use, or requiring approval from your ISP.
Uglier than email? Nah.
Yes, NTFY is another example I already gave.
No it’s not.
It shouldn’t be used for accounts. That was my entire point. I host a dozen services and half of them no one else can use because the software mandates email verification, which I can’t use because my ISP doesn’t think I should be allowed to for some reason.
Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.
And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.
It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.
Okay so we’re just stuck with email permanently, forever, even when there are a hundred other objectively superior alternatives? No one wants to be the one to push that needle forward?
Are browser notifications not universal?
I rather have an email than a browser notification, email is more passive I can check it when I want to and it’ll be there, browser depending on which machine I’m on is going to get wiped when I close it
hard agree, I hate browser notifications with a hard passion, I would never see them if they swapped to that.
It only gets wiped if you use a shitty iPhone
I use Firefox focus so it wipes every thing when I close it
So…use a different browser?
How do you send a browser notification if the browser is closed?
I don’t know how to answer that. That’s just how they work.
I don’t have much issue with email as a technology. It does what it needs to do, and does it well. The client side software is what hasn’t budged in years - Search barely works, files and attachments are cumbersome, and spam is still rampant.
It would be much cheaper and easier if users weren’t centralised under a few big providers that prefer to bar any and all access to said users if you’re self hosting, making it almost mandatory to use a private service.
The issue is that my ISP blocks it. And so any service that requires it is inherently broken.
The solution to spam is to require invitations.