As protests spread across France over the police killing of a 17-year-old, its government is seeking more control.
This is why there is more imperative than ever to break away from corporate social media and start using decentralized methods that make it much harder for authoritarian governments to control. If all you use are Facebook, Twitter, Threads, and so on and so forth, it’s easy as stealing candy from a baby to demand that data and level of access. Corporations rarely if ever go to bat for their users, preferring instead to selling them out and giving up their users’ data. Imagine the impossibility of block hundreds and thousands of small, independent social media servers. This is why I want email to de-federate. I want people to stop using Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook.com, et al. Corporations single-handedly broke the internet from what it was designed to be. The whole idea behind it is so that no one entity can exert such unchecked power over all of us.
The internet is getting exciting again and we are watching the power shift back into the hands of the person. This will work against the French Government’s wishes.
Buy your own domain and hosting (~$10 for a domain name and generally $20–60 a year for hosting depending on your needs), then just set up your own email server. Most hosting services should have a couple of email platforms available for you to choose from somewhere in the interface, but there are open-source ones too, like Postfix or Dovecot.
There are plenty of really well written articles out there for a simple google search. If you’re looking for a good one in particular, there’s blog.obtusenet.com which details how to build a secure email server with OpenBSD. However, your problem won’t be with being able to receive mail but send it such that it won’t go to others’ junk email folders. Even if you take every precaution like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, all it takes is some asshole using a server with an IP address on the same subnet and some email providers will just send everything being sent from the subnet to spam. It’s just not worth it anymore to be your own email provider. This a point of contention with me because internet services are supposed to be decentralized and there is entirely too much power given to the two largest email providing entities, Microsoft and Google. But that’s a different discussion altogether.
