It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.

Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.

This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.

Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.

If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.

Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.

Now what can we do about it?

  • EduMerco
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    32 years ago

    We need dead simple turn key solutions for self hosted services.

    Does anyone have experience with FreedomBox? (https://freedombox.org/)

    It looks very interesting…

    • @southerntofu
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      12 years ago

      There’s plenty of solutions like that. Freedombox appears to be stable and well-maintained but doesn’t have a lot of “apps”. Libreserver is more experimental but has strong security features and even an experimental mesh mode (local nodes disconnected from Internet). Yunohost is very popular and has plenty of packages.

      There’s also more “pro” solutions for collective hosts. AlternC is a distro used by many hosting coops, ISPConfig is also quite widespread.