As a tech-nerd who has been around the Internet since the early 1980s and doing at least some level of unix system administration since around 1990, I have always believed that the structure of the Internet should be peer-to-peer at least as much as client/server, and because of that, I have insisted on being as self-contained as possible. Until very recently, that included running my own "post office" (mail server)
In the mid 1990s, I established a personal email account at Silicon Beach (lars@silcom.com) where I also had a shell account. When CMC (by then sold off by Rockwell Internal and renamed OsiCom) shut down in 1997, I talked the IT manager into transferring the CMC.COM name to me, and I got a DSL connection and set up a Linux server. Fortunately, I had already gained some experience tinkering with sendmail configuration files, so I could set up a web server and a mail server.
Around 2005 the original owner of CMC.COM asked to get it back for a new business venture, so I changed he domain name for my server to Beagle-Ears.Com at the suggestion of my young daughter.
Among the advantages of running your own mailserver is the ability to run a mailing list, and I have been running a Mailman service since around 2000, primarily to support my UU congregation.
Over the years, I have kept my Linux system running with only minimal software changes. I have bought old desktop towers retired from corporate upgrades in the refurbished marketplace, because these "obsolete" machines were cheap and generally well built. But in 2025, when Microsoft announced that new Windows releases would no longer run on machines built before 2018, I decided that their reasons for doing that were fairly sound, and I should get a newer machine for Linux as well. In the process, I did a fresh install of Fedora Linux (rather than an in-place version upgrade), and discovered that the in-place upgrades had preserved a lot of software that had not been maintained for a number of years, and the replacements were not compatible with the configuration files and data files I had. I had to temporarily give up on my mailing list server, and I gave up on fixing some recurrent problems in my sendmail setup and move to postfix.
Eventually, I gave up on mailman and outsourced my church mailing list to groups.io.
Shortly before this, the old friend in Switzerland who had been running a professional spam filtering service retired, and left me with an unfiltered SMTP server. Over the next several months I realized that I no longer wanted to do my own filtering,leading me to decide to outsource my email server. After some research, I was pointed to Fastmail.
In a further coincidence, the local provider serving my workplace is "de-emphasizing" their mail service. They were reselling Rackspace email. And recently my account there has been hacked TWICE and used to send spam mass mailings.
On Fastmail, every user mailbox is a Fastmail mailbox. Any other domain gets translated into a fastmail box before delivery.
My first action was to set up an account as follows:
For now, I am keeping my DNS at GoDaddy where I have good control over it, rather than handing DNS over to Fastmail. I really need to do that during the time when I might be switching back and forth.
The most important thing to set is
Secondary entries needed to be able to send mail:
Previous _dmarc TXT v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:root@beagle-ears.com
See details here . Suffice it to say that the procedure is somewhat unique. It uses a QR code to install a profile into the settings app, and then you click an "Install" link on that page in the Settings app to create the profile in the Mail app.
Fastmail notes that "Fastmail has an ecellent iOS app, which many of our users prefer to other mail apps."
Aliases for
These blog pages are found at http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/pages/
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