3 Things About Email You Lost Control of (and How to Fix It) - The Sovereign Computing Show (SOV004)
February 12, 2025 • 46 mins
Discover how to regain control over your email in this episode of the Sovereign Computing Show with Jordan Bravo and Stephen DeLorme. They outline the three main points of control we’ve lost in the modern age. Learn about domain separation, alternate email providers, and the power of email aliases to protect your privacy and digital life. Jordan and Stephen provide actionable tips and tools, including how to use SimpleLogin for email aliases, employing different email clients, and even self-hosting your email server.
Show Notes: https://atlbitlab.com/podcast/three-things-about-email-you-lost-control-of-how-to-fix-it
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jordan Bravo (00:00):
Welcome to the Sovereign Computing Show, presented by ATL BitLab.
I'm Jordan Bravo, and this is apodcast where we teach you how to
take back control of your devices.
Sovereign Computing means you own yourtechnology, not the other way around.
Stephen DeLorme (00:18):
This episode is sponsored by ATL BitLab.
ATL BitLab is Atlanta'sfreedom tech hacker space.
We have co working desks,conference rooms, event space,
maker tools, and tons of coffee.
There is a very activecommunity here in the lab.
Every Wednesday night isBitcoin night here in Atlanta.
We also have meetups for cyber security,artificial intelligence, decentralized
(00:38):
identity, product design, and more.
We offer day passes and nomad passesfor people who need to use the lab only
occasionally, as well as membershipsfor people who plan to use the lab
more regularly, such as myself.
One of the best things abouthaving a BitLab membership isn't
the amenities, it's the people.
Surrounding yourself with acommunity helps you learn faster
and helps you build better.
(00:59):
Your creativity becomes amplifiedwhen you work in this space,
that's what I think at least.
If you're interested in becominga member or supporting this space,
please visit us at atlbitlab.
com.
That's A T L B I T L A B dot com.
Alright, on to our show.
Jordan Bravo (01:18):
Welcome to the Sovereign Computing Show.
I'm Jordan Bravo, and I'm heretoday with Stephen DeLorme.
Stephen DeLorme (01:22):
Hey, how's it going?
Jordan Bravo (01:24):
Today, we are going to start off with an article.
For those of you who are watching thevideo, we're going to put it up on screen.
If you're just listening, we'regoing to summarize it here for you.
this article is actuallyfrom 2022, but don't worry.
It's still relevant in 2025.
If you haven't heard thisalready, this is really scary.
(01:47):
What happened was during COVID,there was a man who had a Google
account and he was doing a telehealthconference call with his doctor because
his son, his baby was sick and hisbaby son had a rash in his groin.
And so per the doctor's request, heused his phone to take a picture of
(02:10):
the baby's groin area with the rashand send it to the doctor so the
doctor could evaluate it and prescribemedication or whatever the doctor needs
to do to treat it and diagnose it.
And what happened then was Googleautomatically detected his account
that picture that he took as childsexual abuse material known as CSAM.
(02:35):
It closed his account, his Google account,notified the authorities so that he had
to explain to the police that he was notin fact a child pornographer or using
any kind of child sexual abuse material.
Now, the police.
Google's automated systems clearedhim of any wrongdoing, because he
(02:55):
obviously didn't do anything thatGoogle had thought he did, but Google's
automated systems were so sure of it.
The problem is, even further,was that once the police cleared
him of any wrongdoing, Googlerefused to reinstate his account.
And this guy, unfortunately,had his entire life in Google.
He had his, he had Google Fi ashis internet service provider.
(03:18):
His phone was a Androidphone . He had a Google account.
All of his pictures anddocuments were uploaded to
Google drive and Google photos.
And so when this guy was cut offfrom his Google account permanently
by Google for a problem, a crime ora wrongdoing that he did not in fact
do, it was devastating to his life.
(03:41):
Try to imagine if you were suddenlypermanently locked out of your email,
your photos, your cloud hosting, yourinternet access, and your phone service,
This is going to be a massive problemin your life . Think about how all of
the other services in your life, thevarious dozens or hundreds of websites
(04:04):
and services that you've signed up for.
They all require you to be able to loginto your email in order to authenticate,
whether that's signing in the firstplace or resetting your password.
So this guy while what happened to him wasa tragedy, it could have been a lot less
terrible for him if he didn't have allof his eggs in one basket, so to speak.
(04:30):
He had a single point of failurewhere Google was acting as a All of
these different services for him.
And when they did something thatimpacted him negatively by cutting him
off, it was devastating to his life.
And the extent of the damage was massive.
Stephen, do you have anything thatyou wanted to comment on this article?
Stephen DeLorme (04:52):
Oh, I don't think so.
I think you pretty muchsummarized it pretty well.
A whole other interesting topic forlike maybe some far off episode is like
How you actually combat CSAM and alsoprotect the privacy of good people, right?
But that's like a whole, whole other thingthat we're not even getting into today.
But this guy was falsely accused, clearedof wrongdoing, and lost everything.
(05:15):
Even if it was just one thingjust his family photos or just his
internet access or just his email,that would be just as disruptive.
Jordan Bravo (05:24):
Yes, so we are going to focus on the email part of
it today, but you're right, thisis wider reaching than email.
But as we'll see, emailis a critical service.
I already mentioned a little bithow email is your gateway into
all of your other services becausethat's for better or for worse.
(05:44):
In the modern era, this is just how wesign up for services and authenticate
with them is via our email address.
So if we don't have access toour email address we don't have
access to many other things.
Stephen DeLorme (05:56):
And for some reason, they, everybody thinks that
they've invented the email killerand it just never seems to happen.
I don't know, it's this reallyresilient technology in our lives too.
Yeah, a lot of like business communicationhas moved on to stuff like Slack and
Microsoft teams and certainly socialmedia marketing is like it's a whole
other thing now, but I don't know.
(06:17):
Email marketing is still verymuch alive and it's like a default
notification system for many services.
So it just, it's this veryresilient piece of technology that.
Has not gone away and I don'tsee it going away anytime soon.
Jordan Bravo (06:33):
I agree.
Although I would I approach email ina way that might be different from a
lot of people, but I think it's a goodapproach and I'd like to advocate for it.
So here's my pitch.
Email is good for certain thingsand specifically it is good for
(06:55):
communicating with non humans.
So if we want to sign up for a newservice and they need our email
address and we create a passwordand that's how we're authenticating,
then that's a great use for it.
Another thing might be, likeyou just mentioned, a newsletter
where you're again Signing up for.
Or something, you're putting youremail address in a database, and
(07:16):
then an automated program is sendingyou an email that you can read.
Neither of these cases is youcommunicating to another human
being who's reading it on their end.
Although this is what email originallystarted for, I would argue that there
are much better technologies for that.
We talked about instant messengers in ourlast episode, and I would guess that most
(07:37):
people, when they're talking to theirfriends and family every day, they're
going Are you using instant messengers or,SMS, I put it in that category as well.
But the point is, people don'temail each other for things like,
can you come pick me up at eight?
It's not, it's just not how it works.
Email is asynchronous as they call it.
Now in business, email is still used ata lot of places, but from my experience,
(07:59):
the, even that is going by the wayside.
It's been replaced by Slackand Microsoft Teams and these
kinds of things for good reason.
So I think email has a placein our toolbox of being how
we sign up for services.
In fact, it's crucial there, right?
You can't really get away from it.
But I would argue that you don't wantto give your email address to any
(08:22):
people that are like human beings.
And if somebody does need youremail address use an alias.
And we're going to talk more about thatand how powerful a concept that is.
But essentially, if you have a singleemail address and you use it everywhere,
it is really easy to be hacked.
(08:45):
Scammed, spammed, and alsohave people stalk you.
Like it's, it can lead toa huge invasion of privacy.
So there's a whole bunch of reasonswhy we don't want to do this.
And we're going to go into the detailsof how we can take those steps, be
more self sovereign with our email,protect our privacy, and also in
inoculate ourselves against futuresingle points of failure, like in this
(09:09):
Google article that we talked about.
Stephen DeLorme (09:13):
All right, let's get into it.
So I guess when we think about beingcut off from our accounts being cut off,
we'll just focus on the email part of it.
A lot of people are probably goingto be using something like Gmail.
Remember when it was just like aclever little experiment and it seemed.
(09:35):
Cute in like 2005 or six or whatever itwas that Oh, wow, that Google thing they
also have an email and it seemed prettyadorable and harmless at the time, but now
it's become, I don't know, I don't knowthe statistics, but it must be the number
one used email service in the world.
But I guess the thing is it didn't justbecome the number one used email service
(09:58):
in terms of sending and receiving emails.
And also storing the data itself,but also in terms of your client.
We would have been using a multitudeof different mail clients in the late
nineties and early two thousands, butGmail has become the number one ESP
email service provider and also thenumber one email client itself, because
(10:19):
I think a lot of people are just usingit in the web browser or they're using
it as an app on their phone or something.
Jordan Bravo (10:25):
Agreed.
I don't know the statistics off topof my head, but I get the sense that.
Gmail is the most widely used emailprovider, at least in the United States.
Stephen DeLorme (10:36):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, your mileage may vary overseas.
I feel like it's become not onlythe default for like individuals,
just, I feel like everybody has aGmail, but it's also the default for
businesses, like it's hard to comeacross businesses that don't use it.
If they do, it might be like, I don'tknow, the outlook cloud or something
to that effect, but at least for mostlike smaller, younger businesses that I
(11:00):
find in the U S tend to default to Gmailand G like Gmail business or whatever.
And most just likeindividuals I find use Gmail.
Jordan Bravo (11:11):
Before we started recording, you mentioned there were
three areas or categories in which youcould reduce single point of failure.
Do you mind enumerating those?
Stephen DeLorme (11:23):
Yeah, so yeah we came up with these on the fly, but the, I
think what we came up with was the ideathat, okay, Gmail is being three things.
One that you go to the gmail.
com.
You log into your email there.
So it's actually a client.
You're actually typing up your emails andreading your emails there in your browser.
So that's where your email client is.
(11:44):
It's like the interface throughwhich you send the emails, receive
the emails, all that good stuff.
So Gmail is a client.
That's number one.
Number two, they arethey're a naming system.
If I have Stephen 1 2 3 4 5, com,I don't, and I don't know who that
is, but um, if I have Stephen 12 3 4 5 @ com, they own gmail.
(12:07):
com.
And so by extension, they also ownthat name that's in front of it.
They all, they own all theusernames are with Gmail.
They're temporarily giving itto you as a service, right?
But that they're in on atechnical level, they own that.
So they own the naming system.
That's number two.
Number three, they actually own the dataitself because we're not downloading
emails onto our computers anymore,we're just going to a website and
(12:30):
fetching them from there dynamically.
They actually keep track of all that data.
So it's the email service.
The email naming and the email datathey own all three of those things.
Jordan Bravo (12:45):
I'd like to create a metaphor here and this is, I'm
coming up with this on the fly.
Bear with me if it's rough andmaybe you can expand upon it.
But it would be if you lived in ahome and the homeowners association,
controlled it set out rules for whatyou can and can't do in your home.
It's as if the homeowners,homeowners association also
(13:08):
was the owner of your mortgage.
So that when you pay every month if youdidn't pay, for example, you would be in
default to the homeowners association.
And now let's say that same home, thatsame organization that you that was a
homeowners association and also yourbank, essentially your mortgage provider,
let's say they also provided you your.
(13:29):
Home insurance.
Now, let's say they also ownedyour car and you were making
payments to them for your car.
Now, let's say you also worked for them.
You could see here how if you wereto anger this organization, they
could really destroy your life.
You could suddenly find yourself homeless,jobless, without insurance, carless.
(13:51):
So that seems a little more concretefor people, but I bet most people
when they use Gmail, they don'trealize that Gmail is providing
all of these different pieces.
For convenience, it's understandablewhy they're so popular.
They make it super easy.
But could see how in that metaphor, I'mtorturing a little bit, so forgive me,
(14:13):
but if you were to have your insurancewith one company and your mortgage with
another company, and your homeowner'sassociation was a different company, you
might have a problem with one of them.
But you'd be okay with the others andyou could work out that problem or
maybe get a new provider, maybe you'rehaving a problem with your mortgage
provider and you don't agree withtheir actions or payments or whatever.
(14:35):
You could find a new mortgage provider,maybe you could refinance, get a different
rate and you're not going to risk losingyour car and your health insurance
and your job and all of that stuff.
Stephen DeLorme (14:45):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a good metaphor.
It's yeah, you're it's all alot of eggs in one basket there.
So which maybe one of theseshould we attack first?
If we want to think about systeman email naming system, an email
service and email data itself,which one should we attack first?
Jordan Bravo (15:06):
I say, let's talk about the domain name first, because even if you.
So if you want to still want to useGoogle on the back end, for example, you
can use it with a custom domain name.
And I would argue that's astep in the right direction.
Stephen DeLorme (15:19):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jordan Bravo (15:20):
So some people already know this because maybe they have
their own custom domain name hookedup to Google or they have a business
that where they do that as well.
But if you have a at gmail.
com domain name for your email,there's something that you can,
there's a step you can take that.
That really gives you a lot of, lotmore sovereignty with your email and
(15:40):
that is to have a custom domain name.
So if I am, for example, usingjordan123@gmail.Com and I decide I
want to keep using, I want to make asminimal changes as possible because I'm
busy and I don't have a lot of time.
So what is one step that I can do?
What I can do is I can buy acustom domain name and domain
(16:03):
names are almost never free.
And I'm only putting that almost inthere because I'm sure you could find
some exception to the rule, but let'sjust say domain names are not free.
You have to pay for them.
If you've never bought a websitedomain name before, you have to
register it with the internationalregistration organization.
But in any case, you buy your domainname, you can get them very cheap.
(16:24):
And then you go into your Gmailsettings and you basically
just plug in the right info.
And next thing you know, I canhave, instead of Jordan at gmail.
com, I can have Jordan at bravo.
com or whatever email uh, whateverdomain name I've purchased.
Stephen DeLorme (16:39):
Yeah.
And it gets a littletechnical too, because.
So you go into Gmail, you tell themyou want to use a custom domain.
They're going to give you some stuffthat you're going to go put in.
You're going to go back tothe domain name website.
And uh, you're going to putin some information there.
Like you're going to have to put in the-- copy and paste in like the basically
the domain to Google's mail serversand all their like backup mail servers.
(17:03):
Um, And usually there's a SPFsender protection framework, which
basically signals to the rest ofthe, people, receiving emails from
you that yes, Google's mail serveris authorized to send on my behalf.
There's the DKIM, the DigitalKey Identity Management.
Actually, I'm not sureGoogle supports that or not.
I know other mail clientssupport it or not.
(17:24):
But there's a whole bunch of,different types of metadata
they might ask you to add.
So you'll be tweaking kind of things onboth copied and pasted the appropriate
details into your domain name settingsand into your Google settings, then
it, should basically work and then youdon't really have to mess with it again.
And I think just to make clear thepoint of why this is important is that.
(17:48):
In the future, if you need to leavegmail, maybe this is because of some,
catastrophic situation where you'vebeen falsely accused of something and
kicked off the platform, or maybe it'sjust a situation where you just want
to use a different service provider.
For whatever reason, youget to maintain that name.
So you don't have to belike emailing everybody.
(18:09):
Hey, I changed my emails.
Use this email in the future.
Whatever.
I don't check this old one anymore,having to go update your email
at a thousand different websites.
You can just maintain thesame name at whatever domain.
com.
You have ownership of that name.
You can take it with you, whetheryou're using Gmail or whether
(18:29):
you're using somebody else.
Jordan Bravo (18:31):
And to expand upon that a little more, Let's
say I have jordan at bravo.
com it's, and I'm stillusing Gmail under the hood.
Now let's say Gmail, let's sayGoogle cuts me off from my account.
I can no longer access.
Previous emails that I've received.
I can't sign into Gmail anymore.
(18:53):
However, what I can then do is Icould find a replacement provider,
whether, I won't name them now.
We'll go into that later, but Ifind a replacement email provider.
And then I just go through thatsame process is when I set it up
with Google, with Gmail, I justset it up with this new provider.
And then going forward.
All my email, any email sent tothat domain name or sent to that
(19:14):
email address will still come to me.
And this is great because nowI'm not going to be locked
out of any of my services.
So if I have to reset a password orsomebody needs to send me an email
from that point forward, I'm stillgoing to receive it at my same email
address, but at my new email provider.
Stephen DeLorme (19:31):
Yeah.
And would this be a good placeto maybe segue into aliases?
Jordan Bravo (19:36):
Before we segue into aliases.
I'd like to talk about are thereother email providers that we
Have used that we might recommendor that have a good reputation
Stephen DeLorme (19:49):
Cool.
So this might segways and instead tothe kind of solving the other problem.
So we've solved the email naming problemby getting our own domain name, right?
Now we're gonna solve.
Okay, the actual email service itself, thesending and the receiving of the emails.
I'll say for me, it's, I'malways a shill for proton.
(20:11):
Because I personally usetheir products and like them.
I think we talked, I think we talkedin another episode about just their
calendar product as well as they'rejust using the contact system, but they
originally started as an email platform.
And I think what the original valueout of proton mail was that their
(20:32):
platform is end to end encrypted.
And so if you're not familiarwith end to end encrypted.
It means that basically meansthat your email data is,
encrypted using your private key.
So Proton doesn't really have away of reading your emails because
they're all encrypted with your key.
It also encrypts it when you'resending it to other people.
So if like Jordan and I send each otheran email our emails are automatically
(20:53):
encrypted with our private keys.
Um,
so even if someone managed tosuccessfully eavesdrop on us,
while the email's in transit,they wouldn't be able to read it.
So I personally like Proton and I'mtrying to think of other services.
I've heard of one called Tutanota,I think, that has a similar kind of
(21:14):
privacy proposition as Protonmail,but I've never personally used them.
So yeah, what about you in terms ofalternate email service providers?
Jordan Bravo (21:24):
I think Proton is great.
I know that they also allow youto use a custom domain name.
With your Proton email, so youcan have any domain name and
under the hood it's ProtonMail.
I use one that's not super well known.
It's called Migadu, M I G A D U dot com.
(Multiple) (21:45):
M A G. M I G
M I G. Wait, hold on.
M A G. M I G. Oh, M I G. D A U.
Jordan Bravo (21:56):
excuse me.
G A M I G A D U dot com.
Yeah.
Stephen DeLorme (22:02):
That's why nobody's heard of them.
Their name is so weird.
Jordan Bravo (22:05):
Yeah, it's a weird name.
I think they're Swiss.
And they might not seem very I don't know.
special at first because they don't haveend to end encryption like Proton for
example, but they are small enough thatthey're not a honeypot for surveillance
and they don't abuse you, googlefor example, if you have a problem
(22:28):
Try calling their customer service.
Good luck.
Like they don't care.
You're one of billions of people.
Migadu has, they're small enoughthat they will respond to customer
service requests and complaints.
They're very reasonably pricedand you can have as many domain
names mapped to it as you want.
So for a price of, Ithink I pay 19 a year.
(22:52):
I can have not only as many emailaddresses as I want, but as many
domain names as I want as well.
And so I've used it for email addressesfor myself, for my businesses that
I've done, for basically everything.
And it only cost me 19 a year.
(23:13):
They do provide a webmail you can login the browser, but their webmail is
bare bones, and I prefer to use itby connecting a client, which, we'll
get into why you might wanna do that.
Stephen DeLorme (23:29):
Man the, it's like they haven't updated this in for those
listening, I'm looking at the page.
It says, can I pay with Bitcoin at all?
And so we do not offer onsite paymentwith Bitcoins and they camel case it.
Interesting.
Jordan Bravo (23:41):
Yeah, it's a very old school way of writing Bitcoin.
Stephen DeLorme (23:44):
That is a really powerful price.
Like it's a very low price.
There's five gigabytes on theplan I'm reading here on the site.
They're almost like giving you likea little like section of an email
server and like you can provisionas many email names as you need
to in your little fiefdom there.
Jordan Bravo (24:03):
That's right.
Stephen DeLorme (24:04):
That's pretty cool.
I remember a long time ago at a,at an old job, we had a email, like
server, where we were renting out and.
was, a little bit difficult andtechnical to manage at times.
And I'm not, this service may be easier,but there was something really incredibly
powerful about just being able to spinup as many emails as you need to, and
(24:24):
once getting into I don't know the newway of doing things where you have to.
Pay for every single user.
Like pretty much everybody hasadopted this like cloud first business
pricing model where you pay like aminimum of 6 per user or whatever.
Ends up stacking up andbeing very prohibitive.
Jordan Bravo (24:45):
Agreed.
So this isn't going to be for everyone,but this is for people who have a
similar approach to email as I do,which is, I'm not using this to send
gigabytes of files, photos, videos,etc. I'm only using email to register
for services and maybe occasionallyarchive receipts and stuff like that.
(25:05):
Oh, mostly text based communications.
Stephen DeLorme (25:09):
That's really cool service.
So these are some alternate serviceproviders that we've looked at here.
Are there any more weshould cover or should we?
Segue into something else.
Jordan Bravo (25:23):
I think we're, we've covered the service providers.
Let's go now to aliases.
Stephen DeLorme (25:29):
Yeah.
And so we've solved our kind of secondproblem there of, being cut off from
the actual sending and the receivingof the email, I think aliases gets
into something that's a little bitmore back on the naming side of things.
(25:51):
The basic problem as I woulddescribe it is that once you own
this name Stephen at whatever domain.
com and you, once this email gets outthere into the world you're just, you're
going to get all kinds of spam, right?
You list your email on a website.
A spider tracks it, like a web spidercrawler picks up your email, starts
(26:12):
adding you to a bunch of lists.
So that becomes a huge problem.
You start getting tons of spam andif you're using Gmail, then maybe
the spam is solved for you, but.
Otherwise, you're just goingto be getting tons of mail.
Once you start filtering outspam, you have to worry about like
false positives, all these things.
So then you also have the idea of likedata breaches of maybe your email is
(26:35):
not published anywhere on the web, butsomebody that you use, like a legitimate
company that you do business with,you've given them your email, so they
have your email recorded so that youcan log in and out of the website, their
website gets hacked, email then getsleaked out onto the dark web or whatever.
So then people still managedto find out about your email.
You have this other kind of threat,which is what if this company that
(26:57):
you're doing business with you thinkslegitimate, they're actually behind
the scenes, just selling your data.
And I think it's a lotmore common than we think.
So they ended up selling your emailand somehow again, your email ends up
either in the hands of like third partymarketers or it ends up in the hands
of, again, some real shady people.
No matter what you end up doing, justby giving anyone your email, you run
(27:21):
the risk of your email getting soldto marketers or criminals or whatever.
And so how do we solve that?
Jordan Bravo (27:29):
And I'd like to ask people to think about.
What could the potential problem bewith giving the same email address
to every single site that you up for?
You are standing in line at arestaurant to order something to go
and they ask for your email address.
You're creating an account onDoorDash et cetera, et cetera.
(27:54):
I would encourage you to think about itand try to come up with it on your own,
but now I'm going to spoil it for you.
What happens is, every single time youdo that it's resting in someone else's
database, someone else's computer.
And companies eventually get hacked.
The bigger the company, the morelikely they are to get hacked.
And when they are hacked, In fact,your email address, if it's, worst
(28:17):
thing that you can have is your firstname and then your last name at gmail.
com.
That one is just so easy for spammersbecause somebody breaches a database,
this is a juicy set of data thatthe hacker has gotten, right?
This will be sold on the dark web.
And now the person who bought thatdata, they have your email address,
(28:38):
they have the site you used.
And then they, and now theyhave your first and last name.
Now they can search the web and they cantry to break in at other websites using
that same email address and same password.
And most people, if they are notusing a password manager to manage
different passwords for them,that same password will likely
work on all of the other sites.
(28:59):
And so this would be coming backto what we originally talked about.
How your email address is your gatewayto the rest of all of your accounts.
would be an example where youmight even have trouble resetting
your account if they were toable to break into your email.
For example, if I wasjordanbravo at gmail.
com and I use that on, let'ssay, and then my password.
(29:24):
Now I've used that same password whenI log into my Gmail account, right?
So now when Netflix's database isbreached, now the hackers have that email
and password and they know it's Gmail.
So now they go to gmail.
com and they log in with JordanBravo and that same password and
boom, now they're into my email.
Now they changed my email passwordto lock me out and now they wreck
(29:47):
absolute havoc on my digital lifebecause they control my email address.
Stephen DeLorme (29:52):
So the whole aliasing system is our solution to this.
And for those just listening, I'mpulling up SimpleLogin's website
up on the screen there, becausethey're a service that I use.
and I'm not sure if there's otheraliasing services we should come up with.
I'm not sure if they like.
(30:14):
Like I remember doing this a longtime ago back when I had, access to a
server where I was like provisioningdifferent usernames and filters and
forwarding addresses like back in theday, this would be, you'd be making like
forwarding addresses on your email server.
Addresses that would automaticallyforward other addresses, right?
But obviously that became a lotharder once we started moving to, like
(30:37):
online cloud hosted email platforms.
So these aliasing systems camearound and do you want to get
into what this exactly does?
Jordan Bravo (30:45):
Yeah.
And.
did use a couple before SimpleLogin andthey're honestly not worth mentioning
because one went out of business andthe other one is not nearly as good.
So SimpleLogin is by farthe best that I've tried.
And what SimpleLogin does isyou have, you create an account
with your real email address.
(31:07):
That's the one where you actually login, and then you, and then SimpleLogin
will, any time you want, it will createan email address for you that points, that
forwards email to your real email address.
So if I'm creating an account onFacebook, I would create, I would sign
(31:30):
into SimpleLogin with my real emailaddress, and then I would say, generate
me an email, and it'll create it.
at alias.
com and if I'm creating an account onNetflix it would create Netflix at alias.
com and it's not goingto literally say alias.
com but it's going to just Put in whateveremail address doesn't matter, right?
(31:52):
It's just filler basically.
But behind the scenes, it'sforwarded to my real email address.
So I log into my email as usual,and I get emails from all of those
different addresses that I've used.
I want to use a differentone for each site, for each
service that I've signed up for.
what's really cool about this is that.
can then toggle on oroff each of those emails.
(32:14):
So let's say I start getting spam fromone of these emails that I've created and
signed up with a site for I can just turnit off with the click of a button and now
I'm no longer getting email from them.
And I know where that spam came from.
I know that this particularsite sold my data.
So maybe I don't want to dobusiness with them in the future.
Stephen DeLorme (32:33):
Yeah, it's, and it sounds complicated, right?
But it's actually pretty easy.
Once you get it set up.
SimpleLogin just has alittle browser extension.
And so any website you go to likehow your password manager will put a
little icon next to any input fieldand offer to fill the password for you.
SimpleLogin will do the samething for any email input field.
(32:53):
It'll give you like a easy optionto just generate a new email.
And like the default ones are the,they're just like these like randomly
generated strings, like these likelong, complicated looking domain names.
But if you have your own custom domain youcan actually use your own custom domain
with SimpleLogin, which is really cool.
Because then like you're getting itbefore about like owning your name on
(33:15):
the internet could just do something likeI could have like Facebook at Stephen.
com and meetup at Stephen, Stephen.
com, all of these different things.
And yeah, I think that the realpowerful thing about this is that if
one of those emails does fall into thewrong hands, I can just cut it off.
I can just turn it off andstop receiving to that email.
(33:38):
So one, I'll know who sold me outand then I'll be able to turn it off
and actually stop the inflow of spam.
Jordan Bravo (33:44):
Yes.
And this is part of the sovereigncomputing mindset of thinking
long term about points of failure.
And so even though we both loveSimpleLogin as a service, and we hope
that the company continues on for theforeseeable future, We want to think,
what if they go out of business someday?
What if they stop existing?
(34:05):
And that's why you would want to useyour custom domain name with them.
So you don't have to usea custom domain name.
If you're getting overwhelmed by allof the different suggestions here
today, you don't have to do that.
You can just go to simplelogin.
io right now and sign up for anaccount for free and just use the
basic defaults out of the box.
But that would be a, what I justillustrated would be an example of.
(34:27):
Being of pulling apart those eggsin one basket and having, not
having a single point of failure.
Stephen DeLorme (34:33):
Yeah.
And they, they're now owned by proton.
It integrates very nicely with protonindividual and like the ProtonMail,
like business suite which is reallynice, but I learned something new that
you are telling me you can actually.
SimpleLogin into your likeoutside password manager.
Jordan Bravo (34:52):
So I use Bitwarden and Bitwarden has great
integration with SimpleLogin.
So when I go to a new website that I,that's asking me to sign up for with an
email and password, for example I clickon my Bitwarden extension in my browser
and it will automatically generate, itwill, it's connected to my SimpleLogin
(35:12):
account and it will automatically generatea unique email address for that website
and then save it in my password manager.
So then my password isautomatically generated.
My email address is automaticallygenerated and it's saved along
with the URL of that website.
Stephen DeLorme (35:30):
Cool.
I was going to look if I could findAPI documentation, but they may
not have it on there, but yeah, sothat is really cool that way you
don't need to be like stuck on theirfront end if you don't want to be.
Yeah, and you could also go like probably,if you're pretty technical, you could
build your own forwarding system, but withthis service built out, it's a no brainer
for me to be using something like this.
Jordan Bravo (35:51):
There is one more thing I'd like to say in SimpleLogin's failure.
Is that.
It's actually open sourceand you can self host it.
Stephen DeLorme (35:58):
You can self host SimpleLogin?
Jordan Bravo (36:00):
Yes, I have not had the time to do that because I've just
been so thrilled with their service.
And the value for the bang for thebuck that you get, I think it's a
great deal, very reasonably priced.
But on my self sovereign to dolist someday, I might try and
self host a SimpleLogin server.
Stephen DeLorme (36:21):
There might be a good way to pivot into kind of solving that
other problem of the email data itself andbeing able to maintain control over that.
I'm going to suggest we startwith the painful hard way and
then move into the easy way maybe.
Jordan Bravo (36:37):
Okay.
And just to contextualize for everybody,we talked about how, if you have your
own, if you separate your domain, youremail address, domain name from your email
provider, then if you were to get cutoff from an email provider, You could,
going forward, still retain access toyour email address by switching providers.
(36:57):
But, that doesn't solve the problem of,if all of my email is on that server,
and now I don't have access to it, Ican't go backwards into the past and
retrieve previously generated emails.
Stephen DeLorme (37:08):
Yeah.
Jordan Bravo (37:09):
What we're going to talk about now would be solving that problem.
Stephen DeLorme (37:13):
Yeah.
And the solution is basicallyself hosting your own email.
If you really don't want to trust there'sthe hard way and then the easy way.
The hard way is selfhosting your own email.
And.
I'm just pulling up here a biton, on Reddit, an article called
why you really don't want toself host your own email server.
And the author goes into a prettylengthy explanation here all the
(37:38):
different stuff you have to go to themain problem they talk about a spam
and just being able to have to manageall the spam filters on your own.
Then you have to worry aboutgetting sent to spam on other
people's machines and all of this.
And so they go into a good bit of detailabout all of the different, steps you have
to go to and through and broad strokes.
But it is a, a painful operation,at least by if the title at the
(38:02):
top of the page indicates anything.
So have you tried this before?
Jordan Bravo (38:06):
I have not tried to self host my own email server yet.
Simply, busy, lack of time.
I would like to try it in the futureso that I can experience it for myself
and see if it's too difficult or not.
This post was three years ago.
Things have, might havegotten a lot easier since.
I've also seen mixed reviews onlineabout self hosting your own email.
(38:28):
So I've actually read this post beforewhen I was researching but I've also
seen the other end of the spectrumwhere people say, it's not that hard.
Here's a, three line script,or here's a program that does
it out of the box for you.
While we're talking about that, weshould mention MailCow is one of
the ones that we talked, we've seen.
And then the other onewould be Mail in a Box.
(38:51):
So if you are interested in self hostingyour own email, Mail in a Box or MailCow,
I think they do a lot of the work for you.
Stephen DeLorme (38:59):
That's good.
I'd be curious to learn about what theirlike spam system is but it looks like
I'm looking on the mail in a box andit's got like a little install scripts.
Wow, installing a DNSserver, DNSSEC signing keys.
Huh.
interesting.
Oh, Roundcube, which is a webclient that you can self host.
Oh, yeah, that's cool.
(39:20):
Looks like it has a lot a lot ofstuff packed into this Mail in a Box.
Jordan Bravo (39:25):
I'd like to throw the question to the audience now.
Have you ever self hosted your own email?
Have you thought about it?
And if so, what were the results?
Please boost in.
And also, if you're interested,let me know if you'd like to hear
about my efforts to self host email.
And if there's enough demand forthat, then I can give it a try and
(39:48):
report back here on my findings.
Stephen DeLorme (39:49):
Yeah, that sounds like awesome.
So yeah, boost in, let us knowyour self hosting email stories.
Jordan Bravo (39:55):
Stephen, how do people boost in if they want to do that?
Stephen DeLorme (39:57):
Oh,
yeah.
So you boost in, you would go to fountain.
fm or any podcasting 2.
0 app, search for ATLBitLab podcast on fountain.
fm. I've got it pulled up on screen foranyone who's watching the video version.
Yeah, fountain.
fm is probably the bestapp to use right now.
So about the hard way.
I think it might be good toget into the the easy way now,
(40:20):
which would really just be like,
Jordan Bravo (40:22):
so if we don't, if we want to make sure we have access to all of
our historical email and we don't havethe time or inclination to self host our
own email server, what are our options?
Stephen DeLorme (40:36):
Get a client, get your own client.
And this kind of goes back towhat we were talking about at the
beginning that, that Gmail becamethe service provider and the client.
The client is, again, thatinterface you actually use to
send, receive, read emails.
And, a long time ago, we, I thinkpeople thought of maybe had a better
idea of these as separate things.
(40:56):
Maybe not everybody, but certainlyif you're a technical, you did these
would be things like, Microsoft Outlookon windows or Apple mail on the Mac
platforms, or it would be maybe, Idon't know, some of some kind of Linux
client, I'm actually not as familiarwith some of older Linux mail clients.
You would have actually used likea mail application on your desktop.
(41:17):
You would have typed in the the,credentials to log into your
mail server, and then you'd bedownloading your emails locally.
And so this would beactually on your computer.
You're like sucking down theemails from the mail server as they
come in and having them locally.
And the, that means that if themail server goes down or you get
cut off from the email serviceprovider or anything like that.
(41:40):
You still have your emails.
They're on your computer.
They're stored there local.
You have like your own local backup.
Jordan Bravo (41:45):
Yeah, exactly.
And you mentioned Apple mail.
And I think that's probably a lotof people might not realize that
they're using Apple mail, but maybethey have Gmail on the back end.
That's a great example of how theclient that's the front end that
you're actually looking at and thebackend server can be decoupled.
In other words, they don'thave to be the same provider.
And so if you are on your phone,your iPhone, and you have Apple mail.
(42:09):
And you'll notice that if you gooffline, maybe you're in airplane
mode or you lose service, you canstill open up your email app, your
Apple Mail app and browse through allthe emails because they're on your
phone, they're on your device locally.
And so if you were to ever permanentlylose access to, let's say Gmail in this
case, You would then be able to exportall of those emails and you'd still
(42:31):
have them that you could save anywhere.
Stephen DeLorme (42:32):
Yeah.
I've got Thunderbird pulled up onscreen for anyone who's just listening.
It's an open source client.
It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
And ooh, it looks like theyhave an Android version as well.
I didn't know that.
So that's an option.
Just if you just want to have thatbackup you can hook up gmail to this.
You can, I believe you canstill hook up proton to it.
(42:53):
They have a cool bridging thingthat allows you that kind of
handles the encryption for youand any pop three or I map.
Those are just like some common protocolsfor checking mail servers for messages.
Like pretty much all of your, majormail service providers will be
able to give you the credentialsto be able to log into your account
using something like Thunderbird.
And so yeah, that's a good way to do it.
(43:14):
Of course, the caveat is you do needto keep track of the disk space.
It will be actually on your computerand we get used to the idea of wow, this
mail provider gave me half a terabyteof storage for free and another half
terabyte for, paying, 5 a month orwhatever, we get a little spoiled by
that, but maybe you actually don't needall your emails stored indefinitely.
(43:36):
Do you really need DoorDashreceipts from four years ago,
like still stored or whatever?
Do you really need thattaking up your space?
Maybe you actually lighten thatdigital footprint a little bit.
And you're really just, storing stuff thatmight be more critical for your business.
Like real like legal documents and,things like that, and maybe you
don't need all of these, just 10year old receipts in your email.
Jordan Bravo (43:56):
Yeah.
Agreed.
I, this is an approach that we canapply to all of our digital life, right?
We can try to, instead of saving andarchiving everything forever, like
you said, our DoorDash receipts, arewe going to need that in a few months
or a few years, like probably not.
So about being thoughtful of, what kindof data trail we want to leave, whether
(44:22):
or not we actually need all this archivaldata stored indefinitely into the future,
and just making decisions about that.
So in other words, going throughand pruning your data from time to
time, or just deleting somethingrather than archiving it as Gmail
encouraged us to do from the beginning.
Stephen DeLorme (44:38):
Yeah.
Jordan Bravo (44:40):
One more thing I would want to say on the topic of email
clients is that this is a recurringtheme on the Sovereign Computing
Show, which is we talked about or wetalked about calendars and contacts,
and we mentioned the open protocols.
And so email is a greatexample of this as well.
Stephen, you mentioned IMAP as somethingthat is spoken by all, almost all
(45:01):
email providers and email clients.
And so that's why you can useThunderbird or Apple Mail or webmails.
These can all speak the sameprotocol and therefore they can
communicate with each other, eventhough they're not the same company.
Stephen DeLorme (45:18):
Open protocols are powerful.
Cool.
Anything else we should hit on?
Jordan Bravo (45:23):
I think we covered it.
That's all for today.
Send us in your boost.
You can do that at fountain.
fm, or you can go to atlbitlab.
com slash podcast.
And you can get show notes andtranscripts and all the good stuff there.
Stephen DeLorme (45:41):
All right it's been real y'all.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Let us know your feedback in theboosts and we'll see you next time.
Jordan Bravo (45:47):
Thanks everyone.
We'll see you next time.
Stephen DeLorme (45:49):
Ending music.
(sound effects) I'm not going toinclude that one in the next edit.
Hey, thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you want to learn more aboutanything that we discussed, you can
look for links in the show notesthat should be in your podcast
player, or you can go to atlbitlab.
(46:10):
com slash podcast.
On a final note, if you foundthis information useful and you
want to help support us, you canalways send us a tip in Bitcoin.
Your support really helps us so that wecan keep bringing you content like this.
All right.
Catch you later.
Welcome to the Sovereign Computing Show, presented by ATL BitLab.
I'm Jordan Bravo, and this is apodcast where we teach you how to
take back control of your devices.
Sovereign Computing means you own yourtechnology, not the other way around.
Stephen DeLorme (00:18):
This episode is sponsored by ATL BitLab.
ATL BitLab is Atlanta'sfreedom tech hacker space.
We have co working desks,conference rooms, event space,
maker tools, and tons of coffee.
There is a very activecommunity here in the lab.
Every Wednesday night isBitcoin night here in Atlanta.
We also have meetups for cyber security,artificial intelligence, decentralized
(00:38):
identity, product design, and more.
We offer day passes and nomad passesfor people who need to use the lab only
occasionally, as well as membershipsfor people who plan to use the lab
more regularly, such as myself.
One of the best things abouthaving a BitLab membership isn't
the amenities, it's the people.
Surrounding yourself with acommunity helps you learn faster
and helps you build better.
(00:59):
Your creativity becomes amplifiedwhen you work in this space,
that's what I think at least.
If you're interested in becominga member or supporting this space,
please visit us at atlbitlab.
com.
That's A T L B I T L A B dot com.
Alright, on to our show.
Jordan Bravo (01:18):
Welcome to the Sovereign Computing Show.
I'm Jordan Bravo, and I'm heretoday with Stephen DeLorme.
Stephen DeLorme (01:22):
Hey, how's it going?
Jordan Bravo (01:24):
Today, we are going to start off with an article.
For those of you who are watching thevideo, we're going to put it up on screen.
If you're just listening, we'regoing to summarize it here for you.
this article is actuallyfrom 2022, but don't worry.
It's still relevant in 2025.
If you haven't heard thisalready, this is really scary.
(01:47):
What happened was during COVID,there was a man who had a Google
account and he was doing a telehealthconference call with his doctor because
his son, his baby was sick and hisbaby son had a rash in his groin.
And so per the doctor's request, heused his phone to take a picture of
(02:10):
the baby's groin area with the rashand send it to the doctor so the
doctor could evaluate it and prescribemedication or whatever the doctor needs
to do to treat it and diagnose it.
And what happened then was Googleautomatically detected his account
that picture that he took as childsexual abuse material known as CSAM.
(02:35):
It closed his account, his Google account,notified the authorities so that he had
to explain to the police that he was notin fact a child pornographer or using
any kind of child sexual abuse material.
Now, the police.
Google's automated systems clearedhim of any wrongdoing, because he
(02:55):
obviously didn't do anything thatGoogle had thought he did, but Google's
automated systems were so sure of it.
The problem is, even further,was that once the police cleared
him of any wrongdoing, Googlerefused to reinstate his account.
And this guy, unfortunately,had his entire life in Google.
He had his, he had Google Fi ashis internet service provider.
(03:18):
His phone was a Androidphone . He had a Google account.
All of his pictures anddocuments were uploaded to
Google drive and Google photos.
And so when this guy was cut offfrom his Google account permanently
by Google for a problem, a crime ora wrongdoing that he did not in fact
do, it was devastating to his life.
(03:41):
Try to imagine if you were suddenlypermanently locked out of your email,
your photos, your cloud hosting, yourinternet access, and your phone service,
This is going to be a massive problemin your life . Think about how all of
the other services in your life, thevarious dozens or hundreds of websites
(04:04):
and services that you've signed up for.
They all require you to be able to loginto your email in order to authenticate,
whether that's signing in the firstplace or resetting your password.
So this guy while what happened to him wasa tragedy, it could have been a lot less
terrible for him if he didn't have allof his eggs in one basket, so to speak.
(04:30):
He had a single point of failurewhere Google was acting as a All of
these different services for him.
And when they did something thatimpacted him negatively by cutting him
off, it was devastating to his life.
And the extent of the damage was massive.
Stephen, do you have anything thatyou wanted to comment on this article?
Stephen DeLorme (04:52):
Oh, I don't think so.
I think you pretty muchsummarized it pretty well.
A whole other interesting topic forlike maybe some far off episode is like
How you actually combat CSAM and alsoprotect the privacy of good people, right?
But that's like a whole, whole other thingthat we're not even getting into today.
But this guy was falsely accused, clearedof wrongdoing, and lost everything.
(05:15):
Even if it was just one thingjust his family photos or just his
internet access or just his email,that would be just as disruptive.
Jordan Bravo (05:24):
Yes, so we are going to focus on the email part of
it today, but you're right, thisis wider reaching than email.
But as we'll see, emailis a critical service.
I already mentioned a little bithow email is your gateway into
all of your other services becausethat's for better or for worse.
(05:44):
In the modern era, this is just how wesign up for services and authenticate
with them is via our email address.
So if we don't have access toour email address we don't have
access to many other things.
Stephen DeLorme (05:56):
And for some reason, they, everybody thinks that
they've invented the email killerand it just never seems to happen.
I don't know, it's this reallyresilient technology in our lives too.
Yeah, a lot of like business communicationhas moved on to stuff like Slack and
Microsoft teams and certainly socialmedia marketing is like it's a whole
other thing now, but I don't know.
(06:17):
Email marketing is still verymuch alive and it's like a default
notification system for many services.
So it just, it's this veryresilient piece of technology that.
Has not gone away and I don'tsee it going away anytime soon.
Jordan Bravo (06:33):
I agree.
Although I would I approach email ina way that might be different from a
lot of people, but I think it's a goodapproach and I'd like to advocate for it.
So here's my pitch.
Email is good for certain thingsand specifically it is good for
(06:55):
communicating with non humans.
So if we want to sign up for a newservice and they need our email
address and we create a passwordand that's how we're authenticating,
then that's a great use for it.
Another thing might be, likeyou just mentioned, a newsletter
where you're again Signing up for.
Or something, you're putting youremail address in a database, and
(07:16):
then an automated program is sendingyou an email that you can read.
Neither of these cases is youcommunicating to another human
being who's reading it on their end.
Although this is what email originallystarted for, I would argue that there
are much better technologies for that.
We talked about instant messengers in ourlast episode, and I would guess that most
(07:37):
people, when they're talking to theirfriends and family every day, they're
going Are you using instant messengers or,SMS, I put it in that category as well.
But the point is, people don'temail each other for things like,
can you come pick me up at eight?
It's not, it's just not how it works.
Email is asynchronous as they call it.
Now in business, email is still used ata lot of places, but from my experience,
(07:59):
the, even that is going by the wayside.
It's been replaced by Slackand Microsoft Teams and these
kinds of things for good reason.
So I think email has a placein our toolbox of being how
we sign up for services.
In fact, it's crucial there, right?
You can't really get away from it.
But I would argue that you don't wantto give your email address to any
(08:22):
people that are like human beings.
And if somebody does need youremail address use an alias.
And we're going to talk more about thatand how powerful a concept that is.
But essentially, if you have a singleemail address and you use it everywhere,
it is really easy to be hacked.
(08:45):
Scammed, spammed, and alsohave people stalk you.
Like it's, it can lead toa huge invasion of privacy.
So there's a whole bunch of reasonswhy we don't want to do this.
And we're going to go into the detailsof how we can take those steps, be
more self sovereign with our email,protect our privacy, and also in
inoculate ourselves against futuresingle points of failure, like in this
(09:09):
Google article that we talked about.
Stephen DeLorme (09:13):
All right, let's get into it.
So I guess when we think about beingcut off from our accounts being cut off,
we'll just focus on the email part of it.
A lot of people are probably goingto be using something like Gmail.
Remember when it was just like aclever little experiment and it seemed.
(09:35):
Cute in like 2005 or six or whatever itwas that Oh, wow, that Google thing they
also have an email and it seemed prettyadorable and harmless at the time, but now
it's become, I don't know, I don't knowthe statistics, but it must be the number
one used email service in the world.
But I guess the thing is it didn't justbecome the number one used email service
(09:58):
in terms of sending and receiving emails.
And also storing the data itself,but also in terms of your client.
We would have been using a multitudeof different mail clients in the late
nineties and early two thousands, butGmail has become the number one ESP
email service provider and also thenumber one email client itself, because
(10:19):
I think a lot of people are just usingit in the web browser or they're using
it as an app on their phone or something.
Jordan Bravo (10:25):
Agreed.
I don't know the statistics off topof my head, but I get the sense that.
Gmail is the most widely used emailprovider, at least in the United States.
Stephen DeLorme (10:36):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Again, your mileage may vary overseas.
I feel like it's become not onlythe default for like individuals,
just, I feel like everybody has aGmail, but it's also the default for
businesses, like it's hard to comeacross businesses that don't use it.
If they do, it might be like, I don'tknow, the outlook cloud or something
to that effect, but at least for mostlike smaller, younger businesses that I
(11:00):
find in the U S tend to default to Gmailand G like Gmail business or whatever.
And most just likeindividuals I find use Gmail.
Jordan Bravo (11:11):
Before we started recording, you mentioned there were
three areas or categories in which youcould reduce single point of failure.
Do you mind enumerating those?
Stephen DeLorme (11:23):
Yeah, so yeah we came up with these on the fly, but the, I
think what we came up with was the ideathat, okay, Gmail is being three things.
One that you go to the gmail.
com.
You log into your email there.
So it's actually a client.
You're actually typing up your emails andreading your emails there in your browser.
So that's where your email client is.
(11:44):
It's like the interface throughwhich you send the emails, receive
the emails, all that good stuff.
So Gmail is a client.
That's number one.
Number two, they arethey're a naming system.
If I have Stephen 1 2 3 4 5, com,I don't, and I don't know who that
is, but um, if I have Stephen 12 3 4 5 @ com, they own gmail.
(12:07):
com.
And so by extension, they also ownthat name that's in front of it.
They all, they own all theusernames are with Gmail.
They're temporarily giving itto you as a service, right?
But that they're in on atechnical level, they own that.
So they own the naming system.
That's number two.
Number three, they actually own the dataitself because we're not downloading
emails onto our computers anymore,we're just going to a website and
(12:30):
fetching them from there dynamically.
They actually keep track of all that data.
So it's the email service.
The email naming and the email datathey own all three of those things.
Jordan Bravo (12:45):
I'd like to create a metaphor here and this is, I'm
coming up with this on the fly.
Bear with me if it's rough andmaybe you can expand upon it.
But it would be if you lived in ahome and the homeowners association,
controlled it set out rules for whatyou can and can't do in your home.
It's as if the homeowners,homeowners association also
(13:08):
was the owner of your mortgage.
So that when you pay every month if youdidn't pay, for example, you would be in
default to the homeowners association.
And now let's say that same home, thatsame organization that you that was a
homeowners association and also yourbank, essentially your mortgage provider,
let's say they also provided you your.
(13:29):
Home insurance.
Now, let's say they also ownedyour car and you were making
payments to them for your car.
Now, let's say you also worked for them.
You could see here how if you wereto anger this organization, they
could really destroy your life.
You could suddenly find yourself homeless,jobless, without insurance, carless.
(13:51):
So that seems a little more concretefor people, but I bet most people
when they use Gmail, they don'trealize that Gmail is providing
all of these different pieces.
For convenience, it's understandablewhy they're so popular.
They make it super easy.
But could see how in that metaphor, I'mtorturing a little bit, so forgive me,
(14:13):
but if you were to have your insurancewith one company and your mortgage with
another company, and your homeowner'sassociation was a different company, you
might have a problem with one of them.
But you'd be okay with the others andyou could work out that problem or
maybe get a new provider, maybe you'rehaving a problem with your mortgage
provider and you don't agree withtheir actions or payments or whatever.
(14:35):
You could find a new mortgage provider,maybe you could refinance, get a different
rate and you're not going to risk losingyour car and your health insurance
and your job and all of that stuff.
Stephen DeLorme (14:45):
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that's a good metaphor.
It's yeah, you're it's all alot of eggs in one basket there.
So which maybe one of theseshould we attack first?
If we want to think about systeman email naming system, an email
service and email data itself,which one should we attack first?
Jordan Bravo (15:06):
I say, let's talk about the domain name first, because even if you.
So if you want to still want to useGoogle on the back end, for example, you
can use it with a custom domain name.
And I would argue that's astep in the right direction.
Stephen DeLorme (15:19):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jordan Bravo (15:20):
So some people already know this because maybe they have
their own custom domain name hookedup to Google or they have a business
that where they do that as well.
But if you have a at gmail.
com domain name for your email,there's something that you can,
there's a step you can take that.
That really gives you a lot of, lotmore sovereignty with your email and
(15:40):
that is to have a custom domain name.
So if I am, for example, usingjordan123@gmail.Com and I decide I
want to keep using, I want to make asminimal changes as possible because I'm
busy and I don't have a lot of time.
So what is one step that I can do?
What I can do is I can buy acustom domain name and domain
(16:03):
names are almost never free.
And I'm only putting that almost inthere because I'm sure you could find
some exception to the rule, but let'sjust say domain names are not free.
You have to pay for them.
If you've never bought a websitedomain name before, you have to
register it with the internationalregistration organization.
But in any case, you buy your domainname, you can get them very cheap.
(16:24):
And then you go into your Gmailsettings and you basically
just plug in the right info.
And next thing you know, I canhave, instead of Jordan at gmail.
com, I can have Jordan at bravo.
com or whatever email uh, whateverdomain name I've purchased.
Stephen DeLorme (16:39):
Yeah.
And it gets a littletechnical too, because.
So you go into Gmail, you tell themyou want to use a custom domain.
They're going to give you some stuffthat you're going to go put in.
You're going to go back tothe domain name website.
And uh, you're going to putin some information there.
Like you're going to have to put in the-- copy and paste in like the basically
the domain to Google's mail serversand all their like backup mail servers.
(17:03):
Um, And usually there's a SPFsender protection framework, which
basically signals to the rest ofthe, people, receiving emails from
you that yes, Google's mail serveris authorized to send on my behalf.
There's the DKIM, the DigitalKey Identity Management.
Actually, I'm not sureGoogle supports that or not.
I know other mail clientssupport it or not.
(17:24):
But there's a whole bunch of,different types of metadata
they might ask you to add.
So you'll be tweaking kind of things onboth copied and pasted the appropriate
details into your domain name settingsand into your Google settings, then
it, should basically work and then youdon't really have to mess with it again.
And I think just to make clear thepoint of why this is important is that.
(17:48):
In the future, if you need to leavegmail, maybe this is because of some,
catastrophic situation where you'vebeen falsely accused of something and
kicked off the platform, or maybe it'sjust a situation where you just want
to use a different service provider.
For whatever reason, youget to maintain that name.
So you don't have to belike emailing everybody.
(18:09):
Hey, I changed my emails.
Use this email in the future.
Whatever.
I don't check this old one anymore,having to go update your email
at a thousand different websites.
You can just maintain thesame name at whatever domain.
com.
You have ownership of that name.
You can take it with you, whetheryou're using Gmail or whether
(18:29):
you're using somebody else.
Jordan Bravo (18:31):
And to expand upon that a little more, Let's
say I have jordan at bravo.
com it's, and I'm stillusing Gmail under the hood.
Now let's say Gmail, let's sayGoogle cuts me off from my account.
I can no longer access.
Previous emails that I've received.
I can't sign into Gmail anymore.
(18:53):
However, what I can then do is Icould find a replacement provider,
whether, I won't name them now.
We'll go into that later, but Ifind a replacement email provider.
And then I just go through thatsame process is when I set it up
with Google, with Gmail, I justset it up with this new provider.
And then going forward.
All my email, any email sent tothat domain name or sent to that
(19:14):
email address will still come to me.
And this is great because nowI'm not going to be locked
out of any of my services.
So if I have to reset a password orsomebody needs to send me an email
from that point forward, I'm stillgoing to receive it at my same email
address, but at my new email provider.
Stephen DeLorme (19:31):
Yeah.
And would this be a good placeto maybe segue into aliases?
Jordan Bravo (19:36):
Before we segue into aliases.
I'd like to talk about are thereother email providers that we
Have used that we might recommendor that have a good reputation
Stephen DeLorme (19:49):
Cool.
So this might segways and instead tothe kind of solving the other problem.
So we've solved the email naming problemby getting our own domain name, right?
Now we're gonna solve.
Okay, the actual email service itself, thesending and the receiving of the emails.
I'll say for me, it's, I'malways a shill for proton.
(20:11):
Because I personally usetheir products and like them.
I think we talked, I think we talkedin another episode about just their
calendar product as well as they'rejust using the contact system, but they
originally started as an email platform.
And I think what the original valueout of proton mail was that their
(20:32):
platform is end to end encrypted.
And so if you're not familiarwith end to end encrypted.
It means that basically meansthat your email data is,
encrypted using your private key.
So Proton doesn't really have away of reading your emails because
they're all encrypted with your key.
It also encrypts it when you'resending it to other people.
So if like Jordan and I send each otheran email our emails are automatically
(20:53):
encrypted with our private keys.
Um,
so even if someone managed tosuccessfully eavesdrop on us,
while the email's in transit,they wouldn't be able to read it.
So I personally like Proton and I'mtrying to think of other services.
I've heard of one called Tutanota,I think, that has a similar kind of
(21:14):
privacy proposition as Protonmail,but I've never personally used them.
So yeah, what about you in terms ofalternate email service providers?
Jordan Bravo (21:24):
I think Proton is great.
I know that they also allow youto use a custom domain name.
With your Proton email, so youcan have any domain name and
under the hood it's ProtonMail.
I use one that's not super well known.
It's called Migadu, M I G A D U dot com.
(Multiple) (21:45):
M A G. M I G
M I G. Wait, hold on.
M A G. M I G. Oh, M I G. D A U.
Jordan Bravo (21:56):
excuse me.
G A M I G A D U dot com.
Yeah.
Stephen DeLorme (22:02):
That's why nobody's heard of them.
Their name is so weird.
Jordan Bravo (22:05):
Yeah, it's a weird name.
I think they're Swiss.
And they might not seem very I don't know.
special at first because they don't haveend to end encryption like Proton for
example, but they are small enough thatthey're not a honeypot for surveillance
and they don't abuse you, googlefor example, if you have a problem
(22:28):
Try calling their customer service.
Good luck.
Like they don't care.
You're one of billions of people.
Migadu has, they're small enoughthat they will respond to customer
service requests and complaints.
They're very reasonably pricedand you can have as many domain
names mapped to it as you want.
So for a price of, Ithink I pay 19 a year.
(22:52):
I can have not only as many emailaddresses as I want, but as many
domain names as I want as well.
And so I've used it for email addressesfor myself, for my businesses that
I've done, for basically everything.
And it only cost me 19 a year.
(23:13):
They do provide a webmail you can login the browser, but their webmail is
bare bones, and I prefer to use itby connecting a client, which, we'll
get into why you might wanna do that.
Stephen DeLorme (23:29):
Man the, it's like they haven't updated this in for those
listening, I'm looking at the page.
It says, can I pay with Bitcoin at all?
And so we do not offer onsite paymentwith Bitcoins and they camel case it.
Interesting.
Jordan Bravo (23:41):
Yeah, it's a very old school way of writing Bitcoin.
Stephen DeLorme (23:44):
That is a really powerful price.
Like it's a very low price.
There's five gigabytes on theplan I'm reading here on the site.
They're almost like giving you likea little like section of an email
server and like you can provisionas many email names as you need
to in your little fiefdom there.
Jordan Bravo (24:03):
That's right.
Stephen DeLorme (24:04):
That's pretty cool.
I remember a long time ago at a,at an old job, we had a email, like
server, where we were renting out and.
was, a little bit difficult andtechnical to manage at times.
And I'm not, this service may be easier,but there was something really incredibly
powerful about just being able to spinup as many emails as you need to, and
(24:24):
once getting into I don't know the newway of doing things where you have to.
Pay for every single user.
Like pretty much everybody hasadopted this like cloud first business
pricing model where you pay like aminimum of 6 per user or whatever.
Ends up stacking up andbeing very prohibitive.
Jordan Bravo (24:45):
Agreed.
So this isn't going to be for everyone,but this is for people who have a
similar approach to email as I do,which is, I'm not using this to send
gigabytes of files, photos, videos,etc. I'm only using email to register
for services and maybe occasionallyarchive receipts and stuff like that.
(25:05):
Oh, mostly text based communications.
Stephen DeLorme (25:09):
That's really cool service.
So these are some alternate serviceproviders that we've looked at here.
Are there any more weshould cover or should we?
Segue into something else.
Jordan Bravo (25:23):
I think we're, we've covered the service providers.
Let's go now to aliases.
Stephen DeLorme (25:29):
Yeah.
And so we've solved our kind of secondproblem there of, being cut off from
the actual sending and the receivingof the email, I think aliases gets
into something that's a little bitmore back on the naming side of things.
(25:51):
The basic problem as I woulddescribe it is that once you own
this name Stephen at whatever domain.
com and you, once this email gets outthere into the world you're just, you're
going to get all kinds of spam, right?
You list your email on a website.
A spider tracks it, like a web spidercrawler picks up your email, starts
(26:12):
adding you to a bunch of lists.
So that becomes a huge problem.
You start getting tons of spam andif you're using Gmail, then maybe
the spam is solved for you, but.
Otherwise, you're just goingto be getting tons of mail.
Once you start filtering outspam, you have to worry about like
false positives, all these things.
So then you also have the idea of likedata breaches of maybe your email is
(26:35):
not published anywhere on the web, butsomebody that you use, like a legitimate
company that you do business with,you've given them your email, so they
have your email recorded so that youcan log in and out of the website, their
website gets hacked, email then getsleaked out onto the dark web or whatever.
So then people still managedto find out about your email.
You have this other kind of threat,which is what if this company that
(26:57):
you're doing business with you thinkslegitimate, they're actually behind
the scenes, just selling your data.
And I think it's a lotmore common than we think.
So they ended up selling your emailand somehow again, your email ends up
either in the hands of like third partymarketers or it ends up in the hands
of, again, some real shady people.
No matter what you end up doing, justby giving anyone your email, you run
(27:21):
the risk of your email getting soldto marketers or criminals or whatever.
And so how do we solve that?
Jordan Bravo (27:29):
And I'd like to ask people to think about.
What could the potential problem bewith giving the same email address
to every single site that you up for?
You are standing in line at arestaurant to order something to go
and they ask for your email address.
You're creating an account onDoorDash et cetera, et cetera.
(27:54):
I would encourage you to think about itand try to come up with it on your own,
but now I'm going to spoil it for you.
What happens is, every single time youdo that it's resting in someone else's
database, someone else's computer.
And companies eventually get hacked.
The bigger the company, the morelikely they are to get hacked.
And when they are hacked, In fact,your email address, if it's, worst
(28:17):
thing that you can have is your firstname and then your last name at gmail.
com.
That one is just so easy for spammersbecause somebody breaches a database,
this is a juicy set of data thatthe hacker has gotten, right?
This will be sold on the dark web.
And now the person who bought thatdata, they have your email address,
(28:38):
they have the site you used.
And then they, and now theyhave your first and last name.
Now they can search the web and they cantry to break in at other websites using
that same email address and same password.
And most people, if they are notusing a password manager to manage
different passwords for them,that same password will likely
work on all of the other sites.
(28:59):
And so this would be coming backto what we originally talked about.
How your email address is your gatewayto the rest of all of your accounts.
would be an example where youmight even have trouble resetting
your account if they were toable to break into your email.
For example, if I wasjordanbravo at gmail.
com and I use that on, let'ssay, and then my password.
(29:24):
Now I've used that same password whenI log into my Gmail account, right?
So now when Netflix's database isbreached, now the hackers have that email
and password and they know it's Gmail.
So now they go to gmail.
com and they log in with JordanBravo and that same password and
boom, now they're into my email.
Now they changed my email passwordto lock me out and now they wreck
(29:47):
absolute havoc on my digital lifebecause they control my email address.
Stephen DeLorme (29:52):
So the whole aliasing system is our solution to this.
And for those just listening, I'mpulling up SimpleLogin's website
up on the screen there, becausethey're a service that I use.
and I'm not sure if there's otheraliasing services we should come up with.
I'm not sure if they like.
(30:14):
Like I remember doing this a longtime ago back when I had, access to a
server where I was like provisioningdifferent usernames and filters and
forwarding addresses like back in theday, this would be, you'd be making like
forwarding addresses on your email server.
Addresses that would automaticallyforward other addresses, right?
But obviously that became a lotharder once we started moving to, like
(30:37):
online cloud hosted email platforms.
So these aliasing systems camearound and do you want to get
into what this exactly does?
Jordan Bravo (30:45):
Yeah.
And.
did use a couple before SimpleLogin andthey're honestly not worth mentioning
because one went out of business andthe other one is not nearly as good.
So SimpleLogin is by farthe best that I've tried.
And what SimpleLogin does isyou have, you create an account
with your real email address.
(31:07):
That's the one where you actually login, and then you, and then SimpleLogin
will, any time you want, it will createan email address for you that points, that
forwards email to your real email address.
So if I'm creating an account onFacebook, I would create, I would sign
(31:30):
into SimpleLogin with my real emailaddress, and then I would say, generate
me an email, and it'll create it.
at alias.
com and if I'm creating an account onNetflix it would create Netflix at alias.
com and it's not goingto literally say alias.
com but it's going to just Put in whateveremail address doesn't matter, right?
(31:52):
It's just filler basically.
But behind the scenes, it'sforwarded to my real email address.
So I log into my email as usual,and I get emails from all of those
different addresses that I've used.
I want to use a differentone for each site, for each
service that I've signed up for.
what's really cool about this is that.
can then toggle on oroff each of those emails.
(32:14):
So let's say I start getting spam fromone of these emails that I've created and
signed up with a site for I can just turnit off with the click of a button and now
I'm no longer getting email from them.
And I know where that spam came from.
I know that this particularsite sold my data.
So maybe I don't want to dobusiness with them in the future.
Stephen DeLorme (32:33):
Yeah, it's, and it sounds complicated, right?
But it's actually pretty easy.
Once you get it set up.
SimpleLogin just has alittle browser extension.
And so any website you go to likehow your password manager will put a
little icon next to any input fieldand offer to fill the password for you.
SimpleLogin will do the samething for any email input field.
(32:53):
It'll give you like a easy optionto just generate a new email.
And like the default ones are the,they're just like these like randomly
generated strings, like these likelong, complicated looking domain names.
But if you have your own custom domain youcan actually use your own custom domain
with SimpleLogin, which is really cool.
Because then like you're getting itbefore about like owning your name on
(33:15):
the internet could just do something likeI could have like Facebook at Stephen.
com and meetup at Stephen, Stephen.
com, all of these different things.
And yeah, I think that the realpowerful thing about this is that if
one of those emails does fall into thewrong hands, I can just cut it off.
I can just turn it off andstop receiving to that email.
(33:38):
So one, I'll know who sold me outand then I'll be able to turn it off
and actually stop the inflow of spam.
Jordan Bravo (33:44):
Yes.
And this is part of the sovereigncomputing mindset of thinking
long term about points of failure.
And so even though we both loveSimpleLogin as a service, and we hope
that the company continues on for theforeseeable future, We want to think,
what if they go out of business someday?
What if they stop existing?
(34:05):
And that's why you would want to useyour custom domain name with them.
So you don't have to usea custom domain name.
If you're getting overwhelmed by allof the different suggestions here
today, you don't have to do that.
You can just go to simplelogin.
io right now and sign up for anaccount for free and just use the
basic defaults out of the box.
But that would be a, what I justillustrated would be an example of.
(34:27):
Being of pulling apart those eggsin one basket and having, not
having a single point of failure.
Stephen DeLorme (34:33):
Yeah.
And they, they're now owned by proton.
It integrates very nicely with protonindividual and like the ProtonMail,
like business suite which is reallynice, but I learned something new that
you are telling me you can actually.
SimpleLogin into your likeoutside password manager.
Jordan Bravo (34:52):
So I use Bitwarden and Bitwarden has great
integration with SimpleLogin.
So when I go to a new website that I,that's asking me to sign up for with an
email and password, for example I clickon my Bitwarden extension in my browser
and it will automatically generate, itwill, it's connected to my SimpleLogin
(35:12):
account and it will automatically generatea unique email address for that website
and then save it in my password manager.
So then my password isautomatically generated.
My email address is automaticallygenerated and it's saved along
with the URL of that website.
Stephen DeLorme (35:30):
Cool.
I was going to look if I could findAPI documentation, but they may
not have it on there, but yeah, sothat is really cool that way you
don't need to be like stuck on theirfront end if you don't want to be.
Yeah, and you could also go like probably,if you're pretty technical, you could
build your own forwarding system, but withthis service built out, it's a no brainer
for me to be using something like this.
Jordan Bravo (35:51):
There is one more thing I'd like to say in SimpleLogin's failure.
Is that.
It's actually open sourceand you can self host it.
Stephen DeLorme (35:58):
You can self host SimpleLogin?
Jordan Bravo (36:00):
Yes, I have not had the time to do that because I've just
been so thrilled with their service.
And the value for the bang for thebuck that you get, I think it's a
great deal, very reasonably priced.
But on my self sovereign to dolist someday, I might try and
self host a SimpleLogin server.
Stephen DeLorme (36:21):
There might be a good way to pivot into kind of solving that
other problem of the email data itself andbeing able to maintain control over that.
I'm going to suggest we startwith the painful hard way and
then move into the easy way maybe.
Jordan Bravo (36:37):
Okay.
And just to contextualize for everybody,we talked about how, if you have your
own, if you separate your domain, youremail address, domain name from your email
provider, then if you were to get cutoff from an email provider, You could,
going forward, still retain access toyour email address by switching providers.
(36:57):
But, that doesn't solve the problem of,if all of my email is on that server,
and now I don't have access to it, Ican't go backwards into the past and
retrieve previously generated emails.
Stephen DeLorme (37:08):
Yeah.
Jordan Bravo (37:09):
What we're going to talk about now would be solving that problem.
Stephen DeLorme (37:13):
Yeah.
And the solution is basicallyself hosting your own email.
If you really don't want to trust there'sthe hard way and then the easy way.
The hard way is selfhosting your own email.
And.
I'm just pulling up here a biton, on Reddit, an article called
why you really don't want toself host your own email server.
And the author goes into a prettylengthy explanation here all the
(37:38):
different stuff you have to go to themain problem they talk about a spam
and just being able to have to manageall the spam filters on your own.
Then you have to worry aboutgetting sent to spam on other
people's machines and all of this.
And so they go into a good bit of detailabout all of the different, steps you have
to go to and through and broad strokes.
But it is a, a painful operation,at least by if the title at the
(38:02):
top of the page indicates anything.
So have you tried this before?
Jordan Bravo (38:06):
I have not tried to self host my own email server yet.
Simply, busy, lack of time.
I would like to try it in the futureso that I can experience it for myself
and see if it's too difficult or not.
This post was three years ago.
Things have, might havegotten a lot easier since.
I've also seen mixed reviews onlineabout self hosting your own email.
(38:28):
So I've actually read this post beforewhen I was researching but I've also
seen the other end of the spectrumwhere people say, it's not that hard.
Here's a, three line script,or here's a program that does
it out of the box for you.
While we're talking about that, weshould mention MailCow is one of
the ones that we talked, we've seen.
And then the other onewould be Mail in a Box.
(38:51):
So if you are interested in self hostingyour own email, Mail in a Box or MailCow,
I think they do a lot of the work for you.
Stephen DeLorme (38:59):
That's good.
I'd be curious to learn about what theirlike spam system is but it looks like
I'm looking on the mail in a box andit's got like a little install scripts.
Wow, installing a DNSserver, DNSSEC signing keys.
Huh.
interesting.
Oh, Roundcube, which is a webclient that you can self host.
Oh, yeah, that's cool.
(39:20):
Looks like it has a lot a lot ofstuff packed into this Mail in a Box.
Jordan Bravo (39:25):
I'd like to throw the question to the audience now.
Have you ever self hosted your own email?
Have you thought about it?
And if so, what were the results?
Please boost in.
And also, if you're interested,let me know if you'd like to hear
about my efforts to self host email.
And if there's enough demand forthat, then I can give it a try and
(39:48):
report back here on my findings.
Stephen DeLorme (39:49):
Yeah, that sounds like awesome.
So yeah, boost in, let us knowyour self hosting email stories.
Jordan Bravo (39:55):
Stephen, how do people boost in if they want to do that?
Stephen DeLorme (39:57):
Oh,
yeah.
So you boost in, you would go to fountain.
fm or any podcasting 2.
0 app, search for ATLBitLab podcast on fountain.
fm. I've got it pulled up on screen foranyone who's watching the video version.
Yeah, fountain.
fm is probably the bestapp to use right now.
So about the hard way.
I think it might be good toget into the the easy way now,
(40:20):
which would really just be like,
Jordan Bravo (40:22):
so if we don't, if we want to make sure we have access to all of
our historical email and we don't havethe time or inclination to self host our
own email server, what are our options?
Stephen DeLorme (40:36):
Get a client, get your own client.
And this kind of goes back towhat we were talking about at the
beginning that, that Gmail becamethe service provider and the client.
The client is, again, thatinterface you actually use to
send, receive, read emails.
And, a long time ago, we, I thinkpeople thought of maybe had a better
idea of these as separate things.
(40:56):
Maybe not everybody, but certainlyif you're a technical, you did these
would be things like, Microsoft Outlookon windows or Apple mail on the Mac
platforms, or it would be maybe, Idon't know, some of some kind of Linux
client, I'm actually not as familiarwith some of older Linux mail clients.
You would have actually used likea mail application on your desktop.
(41:17):
You would have typed in the the,credentials to log into your
mail server, and then you'd bedownloading your emails locally.
And so this would beactually on your computer.
You're like sucking down theemails from the mail server as they
come in and having them locally.
And the, that means that if themail server goes down or you get
cut off from the email serviceprovider or anything like that.
(41:40):
You still have your emails.
They're on your computer.
They're stored there local.
You have like your own local backup.
Jordan Bravo (41:45):
Yeah, exactly.
And you mentioned Apple mail.
And I think that's probably a lotof people might not realize that
they're using Apple mail, but maybethey have Gmail on the back end.
That's a great example of how theclient that's the front end that
you're actually looking at and thebackend server can be decoupled.
In other words, they don'thave to be the same provider.
And so if you are on your phone,your iPhone, and you have Apple mail.
(42:09):
And you'll notice that if you gooffline, maybe you're in airplane
mode or you lose service, you canstill open up your email app, your
Apple Mail app and browse through allthe emails because they're on your
phone, they're on your device locally.
And so if you were to ever permanentlylose access to, let's say Gmail in this
case, You would then be able to exportall of those emails and you'd still
(42:31):
have them that you could save anywhere.
Stephen DeLorme (42:32):
Yeah.
I've got Thunderbird pulled up onscreen for anyone who's just listening.
It's an open source client.
It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
And ooh, it looks like theyhave an Android version as well.
I didn't know that.
So that's an option.
Just if you just want to have thatbackup you can hook up gmail to this.
You can, I believe you canstill hook up proton to it.
(42:53):
They have a cool bridging thingthat allows you that kind of
handles the encryption for youand any pop three or I map.
Those are just like some common protocolsfor checking mail servers for messages.
Like pretty much all of your, majormail service providers will be
able to give you the credentialsto be able to log into your account
using something like Thunderbird.
And so yeah, that's a good way to do it.
(43:14):
Of course, the caveat is you do needto keep track of the disk space.
It will be actually on your computerand we get used to the idea of wow, this
mail provider gave me half a terabyteof storage for free and another half
terabyte for, paying, 5 a month orwhatever, we get a little spoiled by
that, but maybe you actually don't needall your emails stored indefinitely.
(43:36):
Do you really need DoorDashreceipts from four years ago,
like still stored or whatever?
Do you really need thattaking up your space?
Maybe you actually lighten thatdigital footprint a little bit.
And you're really just, storing stuff thatmight be more critical for your business.
Like real like legal documents and,things like that, and maybe you
don't need all of these, just 10year old receipts in your email.
Jordan Bravo (43:56):
Yeah.
Agreed.
I, this is an approach that we canapply to all of our digital life, right?
We can try to, instead of saving andarchiving everything forever, like
you said, our DoorDash receipts, arewe going to need that in a few months
or a few years, like probably not.
So about being thoughtful of, what kindof data trail we want to leave, whether
(44:22):
or not we actually need all this archivaldata stored indefinitely into the future,
and just making decisions about that.
So in other words, going throughand pruning your data from time to
time, or just deleting somethingrather than archiving it as Gmail
encouraged us to do from the beginning.
Stephen DeLorme (44:38):
Yeah.
Jordan Bravo (44:40):
One more thing I would want to say on the topic of email
clients is that this is a recurringtheme on the Sovereign Computing
Show, which is we talked about or wetalked about calendars and contacts,
and we mentioned the open protocols.
And so email is a greatexample of this as well.
Stephen, you mentioned IMAP as somethingthat is spoken by all, almost all
(45:01):
email providers and email clients.
And so that's why you can useThunderbird or Apple Mail or webmails.
These can all speak the sameprotocol and therefore they can
communicate with each other, eventhough they're not the same company.
Stephen DeLorme (45:18):
Open protocols are powerful.
Cool.
Anything else we should hit on?
Jordan Bravo (45:23):
I think we covered it.
That's all for today.
Send us in your boost.
You can do that at fountain.
fm, or you can go to atlbitlab.
com slash podcast.
And you can get show notes andtranscripts and all the good stuff there.
Stephen DeLorme (45:41):
All right it's been real y'all.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Let us know your feedback in theboosts and we'll see you next time.
Jordan Bravo (45:47):
Thanks everyone.
We'll see you next time.
Stephen DeLorme (45:49):
Ending music.
(sound effects) I'm not going toinclude that one in the next edit.
Hey, thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you want to learn more aboutanything that we discussed, you can
look for links in the show notesthat should be in your podcast
player, or you can go to atlbitlab.
(46:10):
com slash podcast.
On a final note, if you foundthis information useful and you
want to help support us, you canalways send us a tip in Bitcoin.
Your support really helps us so that wecan keep bringing you content like this.
All right.
Catch you later.
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