New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
I'll be back at my desk in the next couple of hours.
He's taking the long way to his "desk".
Had to drop money off to the girlfriend. Her buffalo is sick. Luckily her brother has been staying at her house to help care for her and the buffalo during these trying times.
Just kidding. Pattaya will never see MannDude grace its presence. Too degenerate of a place.
Sooooooooooooon?
Maybe.
This is looking great. Very user friendly looking
I know you've mentioned it isn't set in stone, but have you reached a estimate/range of what this might cost? Looking forward to testing this.
I have the same question.
Screw the cost, let me get my grubby little hands on it right this instant
I've not gotten there yet.
I won't be giving it away like NameCrane and MXRoute did at Black Friday or anything. The idea of providing the service to a ton of people paying next to nothing sounds awful from a management perspective. I can't keep up and I have zero interest in market dominance or anything like that.
We'll probably do plans starting at $2/mo ($24/yr) paid annually for the most basic of plans and do 3 packages.
HOW MUCH EMAIL STORAGE SPACE ARE YOU ACTUALLY USING?
I've been using MXR for years for business email. I'm only using 5.5GB of storage, and this is a very active account that has a ton of automated emails sent to different inboxes from servers. This includes up/downtime notifications, other internal alerts, automated emails from WHMCS, invoices from our upstreams, general business communication (sending LOAs, pre-sales chatter, etc), etc, etc. I'd say our usage, as a business, is pretty representative of most businesses. After 3 or 4 years... We've only used 5.5GB~.
I'd say that our usage is greater than most personal user's needs... But what do I know? That's why I'm asking. How much email storage space are you actually using?
I don't want to create unrealistic plans but I know people will complain if they "only get" 10GB of storage despite that being enough for a casual user to never have to delete an email for 10+ years. I'm trying to come up with reasonable plans with limits based around real world needs.
So, what do you actually need?
I'd be happy with just 5GB
Will there be some "strategically-priced" deals for early adopters?
Also, considering the privacy aspect of a whole IncogNET, how much is the effort to implement simplelogin/addy.io/temp email forwarder feature?
If possible, consider adding it to Bitwarden, like mentioned services. It can be a win-win situation both for IncogNET and its users, as it's quite convenient to generate a random email address from a password manager and on the other hand, it's a free advertisement of a service on all Bitwarden applications.
1-2 GB pop3/smtp
Been busy with this stuff the last couple of days.
I think just one gigabyte could be enough. (I like webmail rather than mail clients.)
huh mailcow?
I use about 13-14GB and I’d probably feel comfortable on a 20GB plan that I’d have space to grow.
Most of that email is marketing fluff, but I’m the sort of person that doesn’t like to triage things and would rather hit “archive” on all mail. Price I pay is I retain stuff I probably don’t need to, but I also keep a very lean inbox compared to many since I dont have a backlog of mail to sort.
Not in the market to move mind you (have Fastmail with some time left to run in my plan), but that’s how much I have, why I have it, and the sort of extra capacity I’d look at if I was looking to jump ship.
Yes
I posted a thread here with 199 votes: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/202619/how-much-email-storage-are-you-actually-using-and-actually-need/p1
And asked on Twitter with 40 votes: https://x.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1888981915778347074
You're usage is on the higher end but within the realm of normal. I'm glad I asked, as comparing plans from others didn't really give me a good picture. Lot of variance between providers in what they offer, but it seems that usage is pretty predictable for most use cases. Some fringe uses may require tons, but we're not allowing resellers or combining anything like Nextcloud in the mix (though that is a planned service, just a separate one).
You probably missed this @MannDude
I know the service didn't even started yet, but just wanted to double check regarding this temp email forwarder feature.
Sorry, I remember reading this on mobile but I don't usually respond much from it.
I'm not sure how any of that would integrate into this. There are a ton of neat features and integrations that would be ideal to do. None of which I have the capability of doing and maintaining myself. Anonaddy we could just run separately and toss a few of our domains on it and make it free for public use, that's simple.
The entire mail system is based on MailCow. Not much modifications under the hood besides whats needed for RoundCube or Tor / I2P webmail access.
What's the BitWarden integration you mention? It's just a Password Manager, yea?
EDIT: Yeah, early adopters will certainly get some sort of deal.
Understandable. The reason why I asked is because if possible to implement such feature, a lot of users (myself first) would ditch multiple services like proton, simple login, addy and so on, if there's a privacy oriented email service with a feature to create email forwarder addresses on-the-fly. Currently, there's nothing like this on the market.
Yes, a password manager where you can use addy, simplelogin, etc. over API to generate temp emails: https://bitwarden.com/blog/add-privacy-and-security-using-email-aliases-with-bitwarden/
What about Runbox?
Not sure do they have this alias feature, but beside that, I didn't like a lack of reviews about their service and a required yearly payment. Also I remember someone posted, I think it was reddit, runbox closed their account with no warning, so I wouldn't really risk it.
I completely understand. I was only trying to clarify the point that there is "something like this on the market" now. At least for webmail use, Runbox's alias feature works extremely well. It is possible that other aspects of Runbox aren't as good.
Been incredibly busy lately! Some general updates since I've had a couple people ask me in private about some of this.
Beyond Netherlands related matters:
I ran a YaBs on one of the "Virtually Dedicated" plans, with 2.5Gbps unmetered bandwidth, with the results below:
Sure, it's older hardware. Yeah, it's a single SSD. But the resource you pay for are yours to use 100%. Great network, decent size storage, lots of cores and RAM for not too much money.
What are some NextCloud / OwnCloud hosting providers you use? As in, what service providers are you using that offer this service as a product? (Not what providers did you install your own instance on). I'm wanting to add some companies to my comparison list as we work towards offering this service in the US and in NL for IncogNET and another brand.
UPDATE TIME
Good news and some bad news.
I'll start with the bad:
I'm just going to scrap the MyPrivateInbox project.
I just don't have the time to work on it. Additionally, we were going to launch this originally in the Netherlands, of course, but since we're migrating out of Worldstream in the coming months, any services hosted there (including this) would be disrupted during the migration. Seems like poor practice to offer / advertise a service as available only to disrupt access to it a month or two later for a few hours or so (unsure how long the migration will actually take).
Plus, we'll do some IP renumbering in NL, won't impact everyone but will impact the subnet that this was originally on. Just honestly don't feel like it's worth the hassle to migrate, renumber, or even recreate.
NameCrane will have EU based mail soon, so if that is all that you care about, use them as they're going to be much cheaper and offer way more storage and features than we ever would have. If you want more privacy specific features and options, ProtonMail is fine.
Speaking of Netherlands...
We'll be migrating from Worldstream to the Databarn and maintaining service for everyone in the Netherlands. The caveat being, we will not be accepting new orders for the Netherlands for likely several months. We're simply getting enough hardware to move away from Worldstream and to accommodate existing VPS customers, not hardware to accommodate new customers. This is allowing us to save a ton of money, which we can then use stateside for things like purchasing hardware and hiring some support help.
Beyond that, still testing VirtFusion out and trying to make a proper plan for how I wish to proceed with the migrations stateside. I've got some hardware prepped in WA for this, but am still testing some things out before I begin what I assume will be a long and painstaking migration process.
Will add VirtFusion documentation as I have energy / encounter things that I think will be useful for the end-user to know when moving from Virtualizor: https://portal.incognet.io/knowledgebase/14/Virtual-Private-Server-VPS-or-Virtual-Dedicated-Server-vDedi
Big "Virtually Dedicated Servers" are available: https://portal.incognet.io/store/virtually-dedicated - Ping me if you want these starting at $50. Can't advertise them here directly because they're "Virtual Servers" and exceed $10/mo, even though it's just a virtualized layer ontop of a blade. You're the only customer on the blade and can pound the resources 100%, 24/7 if you wish.
EDIT:
Also, new offers for IncogNET may be posted under our new @ISP account. This is still me. I want to use MannDude more for general shit-posting / whatever and have an account separate for actual business use. Mods / admins know of this already, it's something several other providers practice and there is no issue with it.
Just wondering (a sincere question): is VirtFusion so much better than Virtualizor that it's worth all of the effort to perform a long and painstaking migration process?
(I know that Virtualizor has had its ups and downs over the years, but aren't they pretty responsive to issues that arise?)
In my personal opinion, Virtualizor isn't terrible. It has many features that Virtfusion doesn't have but it's also been increasingly buggy as they spit out more features.
The pros, to me, of Virtualizor is it having a larger development team behind it. They work on a lot of products, such as Softaculous, Webuozzo or whatever, Backuply, etc. They've been around a long time. People more competent than myself claim that their code is shit, but who knows? I'm not going to pretend to be an expert at PHP, because I'm certainly not.
My main gripes with Virtualizor is their their support can be difficult to understand due to language barriers. Their first response is almost always asking for root details which I absolutely hate. (Their live chat was recently compromised and I guess a lot of their customers who gave up their root creds over live chat had XMRIG installed on their nodes... We weren't impacted by this, of course).
They push changes that breaks things. Little things that you'd think they'd test and notice. One day after an update the logo displayed to customers as no longer auto-scaling and just was massive and overlapped menu items. Now, for whatever reason, the logo doesn't even appear on the login page, at least not for admins. I don't even care to debug and look into these UI issues anymore because it'll just break again soon anyway.
With VirtFusion, it seems to be more community based support. I hate Discord but have found it somewhat useful. The documentation isn't as thorough, but I believe it will improve with time. The workflow is completely different than I'm used to, but that can be said about switching software from cPanel to DirectAdmin or from Windows to Linux or any other thing, so that's not really a fault of theirs. Just something someone needs to get used to, is all.
So far, in our testing, VirtFusion seems to work pretty well. I had an issue with PowerDNS for PTR/rDNS records that is on my list to revisit, as updating the record would just remove the entire zone from the cluster. I don't think it was on my end, but very-well may have been. The panel seems more responsive, which I like. I also like that it's more easily customizable. You can view our login page here: https://my.vmho.st , so it's easier to brand.
All in all, I feel like it's just a matter of time before there is a big exploit in Virtualizor. This is based on literally nothing but gut feeling. They push updates very fast and often but it seems sloppy. People who I know who are more versed in PHP has said that their code is spaghetti and written poorly, but who knows? I've also had someone tell me in private to hold of on switching to VirtFusion as it's very buggy and unstable, but seemingly everyone else I've talked to over the last couple of years has tried to convince me to switch to it.
I was hesitant at first to even consider the switch, because it's going to be a long process since it has to be done manually. (Migrate VMs to a new node, manual data entry in WHMCS, etc)
Guess time will tell. Not like there are very many real options.
/rant
Also, this: https://digdeeper.club/articles/incognet.xhtml
Not sure where to address it publicly but have had a few people ping me privately about it.
That's not how disk recovery works. The author of that is literally seeing files from his XMPP users after he reinstalled his server.
I've ran the same tests on fresh VMs and the only 'recovered' data is junk that ships with Virtualizors OS templates. Literally every test I ran on a fresh VM across multiple nodes and locations all return the same 'recovered' data: manpage files and documentation graphics. None of this is other user data.
I invited him to LowEndTalk to post a thread here to learn more about this but he hasn't.
I've responded to it on HackerNews here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333624 and on Twitter: https://x.com/duckdebug/status/1898756566742089732
Another strategy might be to use VirtFusion for new deployments and to see whether VirtFusion convinces you in the short term, and if it does, then to begin the process of migrating earlier deployments from Virtualizor to VirtFusion
That is sort of what I'm doing now. Sort of a pain, but so in VirtFusion I only have some dev VPSes I've made to test some things out like baclups, restores, rDNS, etc. Really the only requirement is making sure that a subnet that I have setup for both VirtFusion and Virtualizor has IPs locked/reserved that I want to use elsewhere so I don't accidentally assign the same IP to two different VMs in two different control panels. Not the end of the world, just need to cross reference IP resources is all.