-----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Richard Owlett Sent: Monday, May 8, 2023 7:47 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PLUG] Looking for a paid POP/IMAP email provider
>Fastmail shoots self in foot with with focus on "gee whiz" and pretty >pictures. No obvious link to unadulterated single >Pop email. Now hold on there that's unfair, like a LOT of sites nowadays you have to use their Search box - type POP3 into their search box and it gives you the appropriate URLs: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058752854 Note the following from that page: "Users on a Basic plan will not be able to use Fastmail on third-party mail clients, or create app passwords. IMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, and CardDAV are available to Standard and Professional users only." >> - Works with any imap email client (Protonmail's paid plan requires a >> Bridge app for Thunderbird. etc) >Protonmail doesn't explicitlty say that it works with Debian &/or SeaMonkey. I >require both. Debian and SeaMonkey are what they term "third-party email clients" If Protonmail's paid plan requires a "bridge app" (very likely a 2FA app) then it probably won't work. I think that ALL of these email services are facing the same issues I've dealt with running the mailservers for ipinc.net and seasurf.net, there are just some users out there who insist on using the SAME god damn password EVERYWHERE as well as other idiotic things. My domains are small enough so that I can monitor the reports from the mailserver and the moment that one of my users accounts starts getting used by a spammer I get notified and I can shut it down. I run scripts that look for certain patterns in the logs that are characteristic of a spammer using a stolen password. Probably once a month one of my user accounts gets broken into. After I change the password on it I wait for a phone call from them and when they call in wanting to know why they can't get email anymore I give them the lecture on why you don't use the same password for email that you use for logging into DisneyPlus or whatever. Then we reset their password to some random string and I have them save it in their phone and other email clients and they forget their password almost immediately and that's that. No more break ins. Frankly I prefer that they DON'T KNOW their own email password. But that is a labor intensive manual process and these larger sites like gmail, etc. are just too big for that. Thus their requirement for 2FA and thus breaking it on normal IMAP/POP3 clients. Spammers are the biggest problem with running these mailservices and you can only fight them either using user education (which is labor intensive and thus unprofitable and some users don't like it) or a variety of esoteric software. I chose to go the route of user education and over the years, the users of mine who seem to take pride in being morons and insisting on doing stupid stuff, have drifted off to other services when I made it clear that I would NOT make it easy for them to continue to use my mailservers. The ones that remain are more than happy to do what I tell them which is LOOK at senders actual domains, don't click unsubscribe links from obvious drive-by spammers, don't use the same password everywhere, and keep their inbox clean and don't let it pile up 10,000 messages, and empty deleted items every once in a while. With trainable users running the servers is easy, but with the obstinate idiots it's a morass. My choice was to make life unpleasant for the obstinate idiots and make it easy for the trainable ones, but since running those is sort of hobby income for me I can do that. The large services have to take everyone including the obstinate idiots and thus they can't piss anyone off, and so instead substitute software to try to mitigate the worst of the problems the idiots bring. Ted
