Angst, Email hosting, and the Non-Annoying Internet

I recently joined Mastodon. As a part of the wave of people leaving Twitter, I found myself with what felt like a handful of others in what seemed a like new social media world. Over and over I would see my fellow exiles expressing sentiments of awe and relief about feelings of not having their data sold or suffering barrages of ads and notifications. Despite seeing myself as a grizzled veteran, old head, or maybe just a dude who used IRC in 90's, I couldn't help feeling all of these feelings too. I had to ask what it was I was experiencing and maybe what feelings Mastodon was helping me to recapture. What I landed on was what I describe as: the Non-Annoying Internet.

Given what I know of how the Internet operates today, calling today's Internet merely annoying is charitable. For example, given the rampant advertising and near constant assaults on privacy, the word predatory would not be any kind of a stretch. On the other hand, today's Internet being annoying is an accurate characterization of the surface-level phenomenon that presents itself to me, while predatory would be how I would describe the seething current of evil that powers the annoying Internet.

Seeing the Internet turn non-annoying for a moment did something to me. I had to confront the fact that when enough people individually make small decisions about the moral character of some billionare and/or what app they would use for social media, it can result in large scale change. From there, I had to ask myself what I could do to be part of the solution, to be part of the force resuscitating the Non-Annoying Internet.

I have been a computer person long enough to remember when my email was not owned by a corporate entity who let me see it in exchange for showing me ads. When I was a kid, I imagined email as a server being operated by a weird man in a basement sitting next to large cables, soda cans, and back issues of Field & Stream. What if I could be the 2023 version of that weird man? I certainly have a lot going for me. Also, in my case, Google has nearly twenty years of my correspondence with the world. There was no way for me to feel ok with that.

This holiday season I found myself with just enough naivete and time on my hands to convince myself that I could move all of my email to a server I operated. Luckily, I did get this to happen but it took quite a bit longer than I imagined (adds a lol here).

The short answer is yes, but as I am writing all this out, I am seeing that maybe another article on the technical challenges would be easier to digest.

To speak to one of the key benefits of this move I will say that it forces you to consider what this stream of information called "your email" actually is, how it can be organized, and how you can consume this information in a better frame of mind with less clutter.

During the move of my GMail inbox, I had to ask what I would do with this mass of data. As a veteran of many bad migrations of data, I knew that data in any amorphous, unwieldy mass is not your friend; so, I decided to actually start organizing it. This doesn't require as much time and effort as you may think. If you can scan your inbox for 10-20 minutes and start to come up with some categories for different pieces of mail, you are already well on your way down this path. Once you have the categories, having your own mail server affords you the ability create separate inboxes for each category. From there, the effort could really just be as little as spending 5 - 10 minutes here or there determining how you are going to get the mail form the old account to the new properly categorized inbox.

But I think that is a sufficient level of technical detail for this article. Let me write another with all of the gory details. After all, I would be grateful for an excuse to be mad about DNS in front of people.