[rescue] Corrupted list messages

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2021, Liam Proven wrote:

> You did note that the "5min a month" line was from Jonathan, not me, right?
>
> I don't accept it, TBH.

In all honesty, it's probably less.  I added an email alias today, and
it'd been two months since even doing that much.

I run updates once in a while, which rarely takes more than a minute.
The TLS certs auto-renew every 60 days or so.  The FreeBSD jail running
mail for me doesn't allow any extenal (non-VPN) connections other than
to the mail services.  Backups stream over the VPN periodically,
eventually draining to tape when I remember to turn the library on.

Really, after front-loading all the maintenance, the services just run
themselves for months at a time.  Once every few years, something in
Postfix changes that makes me edit a config file, or some new hotness in
antispam comes up that means I have to faff with some new sort of
cryptographic DNS record, but maintaining mail isn't anything I spend
any measurable amount of time on.

I've actually got a grim curiosity about how long everything would keep
on trucking if I fell over dead.  My bet is that it'd be as least as
long as it'd take to run into auto-billing problems for the connectivity
and storage.

My wish is that more people would do this; the effort is that minimal
compared to what it used to be, but I understand that most people don't
have the level of interest in it which makes the work fun.  That the
work is onerous or sizeable is a myth which has served to centralize the
influence over what "mail" even means anymore.  It's no longer the
"killer app" for IT services, but a commodity one rents from "the
cloud."

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA