Welcome to Blogger muck

Welcome to Blogger muck!

For a while I've been cutting back on personal hosting. The time and money to maintain a personal domain was getting out of hand for something that was suppose to be a hobby. And, I simply was not getting to the projects I'd planned on when setting up a public server. Ok, not that big a deal but... maintaining a mail server is a pain, maintaining a VPN proxy is a pain, maintaining a LAMP server is a pain, ... Especially when I was not really doing those things that required I maintain a piece of Silicon on the public net.

The proverbial last straw came when I stumbled on some G Mail documentation about support for a catch all mail address in G Suite. Why do this you ask? Because I'd lost patience with vendors selling my mail address to marketing trolls. Now, when a vendor asks for an email address I give them one with their domain in the address; yourDomainHere@jerunamuck.org. With a catch all alias those messages show up in one in box. When that address starts getting advertisements for male enhancement snake oils or political propaganda spam I know exactly who sold me out to the trolls. That address gets replaced with an alias to immediately redirect any future spam back to their support line and I stop doing business with them. When the alias' messages start bouncing I change it to a new address @yourDomainHere. The strategy has been wildly successful; I don't get any more spam. Unfortunately, you can't do this with an address like me@justAnyISP.com, you need to be able to manage email for an entire domain. Doing that without becoming pawned by spammers requires diligent maintenance of your mail server.

I'd out sourced my mail server a couple years before and the next year's hosting bill was waiting to be paid. Shit! I could replace my mail server account with G Mail for half the cost and G would handle server maintenance? And I'd get access to all the other G Suite services too? Um, wait a minute... <do diligence /> OK.

So, private domain G Mail worked out fine. I'm really happy with it and actually check mail more often than I did when I had to drag out my lap top and go get coffee while Outlook starts. The only thing I really lost is the ability to reply as yourDomainHere@jerunamuck.org but I can live with that.

Now I'm looking at replacing a private hosted WordPress installation. Sure I'll loose the ability to write custom modules but there are other options to replace that. And of course <project interest="lost" /> applies to most of them.  The only thing I'm worried about is being forced to replace this Blogger profile with Google+. I do like that platform but superficially similar is not the same thing. "Fingers Crossed" time will tell.

Muck

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