email – Dan Q

Avanti’s Accessibility Failure

I’m travelling by train in just over a week, and I signed up an account with Avanti West Coast, who proudly show off their Shaw Trust accessibility certificate.

Clearly that certificate only applies to their website, though, and not to e.g. their emails. When you sign up an account with them, you need to verify your email address. They send you a (HTML-only) email with a link to click. Here’s what that link looks like to a sighted person:

So far, so good. But here’s the HTML code they’re using to create that button. Maybe you’ll spot the problem:

<a href="https://www.avantiwestcoast.co.uk/train-tickets/verify-email?prospectId=12345678&customerKey=12345:1234567"
 target="_blank"
  style="font-family:Averta, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">

  <div class="mobile_image"
       style="font-family:Averta, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; display:none; border:none; text-align:center;">

    <img width="40%"
           src="https://image.e.avantiwestcoast.co.uk/lib/fe371170756404747d1670/m/1/9069c7a2-b9ed-4188-9809-bf58592ec002.png"
           alt=""
         style="font-family:Averta, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;width:143px; height:40px;" />

  </div>
</a>

Despite specifying the font to use three times, they don’t actually have any alt text. So for somebody who can’t see that image, the link is completely unusable¹.

This made me angry enough that I gave up on my transaction and bought my train tickets from LNER instead.

Accessibility matters. And that includes emails. Do better, Avanti.

Footnotes

¹ Incidentally, this also makes the email unusable for privacy-conscious people who, like me, don’t routinely load remote images in emails. But that’s a secondary concern, really.

Reply to: Is Not Answering the Thing Now?

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Marc Thiele asked, in a post titled “Is Not Answering the Thing Now?”:

Maybe I am just seeing this wrong, but I experience that a lot of people simply don’t reply to emails/messages these days any more. I get that emails can be exhausting at times, but really, I am answering any email I get. Sometimes late, but I answer.

…

And it is so easy. I can really live with a short message stating no interest or even a “Fuck off”, which is way better as it does not leave me with nothing and not knowing whether my message arrived or not.

…

Marc Thiele

I try to reply to every personal (i.e. from a human, not an automated service, not not including spam) email, unless it very-clearly doesn’t need one: e.g. it’s the end of a conversation or was the response to my query. I suppose that I’m trying to say is that an initial contact with me – a new conversation – should always get a response, because that reassures you that it arrived.

But I see the trend, and I’ve been part of it. Thanks to my many points of presence on the Web, I receive messages on a great number of subjects. Sometimes, if – say – one arrives while I’m travelling, and then when I get around to properly reading it I think it deserves a well-thought out and researched and reasoned answer… I’ll save it for later. And that’s when the trouble starts.

Drifting down my Inbox, it falls out of sight and mind. Whenever I see it, I’m back to square one: having not yet made the time and space to give it the consideration it deserves. The longer it remains there, the more the pressure builds: if it took me three weeks to reply to this email, my reply has to be really good, right? Just firing off a “thanks for your email, sorry I haven’t given it a proper reply yet” now would just be awkward. So it sits longer and stagnates. Eventually, crushed under the weight of the emails above it and of my growing awkwardness with the situation, it gets deleted.

Usually that takes about six months, but in one particularly terrible case – a friend shared with me a draft of some fiction they’d been writing – it took eight years. Eight years of a message sitting in my Inbox, begging me to write a proper response, and me not doing so because any reply I could by-that-point produce nothing that would possibility justify the time it took to respond.

(At some points in my past I’ve had the same problem with blogging: if I take a month without writing a post, it feels like the pressure to produce a real banger is so high that it makes me stagnate. That’s part of the reason that nowadays I semi-automate the inclusion of so much of my life into my blog: ad-hoc notes, checkins to geocaches, etc. Blogging more helps fight the pressure.)

I’d like to think I do better nowadays. I don’t think I’ve got any unanswered personal email in my Inbox (though now I mention it, I think there’s a mailing list I feel like I’m overdue to chip in on).

But on behalf of the people who don’t reliably reply because it feels like too much pressure if you missed the opportunity to do so immediately, I have some empathy. I’ve been there, and the struggle is real. It’s possible, like me, to come out the other side of a mindset of letting email stagnate because you can’t find the words to justify the time it took to respond.

(Anybody who’s got different reasons to mine for failing to respond to personal emails can speak for themselves. Though – possibly – not by email.)

Steam Email alt-text improvements

I noticed that automated emails from Steam weren’t doing alt-text very well. Some image links had no or inadequate alt-text. (Note that Steam don’t support opting for plain text rather than HTML emails.)

I’m fortunate enough to depend upon alt-text never-to-rarely. But I prefer not to load remote images, so I still benefit from alt-text.

I filled out a support request to Steam layout out the specific examples I’d found of where they weren’t doing very well, and stressing why it’s (morally, legally, etc.) important to do better.

And you know what: they quietly fixed it. When I received an email today telling me that something on my wishlist is on sale, it had reasonably-good alt-text throughout. Neat.

Yr Wyddfa’s First Email

On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they’d made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.

It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.

Nowadays, that’s an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart… well, this isn’t exactly why, but it’s a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:’d to a few friends.

It’s not an exciting story. It’s not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)

Note #25347

Even when it’s technical, not all of my International Volunteer Day work for Three Rings has been spent using our key technologies (LNMR [Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, Ruby] stacks).

Today, I wrote some extra PHP for our WordPress-powered contact form to notify our Support Team volunteers via Slack when messages are sent. We already aim to respond to every message within 24 hours, 365 days a year, and are often faster than that… but this might help us to be even more-responsive to the needs of the charities who we help look after.

Zero

✅ Inbox Zero
✅ Slack Notification Zero
✅ Assigned PR Reviews Zero
✅ Owned PRs… one, but it’s approved and just waiting for the right moment to merge

That’s got the be the first time in… literally years… that I’ve ended a workday so “clean”. Feels amazing.

There’ll be a mess again tomorrow, but hopefully only of a manageable size because I’m particularly clean to finish this week at “Work Zero”.

What if Emails were Multilingual?

Multilingual emails

Back when I was a student in Aberystwyth, I used to receive a lot of bilingual emails from the University and its departments¹. I was reminded of this when I received an email this week from CACert, delivered in both English and German.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were some kind of standard for multilingual emails? Your email client or device would maintain an “order of preference” of the languages that you speak, and you’d automatically be shown the content in those languages, starting with the one you’re most-fluent in and working down.

The Web’s already got this functionality², and people have been sending multilingual emails for much longer than they’ve been developing multilingual websites³!

Enter RFC8255!

It turns out that this is a (theoretically) solved problem. RFC8255 defines a mechanism for breaking an email into multiple different languages in a way that a machine can understand and that ought to be backwards-compatible (so people whose email software doesn’t support it yet can still “get by”). Here’s how it works:

You add a Content-Type: multipart/multilingual header with a defined boundary marker, just like you would for any other email with multiple “parts” (e.g. with a HTML and a plain text version, or with text content and an attachment).
The first section is just a text/plain (or similar) part, containing e.g. some text to explain that this is a multilingual email, and if you’re seeing this then your email client probably doesn’t support them, but you should just be able to scroll down (or else look at the attachments) to find content in the language you read.
Subsequent sections have:
- Content-Disposition: inline, so that for most people using non-compliant email software they can just scroll down until they find a language they can read,
- Content-Type: message/rfc822, so that an entire message can be embedded (which allows other headers, like the Subject:, to be translated too),
- a Content-Language: header, specifying the ISO code of the language represented in that section, and
- optionally, a Content-Translation-Type: header, specifying either original (this is the original text), human (this was translated by a human), or automated (this was the result of machine translation) – this could be used to let a user say e.g. that they’d prefer a human translation to an automated one, given the choice between two second languages.

Let’s see a sample email:

Content-Type: multipart/multilingual;
 boundary=10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
To: <b24571@danq.me>
From: <rfc8255test-noreply@danq.link>
Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255?
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2024 10:06:56 +0000

--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

This is a multipart message in multiple languages. Each part says the
same thing but in a different language. If your email client supports
RFC8255, you will see this message in your preferred language out of
those available. Otherwise, you will probably see each language after
one another or else each language in a separate attachment.

--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Language: en
Content-Translation-Type: original

Subject: Does your email client support RFC8255?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0

RFC8255 is a standard for sending email in multiple languages. This
is the original email in English. It is embedded alongside the same
content in a number of other languages.

--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Type: message/rfc822
Content-Language: fr
Content-Translation-Type: automated

Subject: Votre client de messagerie prend-il en charge la norme RFC8255?
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0

RFC8255 est une norme permettant d'envoyer des courriers
électroniques dans plusieurs langues. Le présent est le courriel
traduit en français. Il est intégré à côté du même contenu contenu
dans un certain nombre d'autres langues.

--10867f6c7dbe49b2cfc5bf880d888ce1c1f898730130e7968995bea413a65664--

Why not copy-paste this into a raw email and see how your favourite email client handles it! That’ll be fun, right?

Can I use it?

That proposed standard turns seven years old next month. Sooo… can we start using it?⁴

Turns out… not so much. I discovered that NeoMutt supports it:

NeoMutt’s implementation is basic, but it works: you can specify a preference order for languages and it respects it, and if you don’t then it shows all of the languages as a series of attachments. It can apparently even be used to author compliant multilingual emails, although I didn’t get around to trying that.

Support in other clients is… variable.

A reasonable number of them don’t understand the multilingual directives but still show the email in a way that doesn’t suck:

Screenshot from Thunderbird, showing each language one after the other. — Mozilla Thunderbird does a respectable job of showing each language’s subject and content, one after another.

Some shoot for the stars but blow up on the launch pad:

Screenshot from GMail, showing each language one after the other, but with a stack of extra headers and an offer to translate it to English for me (even though the English is already there). — GMail displays all the content, but it pretends that the alternate versions are *forwarded* messages and adds a stack of meaningless blank headers to each. And then offers to translate the result for you, even though the content is already right there in English.

Others still seem to be actively trying to make life harder for you:

ProtonMail’s Web interface shows only the fallback content, putting the remainder into .eml attachments… which is then won’t display, forcing you to download them and find some other email client to look at them in!⁵

And still others just shit the bed at the idea that you might read an email like this one:

That’s just the clients I’ve tested, but I can’t imagine that others are much different. If you give it a go yourself with something I’ve not tried, then let me know!

I guess this means that standardised multilingual emails might be forever resigned to the “nice to have but it never took off so we went in a different direction” corner of the Internet, along with the <keygen> HTML element and the concept of privacy.

Footnotes

¹ I didn’t receive quite as much bilingual email as you might expect, given that the University committed to delivering most of its correspondence in both English and Welsh. But I received a lot more than I do nowadays, for example

² Although you might not guess it, given how many websites completely ignore your Accept-Language header, even where it’s provided, and simply try to “guess” what language you want using IP geolocation or something, and then require that you find whatever shitty bit of UI they’ve hidden their language selector behind if you want to change it, storing the result in a cookie so it inevitably gets lost and has to be set again the next time you visit.

³ I suppose that if you were sending HTML emails then you might use the lang="..." attribute to mark up different parts of the message as being in different languages. But that doesn’t solve all of the problems, and introduces a couple of fresh ones.

⁴ If it were a cool new CSS feature, you can guarantee that it’d be supported by every major browser (except probably Safari) by now. But email doesn’t get so much love as the Web, sadly.

⁵ Worse yet, if you’re using ProtonMail with a third-party client, ProtonMail screws up RFC8255 emails so badly that they don’t even work properly in e.g. NeoMutt any more! ProtonMail swaps the multipart/multilingual content type for multipart/mixed and strips the Content-Language: headers, making the entire email objectively less-useful.

Permanent Record

To:

****@fulwoodacademy.co.uk

From:

“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>

Subject:

Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997

Date:

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:18:07 +0100

To Whom It May Concern,

Please supply the personal data you hold about me, per data protection law. Specifically, I’m looking for: a list of all offences for which I was assigned detention at school.

Please find attached a variety of documentation which I feel proves my identity and the legitimacy of this request. If there’s anything else you need or you have further questions, please feel free to email me.

Thanks in advance;

Dan Q

To:

“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>

From:

“Jodie Clayton” <*.*******@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>

Subject:

Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997

Date:

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 10:48:33 +0100

Dear Dan Q,

We do not retain records of detentions of former pupils, and we certainly have no academic records of pupils going back thirty years ago.

Jodie Clayton | Office Manager with Cover and Admissions
Black Bull Lane, Fulwood, Preston, PR2 9YR
+44 (0) 1772 719060

To:

“Jodie Clayton” <*********@fulwoodacademy.co.uk>

From:

“Dan Q” <***@danq.me>

Subject:

Re: Subject Access Request – Dan Q, pupil Sep 1992 – Jun 1997

Date:

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:00:49 +0100

But, but… I was always told that this would go on my permanent record. Are you telling me that teachers lied to me? What else is fake!?

Maybe I will always have a calculator with me and I won’t actually need to know how to derive a square root using a pen and paper. Maybe nobody will ever care what my GCSE results are for every job I apply for. Maybe my tongue isn’t divided into different taste areas capable of picking out sweet, salty, bitter etc. flavours. Maybe practicing my handwriting won’t be an essential skill I use every day.

And maybe I will amount to something despite never turning in any History homework, Mr. Needham!

Dan Q

Shared Email Addresses

Email Antipatterns

There are two particular varieties of email address that I don’t often see, but I’ve been known to ridicule when I have:

Geographically-based personal email addresses, e.g. OurHouseName@example.com. These always seemed to me to undermine one of the single-best things about an email address compared to postal mail – that they don’t change when you move house!¹
Shared/couple email addresses, e.g. MrAndMrsSmith@example.net. These make me want to scream “You know email addresses are basically free, right? You don’t have to share one!” Even back when most people got their email address directly from their dial-up provider, most ISPs offered some number of addresses (e.g. five).

If you’ve come across either of the above before, there’s… perhaps a reasonable chance that it was in the possession of somebody born before 1960 (and the older, the more-likely)².

You’ll never catch me doing that!

I found myself thinking about this as I clicked the “No” button on a poll by Terence Eden that asked whether I used a “shared” email address when in a stable long-term relationship.

Terence Eden (@Edent@mastodon.social) on Mastodon asks: "If you're currently in a stable, long term relationship with someone - do you have a joint email address with them?" — Of course I don’t! Why would I? Oh… wait…

It wasn’t until after I clicked “No” that I realised that, in actual fact, I have had multiple email addresses that I’ve share with significant other(s). And more than that, sometimes they’ve been geographically-based! What’s going on?

I’ve routinely had domains or subdomains that I’ve used to represent a place that I live. They’re convenient for when you want to give somebody a short web address which’ll take them to a page with directions to you and links to your location in a variety of different services and formats.

And by that point, you might as well have an email alias, e.g. all@myhouse.example.org, that forwards on email to, well, all the adults at the house. What I’ve described there is, after a fashion, a shared email address tied to a geographical location. But we don’t ever send anything from it. Nor do we use it for any kind of personal communication with anybody outside the house.

We don’t give out these all@ addresses (or their aliases: every company gets their own) to people willy-nilly. But they’re useful for shared services that send automated emails to us all. For example:

Giving a forwarding alias to the supermarket means that receipts (listing any unavailable products) g0 to all of us, and whoever’s meal plan’s been scuppered by an awkward substitution will know what’s up.
Using a forwarding alias with the household Netflix account means anybody can use the “send me a sign-in link” feature to connect a new device.
When confirming that you’ve sent money to a service provider, CC’ing one of these nice, short aliases provides a quick way to let the others know that a bill’s been paid (this one’s especially useful where, like me, you live in a 3+ adult household and otherwise you’d be having to add multiple people to the CC field).

Sure, the need for most of these solutions would evaporate instantly if more services supported multi-user or delegated access³. But outside of that fantasy world, shared aliases seem to be pretty useful!

Footnotes

¹ The most ill-conceived example of geographically-based email addresses I’ve ever seen came from a a 2003 proposal by then-MP Derek Wyatt, who proposed that the domain name part of every single email address should contain not only the country of the owner (e.g. .uk) but also their complete postcode. He was under the delusion that this would somehow prevent spam. Even ignoring the immense technical challenges of his proposal and the impossibility of policing it across the borders of every country that uses email… it probably wouldn’t even be effective at his stated goal. I’ll let The Register take it from here.

² No ageism intended: I suspect that the phenomenon actually stems from the fact that as email took off in the noughties this demographic who were significantly more-likely than younger folks to have (a) a very long-term home that they didn’t anticipate moving out of any time soon, and (b) an existing anticipation that people and companies wrote to them as a couple, not individually.

³ I’d love it if the grocery delivery sites would let multiple “accounts”, by mutual consent, share a delivery slot, destination, and payment method. It’d be cool to know that we could e.g. have a houseguest and give them temporary access to a specific order that was scheduled for during their stay. But that’s probably a lot of work for very little payoff if you’re busy running a supermarket.

Somewhat-Effective Spam Filters

I’ve tried a variety of unusual strategies to combat email spam over the years.

Here are some of them (each rated in terms the geekiness of its implementation and its efficacy), in case you’d like to try any yourself. They’re all still in use in some form or another:

Spam filters

Geekiness: 1/10
Efficacy: 5/10

Your email provider or your email software probably provides some spam filters, and they’re probably pretty good. I use Proton‘s and, when I’m at my desk, Thunderbird‘s. Double-bagging your spam filter only slightly reduces the amount of spam that gets through, but increases your false-positive rate and some non-spam gets mis-filed.

A particular problem is people who email me for help after changing their name on FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, probably because they’re not only “new” unsolicited contacts to me but because by definition many of them have strange and unusual names (which is why they’re emailing me for help in the first place).

Frankly, spam filters are probably enough for many people. Spam filtering is in general much better today than it was a decade or two ago. But skim the other suggestions in case they’re of interest to you.

Unique email addresses

Geekiness: 3/10
Efficacy: 8/10

If you give a different email address to every service you deal with, then if one of them misuses it (starts spamming you, sells your data, gets hacked, whatever), you can just block that one address. All the addresses come to the same inbox, for your convenience. Using a catch-all means that you can come up with addresses on-the-fly: you can even fill a paper form with a unique email address associated with the company whose form it is.

On many email providers, including the ever-popular GMail, you can do this using plus-sign notation. But if you want to take your unique addresses to the next level and you have your own domain name (which you should), then you can simply redirect all email addresses on that domain to the same inbox. If Bob’s Building Supplies wants your email address, give them bobs@yourname.com, which works even if Bob’s website erroneously doesn’t accept email addresses with plus signs in them.

This method actually works for catching people misusing your details. On one occasion, I helped a band identify that their mailing list had been hacked. On another, I caught a dodgy entrepreneur who used the email address I gave to one of his businesses without my consent to send marketing information of a different one of his businesses. As a bonus, you can set up your filtering/tagging/whatever based on the incoming address, rather than the sender, for the most accurate finding, prioritisation, and blocking.

Also, it makes it easy to have multiple accounts with any of those services that try to use the uniqueness of email addresses to prevent you from doing so. That’s great if, like me, you want to be in each of three different Facebook groups but don’t want to give Facebook any information (not even that you exist at the intersection of those groups).

Signed unique email addresses

Geekiness: 10/10
Efficacy: 2/10

Unique email addresses introduce two new issues: (1) if an attacker discovers that your Dreamwidth account has the email address dreamwidth@yourname.com, they can probably guess your LinkedIn email, and (2) attackers will shotgun “likely” addresses at your domain anyway, e.g. admin@yourname.com, management@yourname.com, etc., which can mean that when something gets through you get a dozen copies of it before your spam filter sits up and takes notice.

What if you could assign unique email addresses to companies but append a signature to each that verified that it was legitimate? I came up with a way to do this and implemented it as a spam filter, and made a mobile-friendly webapp to help generate the necessary signatures. Here’s what it looked like:

The domain directs all emails at that domain to the same inbox.
If the email address is on a pre-established list of valid addresses, that’s fine.
Otherwise, the email address must match the form of:
- A string (the company name), followed by
- A hyphen, followed by
- A hash generated using the mechanism described below, then
- The @-sign and domain name as usual

The hashing algorithm is as follows: concatenate a secret password that only you know with a colon then the “company name” string, run it through SHA1, and truncate to the first eight characters. So if my password were swordfish1 and I were generating a password for Facebook, I’d go:

SHA1 ( swordfish1 : facebook) [ 0 ... 8 ] = 977046ce
Therefore, the email address is facebook-977046ce@myname.com
If any character of that email address is modified, it becomes invalid, preventing an attacker from deriving your other email addresses from a single point (and making it hard to derive them given multiple points)

I implemented the code, but it soon became apparent that this was overkill and I was targeting the wrong behaviours. It was a fun exercise, but ultimately pointless. This is the one method on this page that I don’t still use.

Honeypots

Geekiness: 8/10
Efficacy: ?/10

A honeypot is a “trap” email address. Anybody who emails it get aggressively marked as a spammer to help ensure that any other messages they send – even to valid email addresses – also get marked as spam.

I litter honeypots all over the place (you might find hidden email addresses on my web pages, along with text telling humans not to use them), but my biggest source of honeypots is formerly-valid unique addresses, or “guessed” catch-all addresses, which already attract spam or are otherwise compromised!

I couldn’t tell you how effective it is without looking at my spam filter’s logs, and since the most-effective of my filters is now outsourced to Proton, I don’t have easy access to that. But it certainly feels very satisfying on the occasions that I get to add a new address to the honeypot list.

Instant throwaways

Geekiness: 5/10
Efficacy: 6/10

OpenTrashmail is an excellent throwaway email server that you can deploy in seconds with Docker, point some MX records at, and be all set! A throwaway email server gives you an infinite number of unique email addresses, like other solutions described above, but with the benefit that you never have to see what gets sent to them.

If you offer me a coupon in exchange for my email address, it’s a throwaway email address I’ll give you. I’ll make one up on the spot with one of my (several) trashmail domains at the end of it, like justgivemethedamncoupon@danstrashmailserver.com. I can just type that email address into OpenTrashmail to see what you sent me, but then I’ll never check it again so you can spam it to your heart’s content.

As a bonus, OpenTrashmail provides RSS feeds of inboxes, so I can subscribe to any email-based service using my feed reader, and then unsubscribe just as easily (without even having to tell the owner).

Summary

With the exception of whatever filters your provider or software comes with, most of these options aren’t suitable for regular folks. But you’re only a domain name (assuming you don’t have one already) away from being able to give unique email addresses to everybody you deal with, and that’s genuinely a game-changer all by itself and well worth considering, in my opinion.

5 Cool Apps for your Unraid NAS

I’ve got a (now four-year-old) Unraid NAS called Fox and I’m a huge fan. I particularly love the fact that Unraid can work not only as a NAS, but also as a fully-fledged Docker appliance, enabling me to easily install and maintain all manner of applications.

A cube-shaped black computer sits next to a battery pack on a laminated floor. A sign has been left atop it, reading "Caution: Generator connected to this installation." — There isn’t really a generator attached to Fox, just a UPS battery backup. The sign was liberated from our shonky home electrical system.

I was chatting this week to a colleague who was considering getting a similar setup, and he seemed to be taking notes of things he might like to install, once he’s got one. So I figured I’d round up five of my favourite things to install on an Unraid NAS that:

Don’t require any third-party accounts (low dependencies),
Don’t need any kind of high-powered hardware (low specs), and
Provide value with very little set up (low learning curve).

Here we go:

Syncthing

I’ve been raving about Syncthing for years. If I had an “everyday carry” list of applications, it’d be high on that list.

Here’s the skinny: you install Syncthing on several devices, then give each the identification key of another to pair them. Now you can add folders on each and “share” them with the others, and the two are kept in-sync. There’s lots of options for power users, but just as a starting point you can use this to:

Manage the photos on your phone and push copies to your desktop whenever you’re home (like your favourite cloud photo sync service, but selfhosted).
Keep your Obsidian notes in-sync between all your devices (normally costs $4/month).¹
Get a copy of the documents from all your devices onto your NAS, for backup purposes (note that sync’ing alone, even with versioning enabled, is not a good backup: the idea is that you run an actual backup from your NAS!).

Huginn

You know IFTTT? Zapier? Services that help you to “automate” things based on inputs and outputs. Huginn’s like that, but selfhosted. Also: more-powerful.

The learning curve is steeper than anything else on this list, and I almost didn’t include it for that reason alone. But once you’ve learned your way around its idiosyncrasies and dipped your toe into the more-advanced Javascript-powered magic it can do, you really begin to unlock its potential.

It couples well with Home Assistant, if that’s your jam. But even without it, you can find yourself automating things you never expected to.

FreshRSS

I’ve written a lot about how and why FreshRSS continues to be my favourite RSS reader. But you know what’s even better than an awesome RSS reader? An awesome selfhosted RSS reader!

Many of these suggested apps benefit well from you exposing them to the open Web rather than just running them on your LAN, and an RSS reader is probably the best example (you want to read your news feeds when you’re out and about, right?). What you need for that is a reverse proxy, and there are lots of guides to doing it super-easily, even if you’re not on a static IP address.². Alternatively you can just VPN in to your home: your router might be able to arrange this, or else Unraid can do it for you!

Open Trashmail

You know how sometimes you need to give somebody your email address but you don’t actually want to. Like: sure, I’d like you to email me a verification code for this download, but I don’t trust you not to spam me later! What you need is a disposable email address.³

You just need to install Open Trashmail, point the MX records of a few domain names or subdomains (you’ve got some spare domain names lying around, right? if not; they’re pretty cheap…) at it, and it will now accept email to any address on those domains. You can make up addresses off the top of your head, even away from an Internet connection when using a paper-based form, and they work. You can check them later if you want to… or ignore them forever.

Couple it with an RSS reader, or Huginn, or Slack, and you can get a notification or take some action when an email arrives!

Need to give that escape room your email address to get a copy of your “team photo”? Give them a throwaway, pick up the picture when you get home, and then forget you ever gave it to them.
Company give you a freebie on your birthday if you sign up their mailing list? Sign up 366 times with them and write a Huginn workflow that puts “today’s” promo code into your Obsidian notetaking app (Sync’d over Syncthing) but filters out everything else.
Suspect some organisation is selling your email address on to third parties? Give them a unique email address that you only give to them and catch them in a honeypot.

YOURLS

Finally: a URL shortener. The Internet’s got lots of them, but they’re all at the mercy of somebody else (potentially somebody in a country that might not be very-friendly with yours…).

Plus, it’s just kinda cool to be able to brand your shortlinks with your own name, right? If you follow only one link from this post, let it be to watch this video that helps explain why this is important: danq.link/url-shortener-highlights.

I run many, many other Docker containers and virtual machines on my NAS. These five aren’t even the “top five” that I use… they’re just five that are great starters because they’re easy and pack a lot of joy into their learning curve.

And if your NAS can’t do all the above… consider Unraid for your next NAS!

Footnotes

¹ I wrote the beginnings of this post on my phone while in the Channel Tunnel and then carried on using my desktop computer once I was home. Sync is magic.

² I can’t share or recommend one reverse proxy guide in particular because I set my own up because I can configure Nginx in my sleep, but I did a quick search and found several that all look good so I imagine you can do the same. You don’t have to do it on day one, though!

³ Obviously there are lots of approachable to on-demand disposable email addresses, including the venerable “plus sign in a GMail address” trick, but Open Trashmail is just… better for many cases.

Pen Pals Wanted

Semi-inspired by a similar project by Kev Quirk, I’ve got a project I want to run on my blog in 2024.

I want you to be my pen pal for a month. Get in touch by emailing penpals@danq.me or any other way you like and let’s do this!

Traditional inkwell and pen, the latter held in an inkstained finger grip, being used to write a letter on unbleached paper atop a wooden desk. — We’ll use email, though, not paper.

I don’t know much about the people who read my blog, whether they’re ad-hoc visitors or regular followers¹.

Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and jeans, sits hunched over a keyboard with Pride-coloured keys, looking thoughtfully at a widescreen monitor. On the monitor is a mocked-up screenshot showing site analytics for DanQ.me, but with question marks for every datapoint. — I’m not interested in collecting statistics about people reading this post. I’m interested in meeting them.

So here’s the plan: I’m looking to do is to fill a “dance card” of interesting people each of with whom I’ll “pen pal” for a month.

The following month, I’ll blog about the experience: who I met, what I learned about them, what I learned about myself. Have a look below and see if there’s a slot for you: I’d love to chat to you about, well – anything!

My goals:

- Get inspired to blog about new/different things (and hopefully help inspire others to do the same).
- Connect with a dozen folks on a more-interpersonal level than I normally do via my blog.

Maybe even make, or deepen, some friendships!

The “rules”:

Aiming for at least 3 email exchanges over a month. Maybe more.²
Email is the medium.³
There’s no specific agenda: I promise to bring what I’ve been thinking about and working on, and possibly a spicy conversation-starter from LetsLifeChat.com. You bring whatever you like. No topic is explicitly off the table unless somebody says it is (which anybody can do at any time, for any or no reason).
I’ll blog a summary of my experience the month afterwards, but I won’t share anything without permission. I’ll happily share an unpublished draft with each penpal first so they can veto any bits they don’t like. I’ll refer to you by whatever name, link etc. suits you best.
If you have a blog/digital garden/social presence of any kind, you’re welcome to blog about it too. Or not: entirely up to you!

Who’s in so far?

~~Want in? Leave a comment, at-me on the Fediverse @dan@danq.me, fill my contact form, or just email penpals@danq.me.~~ Okay; looks like I’ve got a full year of people to meet! Awesome!

Penpal with…	…during…	…and blog in:	Notes:
Colin Walker	December 2023	January 2024	Colin’s announcement
Thom Denholm	January 2024	February 2024
Ru	February 2024	March 2024
Dr. Alex Bowyer	March 2024	April 2024	Agreement via LinkedIn
Roslyn Cook	April 2024	May 2024
Garrett Coakley	May 2024	June 2024
Derek Kedziora	June 2024	July 2024
Aarón Fas	July 2024	August 2024
Cal Desmond-Pearson	August 2024	September 2024
Tyoma	September 2024	October 2024
Farai	October 2024	November 2024
Katie	November 2024	December 2024	Katie’s comment

I’ll update this table as people get in touch.

Who do I want to meet?

You! If you’re reading this, you’re probably somebody I want to meet! But I’d be especially interested in penpalling with people who tick one or more of the following boxes:

Personal bloggers at the edges of or just outside my usual social circles. Maybe you’re an IndieWeb, RSS Club, or Geminispace explorer?
Regular readers, whether you just skim the post titles and dive in once in a blue moon or read every post and comment on the things you care about.
Automatticians from parts of the company I don’t get to interact with. Let’s build some bridges!
People whose interests overlap with mine in any way, large or small. That overlap might be technology (web standards, accessibility, security, blogging, open source…), hobbies (GPS sports, board games, magic, murder mysteries, science fiction, getting lost on Wikipedia…), volunteering (third sector support, tech for good, diversity in tech…), social (queer issues, polyamory, socialism…), or something else entirely.
Missed connections. Did we meet briefly or in-passing (conferences, meetups, friends-of-friends, overlapping volunteering circles) but not develop anything further? I’d love to pick up where we left off!
Distant- and nearly-friends. Did we drift apart long ago, or never quite move into one another’s orbit in the first place? This could be your excuse to touch bases!

If you read this far and didn’t email penpals@danq.me yet, go do that. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Footnotes

¹ Not-knowing who reads my blog might come at least in part from the fact that I actively sabotage any plugin that might give me any analytics! One might say I’ve shot myself in the foot, there.

² If we stay in touch afterwards that’s fine too, but it’s not essential.

³ I’m looking for longer-form, but slower, communication than you get via e.g. instant messengers and whatnot: a more “penpal” experience.

Debian + DKIM for Dummies

Earlier this year, for reasons of privacy/love of selfhosting, I moved the DanQ.me mailing list from Mailchimp to Listmonk (there’s a blog post about how I set it up), relaying outbound messages via an SMTP server provided by my domain registrar, Gandi.

I assume that you knew that you can get an email, no more than once per day or once per week (your choice!) of what I get up to online, right? Email not your jam: there are plenty of other options too!

Unfortunately, Gandi recently announced that they’ll no longer be providing email services for free, so rather than fork out €4/month for an email address I won’t even read, I decided to inhouse it.

And because I learned a few things while doing so, I wrote this blog post so that next time I have to configure Postfix + DKIM, I’ll know where to find a guide. If it helps you in the meantime, that’s just a bonus.

Photograph of a French Bulldog on a wooden floor playing tug-of-war using a multicoloured plaited rope (the human holding the other end of the rope is behind the camera). — If the first rule of computing is “never roll your own crypto” (based on Schneier’s Law), the second rule might be “don’t run your own mailserver”. I don’t have a good picture to illustrate that, so here’s a photo of my dog playing tug-of-war.

Postfix

Running your own mailserver is a pain. I used to do it for all of my email, but – like many other nerds – when spam reached its peak and deliverability became an issue, I gave up and oursourced it¹.

Screenshot of a Weekly Digest email from DanQ.me, showing in Mozilla Thunderbird. — Fun fact: when I’m at my desktop, I use a classic desktop email application for my personal email, like it’s the 90s or something².

Luckily, I don’t need it to do much. I just need a mail transfer agent with an (unauthenticated, but local-only) SMTP endpoint: something that Listmonk can dump emails into, which will then reach out to the mailservers representing each of the recipients and relay them on. A default install of Postfix does all that out-of-the-box, so I ran sudo apt install postfix, accepted all the default options, and put the details into Listmonk.

Screenshot showing Listmonk's SMTP configuration screen. The host "192.168.2.12" and port "25" have been entered, TLS has been set to "STARTTLS", Skip TLS verification is enabled, and Auth Protocol is set to "None". — Listmonk makes adding an SMTP server very easy, and even includes a quick “test connection” link with which you can try out your settings.

Next, I tweaked my DNS configuration to add an SPF record, and tested it. This ought to have been enough to achieve approximate parity with what Gandi had been providing me with. Not bad.

$ dig +short -t TXT danq.link
"v=spf1 a mx a:fox.q-t-a.uk ip4:83.151.206.115 ~all"

You really can’t be doing without an SPF record as a minimum these days.

I sent a test email to a Gmail account, where I noticed two problems:

Screenshot from GMail showing a message with a red slashed padlock icon, which when clicked advises that "mail.danq.link did not encrypt this message". — It turns out that since the last time I ran a mailserver “for real”, the use of TLS for inter-server communication has become… basically mandatory. You don’t strictly have to do it, but if you don’t, some big email providers will put scary security warnings on your messages. This is a good thing.

The first problem was that Postfix on Debian isn’t configured by-default to use opportunistic TLS when talking to other mailservers. That’s a bit weird, but I’m sure there’s a good reason for it. The solution was to add smtp_tls_security_level = may to my /etc/postfix/main.cf.

The second problem was that without a valid DKIM signature on them, about half of my test emails were going straight to the spam folder. Again, it seems that since the last time I seriously ran a mailserver 20 years ago, this has become something that isn’t strictly required… but your emails aren’t going to get through if you don’t.

I’ve put it off this long, but I think it’s finally time for me to learn some practical DKIM.

Understanding DKIM

What’s DKIM, then?

A server that wants to send email from a domain generates a cryptographic keypair.
The public part of the key is published using DNS. The private part is kept securely on the server.
When the server relays mail on behalf of a user, it uses the private key to sign the message body and a stated subset of the headers³, and attaches the signature as an email header.
When a receiving server (or, I suppose, a client) receives mail, it can check the signature by acquiring the public key via DNS and validating the signature.

In this way, a recipient can be sure that an email received from a domain was sent with the authorisation of the owner of that domain. Properly-implemented, this is a strong mitigation against email spoofing.

OpenDKIM

To set up my new server to sign outgoing mail, I installed OpenDKIM and its keypair generator using sudo apt install opendkim opendkim-tools. It’s configuration file at /etc/opendkim.conf needed the following lines added to it:

# set up a socket for Postfix to connect to:
Socket inet:12301@localhost

# set up a file to specify which IPs/hosts can send through us without authentication and get their messages signed:
ExternalIgnoreList      refile:/etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts
InternalHosts           refile:/etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts

# set up a file to specify which selector/domain are used to each incoming email address:
SigningTable            refile:/etc/opendkim/SigningTable

# set up a file to specify which signing key to use for each selector/domain:
KeyTable                refile:/etc/opendkim/KeyTable

Into /etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts I put a list of local IPs/domains that would have their emails signed by this server. Mine looks like this (in this example I’m using example.com as my domain name, and default as the selector for it: the selector can be anything you like, it only matters if you’ve got multiple mailservers signing mail for the same domain). Note that 192.168.0.0/16 is the internal subnet on which my sending VM will run.

127.0.0.0.1
::1
192.168.0.0/16
*.example.com
example.com

/etc/opendkim/SigningTable maps email addresses (I’m using a wildcard) to the subdomain whose TXT record will hold the public key for the signature. This also goes on to inform the KeyTable which private key to use:

*@example.com default._domainkey.example.com

And then /etc/opendkim/KeyTable says where to find the private key for that:

default._domainkey.example.com example.com:default:/etc/opendkim/keys/example.com/default.private

Next, we need to create and secure that keypair. In /etc/opendkim/keys/example.com/, we run:

sudo opendkim-genkey -s default -d example.com
sudo chown opendkim:opendkim default.private

At last, we can configure Postfix to filter all mail through OpenDKIM by adding to our /etc/postfix/main.cf file:

milter_protocol = 2
milter_default_action = accept
smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:12301
non_smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:12301

DNS

The public key needs publishing via DNS. Conveniently, when you create a keypair using its tools, OpenDKIM provides a sample (in BIND-style) for you to copy-paste from or adapt: look in /etc/opendkim/keys/example.com/default.txt!

Once we’ve restarted both services (sudo service postfix restart; sudo service opendkim restart), we can test it!

Screenshot from GMail showing "DKIM: 'PASS' with domain danq.link". — Once the major email providers – who have the worst spam problem to deal with – say that your email signature looks good, you’re good.

So I learned something new today.

If you, too, love to spend your Saturday mornings learning something new, have a look at those subscription options to decide how you’d like to hear about whatever I get up to next.

Footnotes

¹ I still outsource my personal email, and I sing the praises of the excellent folks behind ProtonMail.

² My desktop email client also doubles as my newsreader, because, yes, of course you can still find me on USENET. Which, by the way, is undergoing a mini-revival…

³ Why doesn’t DKIM sign all the headers in an email? Because intermediary servers and email clients will probably add their own headers, thereby invalidating the signature! DKIM gets used to sign the From: header, for obvious reasons, and ought to be used for other headers whose tampering could be significant such as the Date: and Subject:, but it’s really up to the signing server to choose a subset.

Installing Listmonk on Unraid

I wanted to play about with Listmonk and it’s available as a Docker image, so I figured I’d just install it on my Unraid box. It doesn’t have a recipe in Community Apps but it’s not usually hard to reverse-engineer an official installation guide into something that “just works” on Unraid. After a first attempt failed, I looked around for a quick how-to guide online and mostly found… a mixture of people similarly failing to get it working or else having a kindly stranger offer to help… but not on the open Web where the rest of us can benefit from their knowledge. Sigh.

So I resolved that when I figured it out, I’d document the steps so that the next person after me can have an easier job of it.

Installing Listmonk on Unraid

Install Postgres if you don’t have it already. I used the postgresql15 image from Community Apps.
Set up a role and database. To do this, log in to your Postgres database using your favourite Postgres client and run, for example:
CREATE USER listmonk WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'my-listmonk-db-password'; CREATE DATABASE listmonk OWNER listmonk;
Create a Listmonk configuration file. I created a listmonk share and put it in there, calling it /listmonk/config.toml, but anywhere on your Unraid server will do. There’s a sample configuration in the repository. You’ll probably want to change:
- [app] address: change to 0.0.0.0:9000 to listen on all interfaces so you can access it from elsewhere on your network (might not be needed if you intend to proxy with a host-networked reverse proxy server)
- [app] admin_username / admin_password: obviously change these – this is how you’ll log in to your Listmonk system
- [db] host: if your Postgres container and/or Listmonk container is running in bridged networking mode rather than host networking mode, you’ll need to change this to the name or IP address of your Postgres server
- [db] password: set to the password you chose for the listmonk user on your Postgres server
Add a Listmonk container. In Unraid, on the Docker tab, click the Add Container button. A minimal configuration might look like this:
- Name: Listmonk
- Repository: listmonk/listmonk:latest
- Network Type: consider using Host to simplify your [db] setup, above.
- Add a Port with Name: HTTP and Host Port: 9000. Then fill in 9000 as the value (or whatever port you want to run Listmonk on)
- Add a Path with Name: Config and Container Path: /listmonk/config.toml. Set the Host Path to wherever you put the Listmonk configuration file, e.g. /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml.
Start the Listmonk container and watch it stop. When you click “Apply” the container will start, run for a few seconds, and then stop. If you want, look at the logs and you’ll see what the problem is: it needs to be started in a different way in order to set up the database. Instead, what we’ll do is spin up a new Listmonk container just for that purpose (and then throw it away).
Start Listmonk in “install” mode. SSH into your Unraid server itself and run, e.g.docker run --rm -ti --net='host' -e TZ="UTC" -v '/mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml':'/listmonk/config.toml':'rw' listmonk/listmonk:latest ./listmonk -- --install Substitute /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml for whatever path your configuration file is at, if applicable. You’ll be prompted with the messages “** first time installation **”, “** IMPORTANT: This will wipe existing listmonk tables and types in the DB ‘listmonk’ **”, and then asked “continue (y/N)?”. Press “y” and the installation will complete.
Start the Listmonk container again. This time it’ll stay running and you’ll be able to access the Web interface via e.g. https://your-unraid-server:9000/

Hope that helps somebody!

Email newsletters via RSS

I love feeds!

Maybe you’ve heard already, but I love RSS.

I love it so much that I retrofit sites without feeds into it for the convenience of my favourite reader FreshRSS: working around (for example) the lack of feeds in The Far Side (twice), in friends’ blogs, and in my URL shortener. Whether tracking my progress binging webcomic history, subscribing to YouTube channels, or filtering-out sports news, feeds are the centre of my digital life.

There’s been a bit of a resurgence lately of sites whose only subscription option is email, or – worse yet – who provide certain “exclusive” content only to email subscribers.

I don’t want to go giving an actual email address to every damn service, because:

It’s not great for privacy, even when (as usual) I use a unique alias for each sender.
It’s usually harder to unsubscribe than I’d like, and rarely consistent: you need to find a recent message, click a link, sometimes that’s enough or sometimes you need to uncheck a box or click a button, or sometimes you’ll get another email with something to click in it…
I rarely want to be notified the very second a new issue is published; email is necessarily more “pushy” than I like a subscription to be.
I don’t want to use my email Inbox to keep track of which articles I’ve read/am still going to read: that’s what a feed reader is for! (It also provides tagging, bookmarking, filtering, standardised and bulk unsubscribing tools, etc.)

So what do I do? Well…

I already operate an OpenTrashMail instance for one-shot throwaway email addresses (which I highly recommend). And OpenTrashMail provides a rich RSS feed. Sooo…

How I subscribe to newsletters (in my feed reader)

If I want to subscribe to your newsletter, here’s what I do:

Put an email address (I usually just bash the keyboard to make a random one, then put @-a-domain-I-control on the end, where that domain is handled by OpenTrashMail) in to subscribe.
Put https://my-opentrashmail-server/rss/the-email-address-I-gave-you/rss.xml into my feed reader.
That’s all. There is no step 3.

Now I get your newsletter alongside all my other subscriptions. If I want to unsubscribe I just tell my feed reader to stop polling the RSS feed (You don’t even get to find out that I’ve unsubscribed; you’re now just dropping emails into an unmonitored box, but of course I can resubscribe and pick up from where I left off if I ever want to).

Obviously this approach isn’t suitable for personalised content or sites for which your email address is used for authentication, because anybody who can guess the random email address can get the feed! But it’s ideal for those companies who’ll ocassionally provide vouchers in exchange for being able to send you other stuff to your Inbox, because you can simply pipe their content to your feed reader, then add a filter to drop anything that doesn’t contain the magic keyword: regular vouchers, none of the spam. Or for blogs that provide bonus content to email subscribers, you can get the bonus content in the same way as the regular content, right there in a folder of your reader. It’s pretty awesome.

If you don’t already have and wouldn’t benefit from running OpenTrashMail (or another trashmail system with feed support) it’s probably not worth setting one up just for this purpose. But otherwise, I can certainly recommend it.