Set this up possible within a home network with external relays&dns or would remote filesystems be a good way to get data out of the cloud

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#1

Email Relay OR remotely mounted user/backup data.

I’ve read a few email solutions that allow you to host your email at your home using email relays at Amazon or wherever. I thought the other alternative would be to set up a WireGuard link between my home and my MIAB server and some kind of network mount with fs-cache to mount the user data directory remotely from my house.

If a relay is possible

How secure would the relay be able to view the email contents? I know that email used to be simply plaintext leaving all emails available to MITM attacks. However, I’ve read that email now is somewhat encrypted, granted the metadata is not.

If remotely mounted data is feasible

Would it be painfully slow, or would it be a reasonable option?

#2

Email is now typically encrypted between servers using TLS so that other entities can’t read it, but all servers that an email (intentionally) passes through can read the complete email. There is no end-to-end encryption that prevents servers from reading email (unless you are using specialized software).

Without some extensive research into the ‘locking’ capabilities of the particular remote filesystem method, I would assume that using any remote filesystem could lead to significant data loss/corruption.

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#3

Thanks so much, @JoshData much appreciated that you responded directly. If I was to try doing a remote network mount, what paths should I look to mount? I was thinking of these directories, at least. /home/user-data/owncloud/ /home/user-data/mail/mailboxes/ and `/home/user-data/mail/*backup/

#4

That’s not really a question I can answer for you.

#5

@Ruseen MiaB is developed assuming a networking environment identical to a hosted VPS service.

It can be used in other environments, but it will be up to you to work out that configuration. Some users on the forums and Slack channel have worked out various different configurations for different environments, but your question I think is more outside of MiaB, and you may find better answers in places specifically addressing such questions.

One comment I would make is that if you place home/user-data/mail/mailboxes/ on a remote server, you may soon discover that the server is accessing these subdirectories a lot more frequently than perhaps you are imagining, and this may cause unpredictable problems, and this is outside of the likely file locking issue previously mentioned.

For the file locking issue, try checking with each project to see what you can find. For something like Dovecot, I know that large installations make heavy use of NFS, but I’m not sure what they might be changing in the configuration to make that work.

And definitely, of course, do not use this for your primary email until you really know you have your configuration issues completely sorted out. You can easily find yourself with posts on every forum everywhere about your borked server and no replies.

#6

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