Well, if you have broadband, always on Internet in your house, you can run your mailserver off an old computer you no longer use. If you have an IP address that changes, there are tools out there which will redirect your domain name over to you current IP address all the time. Back in the early oughties I used dyndns for that purpose and ran my small business mail and webserver out of my living room.
The PROBLEM with running your own mailserver, is that you do need to learn a few things about mail security in order to make it work well and keep your server, email, and the rest of your personal network safe. Itâs easy to securely set up a mailserver that ONLY sends mail, and that only from localhost, so you can send out all your email from your laptop, say. But, itâs a lot harder to do a proper job of setting up a server that can accept non-locahost outgoing mail without leaving the door open to spammers, as well as receive mail and filter spam well.
There are certainly tools to make all this happen. I can do it in an afternoon, and my kids who literally teethed on unix manuals can certainly do it. BoingBoing readers tend to be more technical than most, so lots of you can do this. But to think that most people could do it? Sorry, no. Not with current levels of general technological literacy.
This isnât a letter delivered by the postal service. Itâs handed to you and you sign for it like a federal subpeona/warrant. I know youâre just playing at this point, but the long standing âignorance of the law is no excuseâ comes into play here.
There is no way around this. Thatâs the problem. Not the businesses that are strong-armed into compliance. The big overreaching police state of a government is the problem.
What you and most US citizens seem to miss is that mass surveillance impacts/hinders Free Speech. If you know that your communication is watched you start to change your behavior - youâll avoid saying certain things, effectively censoring yourself (âWill my employer know that I told my brother itâs products are shit?â). There was a BB article exactly on this issue:
Communications surveillance should be regarded as a highly intrusive
act that potentially interferes with the rights to freedom of
expression and privacy and threatens the foundations of a democratic
society.
And when a USian (assuming you are) is saying the âUS is/has/makes ⌠the best of the worldâ, and they like to do that quite regularly, most often the opposite is true. Who has made the US the arbiter of what approach to Free Speech is the best approach? Not surprisingly the US thinks itâs implementation of Free Speech is superior to everyone elseâs. It may suprise you but even Free speech in the US has itâs limitations.
BTW It starts to look like Free speech and GUNS are the only Rights you have left in the US.
The founders made it very, very clear, that if we were to ever lose the first amendment, we were to overthrow the government with the second.
The founders didnât see the government getting so powerful that it kept its own standing army with massive weapons, though, they always envisioned state level militias that could be called up to defend the country if an immediate danger existed. Oh, and a Navy.
Nope. I am pretty sure that I didnât miss that. There is a reason why I cut a check big check to the EFF right after I learned of the NSA spying, on top of what hefty chunk I send out each year.
Itâs handed to you and you sign for it like a federal subpeona/warrant. I know youâre just playing at this point, but the long standing âignorance of the law is no excuseâ comes into play here.