Mynacol’s Personal Blog

Since some weeks I got a strange error message from the Nextcloud client on startup: Changes in synchronized folders could not be tracked reliably. At first, I ignored it, but I noticed Nextcloud wouldn’t sync local changes reliably to the server. After I lost a git commit (yes, I sync some git repos over Nextcloud), I took the issue seriously. I knew this was related to a Linux feature called inotify....

Mail clients are notorious for sending information not really required for mail conversations. They leak their identity and version number, sometimes even the operating system in User-Agent and X-Mailer headers. They leak the locally set time zone in the Date header. And sometimes they leak the private IP addresses during mail sending. Here I document some settings to hide this information in my preferred mail clients. Note: Hiding this metadata might not be enough to fully disguise your choice of mail clients....

I’m using NixOS since over a year for most of my server stuff and I’m loving it. One of the missing services was my email setup, originally deployed on Debian 10, later upgraded to Debian 11. I followed a setup guide and was quite happy, tweaking it over the years to my needs. Roughly, the software stack consists of Postfix as the MTA (“SMTP server”), Dovecot as the MDA (“IMAP server”) and rspamd including its requirement, redis, for spam protection and SPF/DKIM/DMARC verification as well as DKIM signing for outgoing mail....