@stefano "It's all about the cards..." Well, that depends if you care to play the card game they lay out or prefer something completly different alltogether.

@stefano Great job Stefano 😄 great to see that in Italy we have a strong tribe of *BSD fellowers :-)

@stefano Nice, well done!

@stefano ah, the dreaded “real world” which has its wars of “running”:/(

Congrats

@stefano
"Holds all the cards?"
U should have told him: "Yes True, but only if we don't know how to self host and rely on a corporate selling pitches to decide what's good for us"

@stefano running the mail server is easy the hard part for doing it in a business is all the other stuff like audits for ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification and whatnot, such that other businesses or governments can contract you.

@stefano Good for you!
I just lost that battle - we are moving from onprem Exchange to 365 because the CEO wants all those shiny cloud integrations for their calendar.

@stefano Good, you won a battle, but the war is still here to stay. Here, we (all people with the same ideas about) lost the battle in our national research institution. The prospect is that those monopolies will start to accept email only from qualified/registered peers, citing spam as the excuse, not too far in the future.

@stefano
Well, having Google "as a backup" wouldn't be so bad, if it's possible to be sanely configured. But putting encrypted snapshot of mail data on Google or any other clowd service would be easier "as a backup for time in disaster".

The sales person should have proposed such a use-cases.

And I'm old enough to retrieve my emails into local using POP3, preferred over IMAP. (gmail "service" doesn't seem to like it, though.)

@stefano tell me you were cheering with an espresso cup in the hand, equivalent of "dropping mic" for the nerds :)

@stefano now more than ever we need to run our own servers, open source is there ready and waiting. Thank you 👍

@stefano
Amazing job.

@stefano Just in case he hasn't seen this -- @mwl

@stefano #RunBSD !!

@stefano

presenting technically correct information, without a financial gain bias, isn't guaranteed to work every time but it's definitely worth trying every time. sometimes, the right thing happens.

@stefano In the meantime, the provider I've been paying to host my email just moved to Office365 and it took me many hours to get back into my email. *sigh*
I wish it were easy to find a decent self-sovereign provider for personal use. 🥺

@stefano I set up and ran one for a small hosting group. Good for you!

@stefano yeah but the flip side is managing that server and the spam blocking and all the other crap that comes with it

@stefano there is even an open spurce exchange-like server. Will ypu propose that or a more standard solution with postfix, imap etc?

@stefano

Wooooo well done Stefano! 👏

Brilliant work!

Also, it's always worth suggesting the self-hosting option even if someone doesn't go with your plan, because it puts it on their radar and they are way more likely to consider it in the future.

People are never going to consider options they don't know about.

@stefano fuck yes

@stefano how does one do that nowadays ? I feel like it used to be possible to do that back in the day … but I thought it was well nigh impossible nowadays to avoid email going into some black hole if not on some well known service? And i am a nerd! Lol. Is there a good write up anywhere ?

@stefano Congratulations, very well done!

Where you notably ahead of the sales person regarding the clients trust by way of earlier collaborations or where your arguments simply _that_ good or both? ;)

It would be really interesting to know the specifics of such a real world example of a FOSS-powered E-Mail suite. Which software packages on what servers? Which software is going to be used in what fashion by the users?

@stefano with your permission, i am definitely saying "can you provide an explanation instead of this brochure?" Next time a client sends me a brochure they were sent by a sales rep for my consideration 🙄

@stefano || One of the absurdities. Several years ago we built a "Linux Lab" in a corner classroom of the local HS. From the time we turned the router on with most every problem the IT people had they would point at us with some comment about our ruining their security. 8*) Glad you had a good experience. After about 3 months we were unplugged.

@stefano Random, but sincere, kudos!

@stefano i'm full of envy , did not have clients on my mail servers since the great Zimbra days . my personal server is DoveCot and Postdix although i'm afraid to give it to my clients and handle the endless problems with mails they MSFTshit is blocking. .

@stefano This is the direction we need to head (back) toward. Good work! 😎

@stefano good work!

@stefano nice! 👍 But people are actually moving from msft to google?

@stefano great job !