Email on Macrogol's Blog

Increasing Privacy in Mail Clients

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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. The ordering of mail headers was not tackled, behavior with attachments varies equally high and other details disclose the mail client identity.

Hosting a Mail Server at Home

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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. I avoided a webmail service to keep things simple and I already use standard mail clients across my personal devices anyway.