Run It Yourself
Overlaps somewhat with /c/floss_replacement and /c/privacy; crossposts welcome
I think you could use a Tor proxy on your server to avoid sharing your IP. Or use a VPN.
Instant messaging should be OK over TOR as long as people aren't transmitting over a vast amount of data
It depends on your threat model, as always. Since your IP is linked to you, police and everyone else who can legally ask your provider something will know who you really are. This can be a non-issue in some country and for some use-cases, and could be really dangerous for someone else. But except for this it should not impact deeply your privacy, AFAIK, and having communications under your only complete control is always a good thing. I would only be careful to not link too much services to my only person, especially "social media".
Still, I would advice against hosting your email server for your primary mail, since it will probably cause too many problems (antispam and the like) with other big providers
I'm not trying to be anonymous or anything, I just hate not being in control of my own privacy from things snooping everything I do. e.g. using a windows computer, using whatsapp, google. etc. for communications.
Although one worry I have is my home address being public information.
At most you can get a general area from the IP, not your actual home address. Edit: unless you are the police of course.
The IP itself is less problematic to be public than some people make it sound. There isn't really much anyone could do with it that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise anyways.
Of course if you really need protect your identity, hosting stuff from home isn't recommended.
I think LibreWolf browser helped me spoof my address. When i signed into Google, i go a gmail from Google saying that an unknown person was using my account in a city across the country and using Windows 10. At the time, I hadn't been using Windows at all and had never even tried Windows 10. Can't you get a friend to help you test it out? Ask them to turn on screen recorder and then open up an email from you or a message - then you can see what he/she sees. Then, that person sends you the video. there is also a live way to do that, but I forget what it is called - screen share or something. I think Zoom can do that and a few other software can. I'm not tech-savvy, so not sure if that'd work. Maybe someone here can correct me or add to my idea to make it work better.
I've already quit trying to be invisible, I thought doing so would make my life easier but the opposite happened. I kept trying to find ways that are almost impossible to do. Things I want to do by nature is publicly involved.
So the IP just reveals general area of location, correct? Is there anything I want to worry about in my case?
Yes very hard to do in modern society. But reducing your digital footprint is still a good idea 😉
You can do a reverse search on the domain and IP and it will usually show which ISP and maybe the city or larger region you are in.
Also depending on the domain name, some require to have public contact details available. Some domain registers offer to proxy those however.
Just don't selfhost email
Why?
Many ISP block the necessary ports outright to prevent someone sending spam. But even if not, rDNS is usually not supported and in general it is almost impossible to avoid being sorted out as spam by the large email providers.
So the only issue is that you can't send emails to people using those providers?
In the best case yes. Although there are some providers that allow you to proxy outgoing SMTP connections through their highly trust rated servers. But that at point you might as well get a cheap email with your domain provider and only host other stuff from home. Less hassle.
This and also you end up leaking your IP
And? isn't this entire thread about "leaking" IP being not such a big deal for most people? You can always run a VPN on your home server if you want to "hide" it when not at home.
If you have a dynamic IP is your IP leaking even a problem?
That doesn't really make a difference I think.
I've been wondering about this on-and-off for years.
What if I didn't give a shit? Like, maybe 1% of my gmail emails are complete garbage. Of those 1%, absolutely all of them are responses to account signups or online ordering off of big websites. For those, I could continue to use my gmail account.
But, at this point, email's almost worthless for real communication. If I wanted it to be for real communication, why could I not set up my own email server that is configured such that it blocks all non-encrypted emails received? Just bounces them outright. This means that it instantly becomes a zero-spammable service for me. And the dozen or so friends/family I might want to receive emails from can just get accounts on it.
I understand (and want) it to be isolated from the greater email system. Is this possible?
And if others wanted to (for shits and giggles? dunno) become part of it, it'd be as simple for them to set up similarly configured email servers. You could even test them automatically that they were following the rules... send an unencrypted email to it, and if it doesn't bounce just blacklist them.
I guess there'd have to be some sort of public key infrastructure for it, no idea how to do that.
I actually very seriously considered setting up a one way email to xmpp forwarder with a generic auto-reply informing people to just stop sending me email :-/
Other then for work, which is basically also not real email anymore, but something that looks like it, but is mostly contained to the MS-Teams / Exchange world, I basically never send any emails anyways.
One thing:
Hosting email at home is not possible at all. Since you didn't rent a static IP address and set the inverse zone of your email domain, most public and common email servers will auto-block you.
You need two static email addresses?
Edit: At this point I'll have another service provider to have my own email.
In DNS you have a direct zone for records A, AAAA, MX, TXT, etc and an inverse zone also called rDNS for PTR records.
It's not impossible -- if everyone starts doing it, then most public and common email servers cannot block them.
Self-hosting without applying these checks (which would involve signing a contract and exposing property data about the static IP address) is a thing used by spammers and they have the blocking automatized most times.