I agree with everyone here that self-hosting email is never easy, but if you still decide to go down this route then here are two tips that I personally found very helpful, especially when you decide to host it at home:

The first is to get an SMTP relay server. That’s just another mail server that yours can log into to actually send its mail, just like an email client would. That way you don’t have to worry about your IP’s sending reputation, because everyone will only see the relay’s reputable IP.

Second is to configure a Backup MX. That’s an additional MX DNS entry with lower priority than the primary, and it points to a special mail server that accepts any mail for you and tries to deliver it to the primary server forever (or something like an entire week). So when your primary server is unreachable other sending servers will deliver mail to the backup, and it delivers the mail to the primary as soon as that’s back online.

You can get these as separate services, but some DNS providers (like Strato for example) offer both with the base domain package. It makes self-hosting an email server much simpler and more reliable in my experience.

The thing is, Reddit also has money and lawyers. LW doesn’t, so it’s understandable that they play it safe imo.

Good to know I guess, but yea that’s a bit too speculative for my taste.

Looks ok to me, what in particular do you take issue with?

This UsenetServer discount link gives you 1 trial month for $1, then $50/year after that, and includes a 1TB TweakNews block and a paid PrivadoVPN account.

Completely agree! There are solutions for letting Lidarr download from Deezer and Tidal, but afaik no other music streaming services for some reason.

I’m transcoding everything to 320kbps MP3s. It’s much much smaller than flac, and I can’t hear the difference even if I try.

On Usenet altHUB and abook.link.

I just set up a Vouch-Proxy for this yesterday. It uses the nginx auth_request directive to authenticate users with an SSO server, and then stores the token in a domain-wide cookie, so you’re logged in across all subdomains. Works pretty well so far, you don’t even notice it when you’re logged in to your SSO provider.

But you do have to tell the proxy where you want to redirect a request somehow, either by subdomain (illegal.yourdomain.com) or port (yourdomain.com:8787) or path (yourdomain.com/illegal). I’m not sure if it works with raw IPs as hosts, but you can add additional restrictions like only allowing local client IPs.

In my special case I’m using the local Synology SSO server, and I have to spin up an additional nginx server because the built-in one doesn’t support auth_request.

UsenetServer, and I used this discount link.

Can’t talk for the free tier, but my Usenet account comes bundled with a paid Privado account, and that’s working ok so far. The connections have been reliable, fast, and low latency.

My main issue has been that it doesn’t support port forwarding. Also, some GeoIP services locate many of their servers in the Netherlands, instead of where Privado says they are. Idk who’s right, but it’s definitely a problem if you want to pick a specific location.

Just a heads up, trying to buy Uranium for the reactor on Ebay will get you in trouble real fast, so be careful!

Debrid services are usually cheaper (as low as $2.5/month), but you’re limited to public trackers with them.

Best tip I can give is to use a tool that’s made for this task, like Tdarr/FileFlows/Unmanic. They take care of all the complicated issues like encoders, ffmpeg parameters and parallel processing on multiple nodes, so you only have to handle the things you actually care about.

I’ve been running Gluetun for a few months now, and just the other day discovered that you can use it to seamlessly proxy Twitch streams (using it as http proxy for ttv lol pro), so they load via countries that Twitch doesn’t show ads for. Setting it up was ridiculously easy, and now I have neither ads nor endless loading anymore. The whole thing was a really nice surprise!

Yes. It makes it much harder to build a profile about you though, because you’re not logged in and they don’t know if those views come from you or someone else using your server. Even if you’re the only one, the website doesn’t know that.

I’m no expert on the topic, but I’ve also never heard of a case where a seedbox user was sued because of torrenting. As far as I can tell the seedbox providers only ever get takedown requests, they never have to hand over user data or logs. I believe that’s mostly because of the jurisdictions they operate in, but some also have restrictions like blocking public trackers.

There are probably a bunch of things that contribute to this. Seedbox providers fighting against information requests, their logs not being as valuable in court, law firms not knowing whether the IP they’d get would even lead to an address (as opposed to IPs of providers they know to be cooperative), the fact that you only downloaded from the seedbox and never uploaded anything yourself, and so on. Torrenting lawsuits are already pretty weak, and adding all this uncertainty probably makes it not worth the effort.

The juristiction where the provider operates, and the logging/disclosure requirements are very important! ISPs are often required to keep logs, VPN/Seedbox/Hosting providers usually are not. I’m not a lawyer and so on, but I could also imagine that logs from some VPN showing your IP was used to download/upload something are not as good as evidence as a mandatory (and probably somehow checked/verified) logs of an ISP are.

Another thing are provider incentives. If you’re running a general purpose hosting business you probably don’t want any shady stuff on your servers, and so you’re pretty happy to comply with any reasonable information request in that direction. As a VPN/Seedbox provider your business depends on people feeling safe and private on your servers, so you’ll do everything in your power to fight these requests, and there is a lot that can be done to fight them. And ofc if they do as they say and don’t keep logs then they don’t even have the requested information.

You operate it behind a VPN and the seedbox is just a means to get a 24/7 running Linux machine

I don’t think you need Seedbox + VPN. You can do that of course, but just one is usually enough. The important bit is that other torrent clients don’t see your personal home IP address, and the provider that does know your IP doesn’t have the obligation or incentive to disclose it. But if you want the extra protection you could search for VPN/Seedbox providers that accept crypto as payment, and chain multile VPNs or VPNs and a Seedbox, so none of them have the full picture. I think that’s pretty overkill though, and probably hell to set up and maintain. At that point you should probably go with Tor or I2P instead, because that’s basically how they operate (onion/garlic routing).

seedbox is just a means to get a 24/7 running Linux machine

They usually have very beefy connections, far better than what you get for your home internet, especially when it comes to uploads (asymmetric subscriber lines etc.).

You mainly depend on the fact that the providers don’t keep logs and don’t have to disclose your info. It’s not 100% safe, but nothing really is. The risk of misconfigurating your VPN and accidentally leaking your IP is very real as well for example.

Get a Usenet provider, a download client and a few indexers, set them up, and start downloading. Maybe automate with *arr apps at some point.

Some suggestions:

• Provider: UsenetServer ($1/month trial + $50/year discount)
• Downloader: SABnzbd
• Indexers: NZBGeek, altHUB, NZBIndex, abook.link (Forum), SceneNZBs (German), Tabula Rasa (invite only), NZBCat (invite only)

Most indexers let you search for free on their website, but grabbing download links and using their API with *arr apps is limited (e.g. 10 downloads and 100 API queries per day) unless you pay for VIP access (usually about $10/year/indexer). So you can try out a few, maybe pay for one or two that give you good results, and keep using the rest within the limits of free accounts.