Last week an e-buddy of mine pointed out that she was looking at mailinabox and wondered if it was worth her time. I checked it out, and decided it was, and furthermore was worth my time too.

I spun up a new Digital Ocean droplet, followed the instructions, and it worked. It worked out of the box, just like the name. I've only been using it for a day or two but it really does feel like the complete right direction for indieweb: a black box that you own that just works.

The email portion of this product wasn't even the thing that interested me most, in fact I have a domain on it that's not even my primary email domain (I may switch to this one now though, but that's a whole other process). The part that excited me the most was that ownCloud[owncloud] is installed and activated by default for every account you add to the system. This means truly indie contacts, calendar, and most importantly data. I found a $3 app called Photosync which allows me to automatically back up all new photos to my ownCloud account.

The result of this is that I was able to move my calendar, contacts, and photos out of iCloud and off of gmail (where my calendar was). It feels good to have sliced this little piece out of my own homestead.