My experience has been that MAIB version updates are usually very smooth. Regular OS update (apt update/apt install) are smooth. The big problem is that the recommended path is to install on a fresh system when moving between OS versions. In the most recent release that required that, I actually did an in-place upgrade of the OS by running do-release-upgrade twice and leaving the config files as-is. I followed some steps that were posted on the forum. I ran into one or two minor issues but they were the sorts of things I'd expect to see running an "unsupported" upgrade. Other than the OS updates which just take time to download and install, the total work doing it this unofficial way was maybe a couple of hours. That's necessary every 2-3 years, I think?
I do have a few things that I've customized. Updates to MIAB will overwrite them if they're involved in the services it provides. Recently NextCloud updates have been better about removing all of your plugins. The only problem I ever had with it during an update was when the SQLite DB got corrupt. That basically made it so you had to reset NextCloud.
It's not the hours of work that is problematic (though that should go away too). It is the stress of somehow losing my mail. Of course I have backups, but still I would rather not deal with the hassle of recovering from them.
I really wish, we were in a place where such software were designed for NixOS.
FWIW, I use MIAB and my e-mails aren't dropped regularly from what I can tell. Before this, I was using a mix of CPanel and gmail but for a variety of reasons, I wanted to take greater control of my e-mail.
I signed up with a small VPS/hosting provider that offered a decent amount of storage space with their VMs. I don't send spam and have maintained the domain name for a lot of years. I checked the IP for blacklists before migrating the domain to it. I may have had to e-mail one blacklist provider about being removed but if I did, I don't remember it.
Since MIAB sets up DKIM and SPF, your deliverability is pretty good out of the box. I don't send spam and so I think the IP's reputation has been getting better and better over the last few years. The truth is that for personal e-mail, the majority of messages are inbound and that's really not a problem.
If my memory serves the project started around the time of a popular blog post called NSA-Proof Your E-mail[1]. It may have been Josh's inspiration for the project, I'm not sure. In any event, the techniques described are pretty standard mail hosting and so MAIB's techniques are pretty much the same. I think it's just saying that while it does improve some things, it's not going to be what that blog post promised.
You have to think about Postel's law in terms of protocols and mistakes in your implementation. You assume your implementation isn't perfect and neither is the other. Do your best to be perfect and if you get something that isn't quite right, do your best to handle it well. That doesn't mean you don't validate inputs, it means that if data should come with a \n but instead comes with \n\r, you should treat it as a \n.
I think you miss their point which is that has led to a large number of security bugs. Because it is then path to exploits and sloppiness which then cannot be corrected because of backward compatibility or such.
Anyone else remember the time, years ago, when someone introduced a new performance feature to TCP, using an otherwise-unused bit in the header. Unfortunately, rolling it out turned into a giant clusterfuck because many routers on the internet interpreted "this bit is unused" as "this bit will always be zero"?
Postel's Law isn't why we can't correct errors for backwards compatibility reasons.
We can't correct those because backwards compatibility is necessary to creating a global network that lasts decades. It's the railway effect... One simply can't expect every player to update their architecture religiously because they can't afford to, therefore what is made public tends to stick around for ages, and anything that fails to recognize that stickiness (IPv6 is my go to example) does so at its own peril.
I agree with you 100%. I've had it for quite a while. When I see Youtube without being logged in, I really can't imagine using the at all with the current level of ads - it's gotten way worse in the past few years.
I also like having access to YouTube music but like so many things with streaming, you're not certain to get continued access to stuff you like. I've started buying MP3's of songs that I like again so that I don't have to worry that Google will stop carrying the music any more or raise prices on YouTube Premium to a level I don't like.
I have less and less trust for the big companies that provide these services so I'm focusing more on self-hosting and some form of ownership. It's not just MP3's. I'm also making sure that I'm using FOSS for my note taking (Joplin), backups (duplicati) and other such things. Some of this stuff is too valuable to me to risk losing access to.
I'm self hosting with mail-in-a-box as well. It comes with a nextcloud install. It hasn't been flawless but it's been good and I'm happy to have some control.
With e-mail, I haven't had any problems with one exception. When e-mailing the local school system, they reject my e-mails. I looked into it and it turns out that their spam provider was blocking me because I was a private domain or something like that. It was a configuration on their side. Their tech support told me that I should "get an e-mail address with a normal extension."
Outside of that issue, my e-mails have gotten delivered. Between graylisting and the built-in spam filter software, I haven't had any spam issues. It's been smooth as far as that goes. The webmail (roundcube) isn't as nice as gmail but desktop and mobile clients are good in any event.
The mail-in-a-box nextcloud install does use sqlite which means that you should make sure to backup contacts in case sqlite breaks. It broke for me once but I was able to copy my contacts from Thunderbird back into the system without any real problems.
Calendaring works pretty well with Nextcloud but I haven't found any calendar software that I really love. The web software is good but not super fast. Lightning has gotten better but still feels bolted on. Kontact calendar is too groupware-oriented for my personal use. Evolution never quite felt right to me. The built-in Apple calendar and Samsung (Andriod) calendar apps work fairly well.
Back when I ran slackware, it was pretty easy. You installed packages from the disk sets and the packages had the files they needed. It kept track of which packages wrote out which file in some text file so on removing a package it would know if removing the file was safe.
If I found software that didn't have a package, I would compile it. When I got more advanced, I'd create slack packages for the software. Since I'd compiled it on my system, dependencies were already met. I don't remember for sure, but I believe that the tools to build autoconf software were something in the core package set.
I do have a few things that I've customized. Updates to MIAB will overwrite them if they're involved in the services it provides. Recently NextCloud updates have been better about removing all of your plugins. The only problem I ever had with it during an update was when the SQLite DB got corrupt. That basically made it so you had to reset NextCloud.