Not for everyone, but I use a self-hosted single user email server for this. All the formatting your client permits, clients for every platform, attachments, organization into folders, synced automatically everywhere, etc. No spam filtering, MARC, DKIM, and the like because you only ever email yourself and you don’t permit external senders. I love it.

Well, there’s my first “Wait, what?” moment of the day.

I do housework during the ads. Get on your feet, get something accomplished, feel like a triumphant victor when returning to couch potato mode :)

Is there anything better than DOS jokes???

Scoffs derisively at the new popular thing and switches to BSD…

I use a 2011 ThinkPad X120e as an FTP/Syncthing server. It was underpowered as a laptop from day one, but still works fine as a lightweight server. The best thing about ThinkPads is that TLP allows you to set min/max charging thresholds, so that you can keep an old battery in good shape for … well, I’ll let you know. This one’s 14 years old and still has a four-hour run time.

One thing I’d like to try is “Wake My Potato” for shutdown / automatic restart when a power outage occurs.

Links:

TLP - https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html

Wake My Potato - https://github.com/pablogila/WakeMyPotato

When our local internet provider (Telus) first distributed wifi routers around 2004, they didn’t turn on encryption by default. I think I made use of nodes in the “neighbour net” for about three years before the majority began setting up WEP.

I’ve run an XMPP server for a small online user group for about 7 years. It was relatively simple to get a basic server up and running.

One challenge came when my wife and I decided to use it as our everyday mobile messaging service. I had to learn about and configure a number of extensions to get Prosody working well with Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS).

Another challenge was filtering spam. I posted my administrator XMPP address online and got hammered with spam. It took a while to figure out how to effectively combat it.

With respect to why it’s not more popular, imagine if you were trying to sell people on email (with no business use-case). It’s a generic federated protocol. I don’t know if you can get much more bland.

Late response. I used to host radicale, but switched to MyPhoneExplorer a few years ago. I just sync from the laptop to the phone over bluetooth. It does contacts and memos as well. Reminds me of the old Palm Desktop sync.