Not long after I bought the crde.me domain I signed up with Google Apps for Business in order to set up gmail for the domain, as I did with the previous domain. Just as I finished registration however, Google decided that something suspicious was happening: right at the first login the account got blocked, requiring phone number validation.

If that wasn’t a good incentive to start hosting my own e-mail, then I don’t know what would be.

As it turns out, though, e-mail is a tricky beast. I’m hosting it in a FreeBSD jail (which, by the way, are pretty cool), and before I got a configuration that worked the way I wanted I ended up deleting the email jail and starting from scratch more times than I could keep track of. Tip: don’t even try to use Qmail. Stick to Postfix for the love of God.

Here’s my GPG/PGP public key: BA296851. Also on pgp.mit.edu.