Getting my email to work again (after a year)

UPDATE dchen@dennisc.net is back!

TL;DR use reychen@dennisc.net from now on

Well! After some failed experiments with self-hosting on bare metal (which I may try again at some point in my life, once I actually have stable housing), I realized I haven’t been able to send email, only receive. I had no idea what was happening and didn’t really dig into it because I was a bit busy dying at college. But now I know what’s happened, and for now I’m using Zoho to have a functional email address. The self hosting experiment may continue at some point in the future, probably after I graduate.

To anyone whose emails I haven’t responded to: my apologies! Particularly if it concerns teaching. I have been really busy lately, but now that my email actually works, please feel free to send your email again. (Any emails sent in the past year or so have forever been lost to time, so please paste the full body of any relevant emails.)

so what happened?

It’s a pretty boring story. I could receive emails and not send them, and that was because Vultr silently blocked port 587.¹ I eventually realize this is the case when I try actually reading the messages and pinging port 25/587, and getting no response. A quick internet search confirms that my suspicions were right. A month or so later, I decide to actually get down to fixing it.

However, Zoho is… more than a little buggy. For some unknown reason, it believes that dchen@dennisc.net is a used alias when it is not. And I really cannot be bothered to figure out what is actually going on, so here we are.