Once you have setup your mail server, it is supposed to be a 'fire-and-forget' solution. And if you are the sole user, who hardly surfs on the internet and therefore never gets infected with anything, that might be true.

But for most people, there is always something that can and will happen to your system (ads, drive-by scripts, less scrupulous sites, etc.) and it takes just one thing to get flagged as a spammer by one of the many organisations, which patrol the internet in their fight against spam. Get on one of those black-lists and you will have to make an effort to clean up whatever mess occurred on your network, then apply to be taken off their list (which varies a lot) and wait until they take you off their list.

But you are still being observed for a few weeks to a month and if you manage to get on their list again in that period, it will take a lot more doing to be removed. Repeat offenders are not appreciated at all.

You might be able to look on the following sites to see if your web- and/or mail-host is on their blacklist:

• https://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/
• https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx/
• http://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/
• Spam database lookup

The first 2 links are probably the most important ones to verify against. SpamHaus is a very important player and they are global. Not all organizations cover the same territories, so if you are on a blacklist of one of those, but you are never sending mail to that particular region normally, you still should get off that list, but you can continue to operate while you do this. In that case there is hardly any damage done. But you shouldn't expect your mail server to get a good reputation any time soon.

Private mail servers have almost no possibilities to get a good reputation anyway, just because they are privately managed.

I want to replace my C drive with the OS and all the programs.  Right now that drive is an HDD, and I run backups every evening on the important parts.  I guess I could run a Macrium Reflect clone to an external HDD every couple days, though; think that would wear down my SSD too much?

-BGM (November 28, 2019, 12:59 PM)

To my knowledge, the writing of data to any (type of) SSD drive is the main cause of wearing them out. The reading of data barely "scratches the paint', so to say.

An external HDD is one of the easiest ways to make pretty secure backups. And if you use one that has a "spinner" inside, that should last you a long time if you take care of it. Using one that has an SSD drive in it, the daily scheduled backups would wear out the backup drive. Especially if you are "bluntly" making copies of all files, instead of only the changed files or just the parts of files that have changed. The latter methods reduce write-actions to the drive significantly. Cloning is in essence a "blunt" copy of all files.

Wearing out of a backup drive is something you really don't want to do, it is your backup after all. Besides, using a portable HDD with a SSD inside is often overkill. A "spinning" hard drive comes with cache memory nowadays, which make them quite a lot faster. And with that boost in speed, these drives have little to no problem keeping up with the speed of the data flowing through the USB ports on your machine. In practice, theoretical speed differences are, more often than not, nullified by overhead in the operating system. For those few times that this is not the case, you do notice that a portable HDD with a SSD is "smoother" in operation. Don't know if the offset in costs are worth it, though.

 

Sounds like you are looking for a full blown IDE. Eclipse has some of the features you describe and can be extended with free/commercial extensions that make it more useful than as it comes right out of the box.

Eclipse is open source and free to use in any capacity. Although it is originally designed for Java development, it supports a lot of different programming languages. There is also IdeaJ 2019 (Community Edition) that is free to use and is similar in features, capabilities and expandibility(?) as Eclipse is. But also different enough.

VSCode, Brackets and Atom are also editors that can be used freely and have many extensions available to them. Sublime Text is indeed a very good text editor and has a lot of extensions for it. But Sublime is a commercially licensed product (that you can use for free, but with a nag screen) and extensions are mostly commercial licensed too. It might be that you "sink" a lot of money into Sublime/extensions and still not get what you want, while there are others that can be tried out for a lot less money or even free. Just saying. 

GMail has a feature to automatically forward messages being received at GMail to a different mail account. I make use of that feature. You should check if Yahoo has a similar feature. If it does (and chances are high, because it is a basic feature that almost all mail server software have built in), that would solve your problem of people stubbornly sending mails to your Yahoo mail account.

It might even be a good idea to create a mail footer message that says you moved to GMail. Email client software has a configuration setting that allows you to fill in a "return to:" mail address. If you fill in your GMail account there, your GMail account becomes part of the mail-header that is part of every message you send. Mail clients and most web mail clients respect that configuration setting in the mail-header and people who respond to messages now "automagically" send replies to your GMail account instead, because that mail address is already filled in for them.

That should cover your need of receiving messages at GMail. You must be patient though, as it can take a while before messages are forwarded by any mail service. In my case, I wait about 5 minutes before I check my main mail account for messages that are received/forwarded at GMail.

For archiving and transfer of already received messages in your "collection", the MailStore Home suggestion by another poster in this thread is excellent for this. And its free too. I use it myself for archiving my mail messages for more than 10 years now. And if I'm honest, searching for content in archived messages and their attachments is far better in MailStore Home than the built-in search of mail clients. More useful search options/parameters and faster too.

ok...i think i know a critical feature that would help me choose a software.

versioning...
which software provides the best versioning history?
if this method requires me revisiting notes, and rewriting parts, I am going to want to know what i am redoing and rewriting, so good versioning and easy to use/see would be important to me.  I think connectedtext has it, but maybe the others do not.

-superboyac (October 29, 2019, 05:40 PM)

Using versioning software requires discipline. And there are many too choose from. Git is the most popular tool among coders. But if you aren't a coder, all the features it has is overkill to the n-th degree. Besides that, you have several free online places that allow you to store public repositories (everyone has access to your repository), while private repositories means you need to fork over cash on a monthly or yearly basis.

Does that not sound appealing? There is GitLab. Well, their Community Edition, to be more precise. This you could host yourself in the house where you live for nada. But again, it is intended to be used with Git and might be overwhelming to set up. Oh, and it doesn't run on Windows. And as Docker appears to be in financial trouble, building a dependence on their container software to make it more or less work in Windows might not be the best of ideas. So you'll need a (virtual) Linux or Mac computer.

And then you still need to get your head around client software to communicate with the versioning server.

Versioning requires a serious investment in time to get your head around the concepts and most likely a lot of time for setup and maintenance. And cash for another monthly subscription or hardware to run it yourself. If you are serious about creating and maintaining software, you should make such an investment. For other use-cases like zettelkasten, versioning might take up so much of your time you won't even get to spend time on those.

With the above in mind, I have a difficult time seeing how versioning would help you out. 

Something like this is easily done using AsciiDoc.

-Shades (October 20, 2019, 11:18 AM)

Thanks for the suggestion, but at this stage I'll put some time into stuff I know something about. Had a quick look at it and opened the txt file you attached, but all I got in the viewer was thousands of black diamonds with question marks inside.   

-fredemeister (October 21, 2019, 04:42 PM)

Weird. As far as I know AsciiDocFX stores everything in the UTF-8 character-set. Anyway, the following images is what I see when opening the attached documents.


The main document (preview within the AsciiDocFX editor, including the automatically generated ToC).


The bio section (image is automatically scaled).


The written works section (with a standard table, where the grid lines have been removed).

I can guarantee you that I spent more time writing the post than I did the document.

Oh, before I forget, right-click on the HTML button to generate a HTML version of the document you just created. Yes, that is all it takes.


HTML export.

Well, it could be considered friendly if I also provided the generate HTML file. But as you can see there is in principle very little HTML formatting going on, the syntax from AsciiDoc isn't too difficult to read, even if you would not have a preview at hand. That is to say, in my eye it doesn't.

Because it is relatively simple, you can use pretty simple text manipulation tricks already built into whatever text-editor you prefer, to make quick changes in one or more files if so desired. And you don't have to worry so much about content becoming unreadable after 10 years or more, just because you have moved to a different version of Office. 

Something like this is easily done using AsciiDoc. Which will result in a human readable set of text files and images that are very easy to maintain by almost anyone, as there is very little technical knowledge necessary. Perhaps initially there might be some time needed to get acquainted with the (basic) syntax of AsciiDoc, but afterwards content generation is much faster and easier for a person, but it is also a lot easier for automated content generation using simple text formatted for use in AsciiDoc.

You will need an AsciiDoc editor. Although every text editor is, in essence, an AsciiDoc editor, but only if you are very familiar with the syntax. For those that are not, use AsciiDocFX. This editor actually comes with a pretty extensive 'cheat-sheet' built-in, which should get you up to speed with (basic) AsciiDoc syntax in a very short time.

Attached You'll find an example of a template setup, which took me about an hour and a half to complete from scratch (including writing this message).

The (real-time) previewer in the AsciiDocFX editor allows you to directly export the content you create to HTML and/or PDF and/or EPub and/or DocBook. It also allows you to watch how the content looks like (real-time) in your default browser too.

When finished you could export the HTML version directly into the folder of your current web server software, so anyone looking at the pages on your personal web server are one refresh away of seeing your newest content. If you are not happy with the current choices of fonts, colors, etc. you can add a link to the css file that does have the CSS settings you prefer.

Creating pages like this makes it also easy to store things in a versioning system like Git. And if you use github or a similar service, that can act as a remote backup.

While you could use the exported HTML directly onto the web server software you have in place already, it could result in one huge page, which could affect the performance of your web server software significantly. Generally speaking, any web server software can server small sets of files easily, but one big file with everything included is taxing, especially when many users access the same content the same time. Hence, this might not be such good scenario for your use case. After all, I have no idea how large your collection of data is.

However, there is a solution for this to in the form of static website generators in general and Hugo in particular. Their forum and documentation. This SSG is known to work with AsciiDoc content and generates content optimized for web servers. And there are a lot of templates available that could make your generated website even prettier.

attachment is supposed to be here:

You can ask Google to crawl through your site again. Normally sites are being re-indexed every few weeks (for low traffic ones) automatically.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?visit_id=637064818723088413-1250453188&rd=1 - this link provides some info about re-crawling.


Landing pages are good, sitemaps are better. Having a web site structure that Google expects you to have, will increase your ranking. Having other sites refer to your content will get you much bigger jump in ranking though. But only if those pages have a good ranking too. Highly ranked sites are re-crawled more often than low ranked ones.

While it is good that you moved away from the vBulletin forum software on your site, you can expect some issues by changing the forum software that you run as your back-end. 

Go for the Education versions, as these are mostly akin to the Enterprise versions of Windows 10. N is, as far as I know, a version that has some built-in Windows multi-media options removed. European legislation is to thank for that. If you don't care or use your own set of multi-media software, instead of the ones provided by Microsoft, get the N version.   

You can use Education versions as long as you are registered as a student at an institution that Microsoft acknowledges as a school/university. Although I don't think they actively check on that. Depends also in which part of the world you live.

Wikipedia link to an overview of Windows 10 versions and their capabilities. That should give you an idea which version to choose.

Windows 10 build 1809 looks to be the more stable one. People migrating from build 18xx to 1903 have reported many problematic errors. Maybe a complete fresh install using build 1903 fares better, but I'm not sure of that. Usually a fresh Windows 10 install works better than migrating from one build to a newer build. Also, you can expect even more problems when you would migrate from build 17xx to 1903.

But as you want to keep as much as possible from your Windows 8.1 installation, you limit yourself to the migration option. A plain Windows 8.1 installation is not likely to give you a lot of problems during the migration to Windows 10, but you can expect migration problems, especially when using older/specific software or hardware (drivers).

If possible, create a Virtual Machine and install a trial version of Windows 10 (same build as you are going to get from your university). Then try if the software you depend on works inside this virtual machine. I remember you are using some very specific (and older) software. If that software remains working to your satisfaction, then go through the motions of migrating your computer and discard the Virtual Machine you created.

But if your software isn't working, then keep using Windows 8.1 until Microsoft drops support for it officially and see what you can do about getting a newer version of your software that does work with Windows 10. Or go and find an alternative for your special software, see if that works and migrate to that alternative software on Windows 10.

There used to be a tool, hosted by Microsoft, that could make an educated "guess" if your current hardware supports Windows 10 or not. But I think that was for Windows 10 builds 15xx. For all intents and purposes Windows 10 build 15xx isn't officially supported by Microsoft anymore. Even builds 16xx are out of support (with the exempt of LTSB version of Windows 10, if I remember correctly).

Understand that there are big differences between Windows 10 builds, so if your software works with one build, it is not a given that it will remain working in the next Windows 10 build. Enterprise versions of Windows 10 allow you to postpone migrations from one Windows 10 build to a new build for 1 year maximum. Education versions of Windows 10 are in most respects the same as Enterprise versions of Windows 10, so I assume that you have the same option to postpone.

It comes down to the ability of your special software to work on Windows 10, to see if migrating your computer to Windows 10 is a good idea or not.

No, the mail server you use to send your email message(s) to Hotmail appears not to be configured as the email server at Hotmail expects it should be. Because of that any message that it receives from the mail server that you use will be regarded as spam. Always, that is until the mail server admin(s) at Hotmail decide that mail messages from your mail server should be thrown away immediately. Then those won't even be delivered in the SPAM box of the receiving mail account anymore.

Has to do with certified domains, DMARC, reverse DNS settings, the server you use being on a blacklist of sorts, SPF, DKIM....any configuration error on your mail server in any or all of these items I just mentioned can be enough to trigger the mail server at Hotmail to mark your messages as spam.

Mail services like Google's GMail, Hotmail and pretty much all mail services you need to pay for have all the things I mentioned configured correctly and won't give you problems sending mail to Hotmail. But if you use an obscure service, get a better mail service. Because these items are known for a while now and any professional mail service have these items applied on their mail server(s).

What mail server and/or service do you use to send your mail with? Or do you run your own private mail server? In that case, you must start to read up and apply these items as soon as possible, because more and more mail servers apply these to combat spam. While some items can be added rather easily to your own mail server, others require contact and configuration at the end of the service where you get your IP addresses from.

Which of these programs can effectively post to the Net? (presumably by creating an HTML file).

Allowing that you may have to purchase a domain name and use your hosting platform.

-Steven Avery (September 12, 2019, 09:18 AM)

i seem to remember one of the old school ones was good at this like TreedbNotes.  but im pretty sure rightnote can export to html.  onenote cannot directly, but you can export to word and then from word save as html.

-superboyac (September 12, 2019, 10:34 AM)

Friends don't let friends use word to convert anything to HTML. Just saying...

As an example:
I have an extensive Word document. The docx version is almost 6 MByte in size. After I do a manual conversion to HTML, the resulting document is a bit over 4 MByte in size. When I use Word as converter, the resulting HTML file is almost 17.5 MByte in size. This Word document I have also converted to the AsciiDoc format and that is just shy of 2 MByte in size.

Any version of Word creates a pile of drudge when converting a document to HTML.
 

Interesting news. I do have to say, something about the fact that the guy who wrote the article referred to himself and quoted himself in the third-person several times throughout just seems "off" to me. It seems a bit misleading.

Nonetheless, I can't say I'm surprised by the news. As someone who used to be a big proponent of Google and their services, it's sad to see what's become of them.

-Deozaan (September 08, 2019, 03:07 PM)

How was the saying: "Die as a hero else you live long enough to become the villain". Or something like that.

Google, after becoming a daughter-company of Alphabet, slid down the slippery slope even faster than it did when it was a single entity. At least, that is the impression I got from them. But not all blame lies with them. Companies/corporations that (mis-)use the collected data need to be blamed too. And shamed as well, even after paying a heavy fine. Perhaps things would fix themselves if heads of these companies become personally and therefore financially responsible for collected data.

After all, one learns lessons much quicker when it either financially or physically hurts.

It was the same here. For my own uses I run a wiki and would have been happy to keep documentation that way. Mark down would have been my second choice at that time. And at that point in time I had never heard of (or cared about) AsciiDoc either.

But I have been going through the manuals of both Mark Down and AsciiDoc, have gotten quite some experience with Asciidoc and it is easier to write documentation in AsciiDoc and the syntax is more human-readable than Mark Down (especially when you start to use more complicated items/structures in your documentation).

By all means, keep using what you are familiar with. This whole thread started as a question, but could be seen as a reference or starting point now. For those in need, of course. And if I find new and/or better tooling for working with AsciiDoc, I'll update this thread again.