Reducing My Reliance on Big Tech: Switching Git and Email Providers

I have long lamented that I feel the need to rely on various huge corporations in order to exist at all from a technology perspective. I hosted the version control for this website on GitHub, owned by Microsoft. I used Gmail for email. I host this site using Cloudflare Pages, even. There are countless ways that, even though I evangelize open source, I too rely on the false benevolence of the large, wealthy, powerful technology corporations. Over time, I have endeavored to move towards a life where I am not as reliant on these corps. I don’t feel that I will ever be truly free of them, but I do like that I can, in some small way, take back some ground from them from time to time. Today I want to talk about email and github.

No Frills

The thing that I have quickly found in my search for an email provider that isn’t gmail is that the email-only service doesn’t exist in the same way it used to. A service that is just email isn’t really valuable enough to people, so the major players offer mail for free. It’s also tough for companies to make enough money if they don’t charge a lot for mail, so they often feel the need to develop and include other features into their services to make the cost worth it. These often take the form of cloud storage or office applications. I don’t really need those, though, so the higher price for just email never made a lot of sense to me financially.

Then, along came Cassie who told me about Purelymail which is a service that does one thing and one thing only: email. The extremely stripped down offering means they can provide it at an extremely competitive $10 per year for unlimited users, unlimited custom domains, and unlimited mail within reason. If you’re only doing your own personal email and are a light user, it’s probably even cheaper than that if you use their advanced pricing scheme to pre-load your account with credit. They also have a free trial which gives you enough usage for about a month if you aren’t a heavy user.

There are some real downsides to it. I won’t sugar coat it. The webmail experience is not good. They are working on a new custom webmail app, but it isn’t ready yet and their off the shelf option is not great. Thankfully, a desktop email client sidesteps this. I’m currently using Thunderbird for that, but I might change to something else soon. It’s also JUST email. No calendars, no cloud storage, no documents or spreadsheets. It’s also very explicitly not for business use. It’s intended for regular people to get regular email. That’s it. The stripped down offering is very much up my alley.

I’ve made about five or six email accounts on Purelymail across my various domains. I have one for tk-web.top, another less public one for important accounts, and a few for my various self-hosted services to use to send me alerts about errors and the like. Being able to spin up a new mail account for temporary use will also surely be helpful for other things in the future. It’s a really killer feature that makes Purelymail the cheapest option for me by far.

Git moving

Github may be the standard for code forges and version control on the web right now, but it being Microsoft and heavily encouraging AI use means I want to get away from it as much as I can. The problem with leaving Github is twofold for me. First is Actions. I don’t use them much, but in the few cases I do, I haven’t found a forge yet that has a reliable Actions runner aside from Github and GitLab, which has similar issues to Github for me. AI bullshit and it’s a big company. I want to stay away from that if I can. The second issue is that Cloudflare Pages which I also want to be rid of eventually works really well with Github. The Cloudflare continuous integration is really fast and deploys my posts extremely rapidly.

I haven’t found a solution for Actions, yet, so I’m going to still keep the one repository that needs an Action on Github. That repo builds the firmware for my Lily58 keyboard, so I really don’t use it often at all. I have, however, found a solution for Taming Knots. I am now hosting the version control for the blog on Forgejo, which is running on my home server.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. Both are open source, self hostable Git servers. Codeberg and Disroot both use Forgejo as their code forge. Once it’s set up, using it is extremely familiar to Github and other code forges. Make an account, set up SSH if you want to, and start making and pushing repositories. It’s kind of boring in how easily this went up. In my anecdotal experience so far, it does run a little bit smoother than Gitea did in my home server setup. Now, when I push an update to my blog, my script runs Hugo to generate the html webpages, then commits the changes to Forgejo for version control. The script ends by calling Wrangler, which is Cloudflare’s deployment helper, to push the live site to Cloudflare Pages. I’m not completely happy with this setup, but it means I am finally no longer reliant on Github for any part of the hosting process for Taming Knots!