Private email vs domain email and security

I would like to think it is because I am a genius :grin: but I think IT has become much more accessible.

My thoughts are that we all have a better inherent understanding of technology and systems as they pervade throughout our lives now. We are all becoming more IT literate passively. Secondary, is the vast amount of information we now have via the web of help, walkthroughs on forums and Youtube etc. I also do not feel the passage of time when engaging with computers/systems so where other people get bored, frustrated or give up I can just keep going as I do not get those sensations. Mowing the lawn on the other hand that takes around 30 mins but feels like I have been doing it for 3.5 months non stop…

I have always been a geek and enjoy tech but never managed to get a job in IT. I wanted one when I first left school but alas school and I did not see eye to eye and I left at 15 without any exams or much of an education at all. So I could only get basic labouring jobs. I soon turned my fortunes around though but not in an IT direction. Although my career did include some basic and small IT set ups. I have inherited a few people/small companies I do simple ad-hoc remote support for but mainly as they have difficult personalties, which make their use of traditional support a fraught experience. I am a no BS type of personality so it works with them, as I will not give BS or take it. Not in a tough guy sense but in a fair, honest and reliable sense. Although more work is available from people/companies they recommend to me, I do not wish to take more work on as I have a nice balance in my life atm and mainly get to do what I want, when I want or at least in the order I chose generally and lots of time to learn things along with tinkering and experiments, Like my current Amazon warehouse experiment/experience.

Anyway I digress. I originally used these walkthroughs for setting up Owncloud(then moved to Nextcloud) and the email server on the Pis. They were outdated when I used them but had sufficient information to be able to fill in the blanks/changes that had come along. I used lots of other website for info too but this was the main site used:

For the email server: Raspberry Pi Email Server | samhobbs.co.uk

For the Owncloud/Nextcloud: ownCloud Tutorials | samhobbs.co.uk

I then used various services to check for issues such as:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

The email server has worked flawlessly for years now. Just get the Postfix config right and combine with Fail2ban takes care of most issues. I clone the Pi SD card once a week for back up and Thunderbird backs up and archives all mail that is then backed up to the cloud and a local NAS. I also pass my home network through a old computer running OPNsense(PF Sense fork) when I saw the interview on @floss-weekly to further protect the network. :slight_smile:

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So I’ve begun the transition. Have signed up to Office 365 Business Premium with one month free trial. Have changed the name server settings at Hover. Now waiting for this to propagate everywhere. Seems that Google already knows the new name server as mail is flowing in to the Exchange mailbox, but Microsoft’s own Microsoft 365 Admin Center is still getting FastMail’s DNS server when I hit the verify button. Oh, the joys of DNS propagation.

Now to transfer all my contacts, calendar data, and mail into Exchange.

Thank you for pointing out those tips!

You’re probably right - tech has become much more accessible. There might be the added benefit of us being actually able to set up all of these services today for ourselves where one or the other less-than-perfect outcome is easily acceptable. We’re tinkering, so let’s just tinker so more if things don’t run quite yet.

Before, these services were only really seen in production environments where any downtime or even data loss would be … not an option. So we’re riding our bikes and having fun, but we’re also aware that the admins of production servers are the real Evel Knievel.

That, too, of course. :slight_smile:

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Yes, the confirmation in the Admin Center took two hours for me, too.

You can pull the mail by using a tool in the Admin Center (part of the setup, sure you saw it). It may be useful to have one complete download of the email files from FastMail, too. Just to be sure. I am interested to hear what you can report about the file sizes! :slight_smile:

The calendars you can download from FastMail and then upload again. I suppose the same for contacts.

How do I get to Outlook Web Access in Office 365 Business Premium?

EDIT: I think I’ve found it, but getting error

Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.DatabaseNotFoundException

Everything else working otherwise - can get email on phone and Windows. Just not OWA.

I am going through outlook.com and sign into my new account.

The below may include many obvious things (which were not obvious to me, before), but could be helpful:

  • You have two accounts (user and admin), make sure to log in with your user account to use the product.
  • Make sure you have assigned the Office 365 product to your user account (by using your admin account).
  • Make sure you have completed the set-up wizard in the admin account.

Thanks. Turns out it takes a while for it to become fully set up. All working this morning so I’m happy. Now the main task of importing all my mail from FastMail; there’s no mail export so it looks like it’ll be set up both accounts in Outlook and drag across the mail kind of operation. At least I can import my contacts.

Oh, and reupload the 100GB of files to the new OneDrive storage.

EDIT: One snag was connecting to FastMail as mailbox had the same email address. Had to rename mailbox in FastMail before I could connect to Outlook. Email dragged over and all working now.

Next step to cancel Office 365 Personal and FastMail.

True, but there is a mail import in the Admin part of Office 365. That’s what I used.

I ended up setting both mailboxes up in Outlook and did the drag and drop thing. It gave me a chance to clean up the mailbox and delete emails from ten years ago that followed me from Gmail.

All good now - contacts and calendar imported and working well. Push notifications seem so much faster than with FastMail.

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So it seems that’s the way to go. Could you still compare the account usage on FastMail (lower left when logged into the site) vs. the size of your OST file? Are they roughly equal?

Unfortunately, once I had transferred over everything I wanted to keep I closed my FastMail account and they close it straight away and disabled the login.

FastMail support responded today:

At Fastmail, email attachments are base64 encoded, which increases their size by one-third so this might be the difference. We report the size of the file after it is encoded, which means this includes the base64 size. It’s likely that outlook reports only the unencoded size of the attachment.

Which is interesting and possibly a good explanation.

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It always seems to boil down to how things are reported…

…unless I copy them and screw something up. :smiley: But yeah, you’re right - that’s mostly the case.

BTW, I’m impressed with Microsoft support - I created a ticket in the admin centre when I could not log in to OWA and got a phone call back after five minutes. It pays to go on a business plan I guess…

Wow - I would have imagined something different. Good to know!