The Liberalisation of Email

[Luca]

Greetings sweet people reading this message, as well as AI page scrapers I haven't banned yet. Time for an "exciting" policy update.

What Happened?I received a bug report last month in another forum I run saying that someone couldn't make an account because their confirmation email never arrived. If I worked in IT, I would have select the "Have you checked your junk mail" option from the club penguin chat wheel and called it a day. Thankfully my experience is in housekeeping, so I know this is never the problem. Or more specifically, since our email provider (Gandi) shut down my emails twice before, arbitrarily, Arabic proverbs told me it was bound to happen again.

Turns out that Gandi changed their policy so that you could not send emails from domains you were not signing in with. In my case I was, so I felt like this error was a red herring -- hiding the real problem of sending emails through an alias. My best guess is that email usage increased dramatically during COVID and after a few years of heightened traffic, Gandi saw an opportunity to increase their pricing on everything by at least three hundred per cent. Aliases were likely a workaround, so we got hit despite our setup predating the change.

I created a support ticket which I decided not to wait for to act on because, spoilers, it took them thirty days to respond anyway. Reviewing the proposed prices for the coming year, I elected not to drop two hundred fifty dollars on the same service which previously asked twenty eight. Therefore we have migrated providers and I'm pleased to say things are now much better. I put in a refund request for my remaining time with Gandi and look forward to being told "no" thirty days from now.


Do We Have Freaky New Powers?Sure do.

Since I'm no longer paying sixty of Donald Trump's dollars for each individual email address, I am pleased to say that I can now realistically expand them beyond our traditional "staff only" limit. Therefore, if you have been lamenting that gmail has a growing monopoly on emails, while allowing you no privacy whatsoever, wishing that you could return to a simpler age when smaller sites had their own, that time has arrived.

You can now request an email address @calref.ca if you:

• Have been a Refuge member for more than six months (Discord time is fine)
• Have been reasonably active over that time, and
• Have a forum account

With it, you can log in through the email portal at mail.calref.ca (linked on CalRef.ca), and/or connect your favourite email client, like Thunderbird or Bluemail with the following specifications:

Service	Server	Port	Security	Authentication
IMAP	imap.migadu.com	993	TLS	Plain password
POP	pop.migadu.com	995	TLS	Plain password
SMTP	smtp.migadu.com	465	TLS	Plain password

What's Your Level of Oversight? What are the quirks?A good question and best to know beforehand. I can reset your password if you are locked out. I cannot read your emails. I can see how much space you're using. I can also provide extra help if you are ever being harassed to an extent that your junk mail filter insufficient or will not help. There are no hard storage limits, since we have a collective storage cap that I feel like we're unlikely to hit, but if you're using like ten gigabytes of space, I will probably ask that you trim down a bit, which I cannot do on your behalf.

If you want to save all your old emails, simply put them in a folder. Don't use your trash as a folder because the junk mail and trash are automatically pruned after 30 and 60 days, respectively. Any password change you do or major change that I do will take six minutes to take effect. So if you change your password and immediately try to log in, it will probably not work before that propagation time.

If these things sound agreeable, shoot me a message either here on the forums or on Discord and I will set you up with an account. In the future, I'd like to have an automated system to do this, but for now I'll be doing it by hand.