Own Your Email

Your email is the master key to everything else you own. Password resets, bank alerts, your business, your kids’ school, the account recovery for every other account you have — all of it lands in a mailbox somebody else runs, reads, indexes, prices, and can close on a Tuesday without telling you why.

I don’t think that’s a good arrangement, and I don’t think you have to accept it.

So I’m running a few days, in person and hands-on, for people who want out of it. Not a lecture about privacy. You bring a laptop, and you leave running your own mail server, on your own domain, with your mail in your hands.

I’m offering it to the Alaska list before anyone else. That isn’t a sales line — it’s the actual order I’m doing this in, and it’s because I’d rather spend those days with people I already know.

Where

Oʻahu. You’d fly into Honolulu — direct flights from Anchorage, more places to stay, easier on everyone’s logistics.

This page still isn’t linked from anywhere and isn’t in any search engine; it’s for the Alaska list, not the internet. If you want to bring someone, send me their name and I’ll write to them — please don’t forward the link.

What you leave with

Not slides. A working thing you built and can explain:

• A domain you own, with DNS you control and understand.
• A mail server you administer — sending and receiving, with a real mailbox you can reach from your phone, your laptop, and any mail app you like.
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured properly, so your mail actually arrives instead of quietly landing in other people’s spam folders. This is the part most people get wrong, and it is the difference between owning your mail and owning a mail server nobody can receive.
• TLS certificates that renew themselves, so it doesn’t break in ninety days.
• Spam and abuse filtering that you tuned, not that somebody sold you.
• Backups, and a restore you have actually tested. An untested backup is a rumour.
• A written plan for the night it breaks — what to check, in what order, and how to get mail moving again while you fix the real problem.

You also leave knowing exactly what you signed up for, which matters more than any of the above.

What I won’t pretend

Running your own mail is not free and it is not zero work. It’s a small ongoing responsibility, the way a car is. Some months it asks nothing of you; occasionally it wants an afternoon. Deliverability is genuinely the hard part, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

I’d rather you hear that from me now than find it out in month three. Plenty of people decide the trade is worth it. Some decide it isn’t, and that’s a perfectly good outcome for a few days — you’ll still understand precisely what the big providers do on your behalf, and you’ll never be bluffed about it again.

Who it’s for

Someone competent with a computer who is tired of asking permission.

You don’t need to be a sysadmin. You don’t need to have run a server before. You do need to be willing to type things you don’t fully understand yet and then stay with them until you do. If you already run mail professionally you’d be bored, and I’d rather the seat went to someone who needs it.

Personal mail on your own name. A family domain that outlives any one provider. A business getting itself off Google or Microsoft. All three fit in the same room.

Why there are no dates on this page

Because there aren’t any yet, and that’s the point rather than an oversight.

This gets built with the people who come, not sold to them. Once enough of the right people are interested, I get everyone talking first: what each of you wants to build, what you already know, and what timing genuinely works — for you, for the others, and for me. The dates come out of that conversation. So does the travel, which is a great deal easier and cheaper to sort out as a group than alone. Coming from Alaska, that part is worth doing properly.

It’s far enough out to be completely flexible. I’d rather shape it around the people in the room than pick a weekend and hope the right people are free.

What it costs

It’s paid. I want to say that plainly here rather than let you discover it three emails in.

The number gets worked out with the group, alongside the dates and the travel, once I know who’s coming and what shape the thing takes. I’ll go through it with you directly, and nothing is settled until you’ve heard the figure and said yes. Nobody is committing to anything by filling in the form below.

Tell me what you want to build

This is not a ticket and it is not a waitlist. It’s the start of the conversation — you tell me what you’re after, and I write back.

Or just call me

If a form isn’t your thing, it never was mine either. 808-647-2304, or aloha@mycomputertherapy.com. Say “retreat” and I’ll know what you mean.

And if this isn’t for you at all, that’s completely fine — the other page is the honest reason I got back in touch, and it stands on its own.