Own Your Email

Your email is the master key to everything else you own. Password resets, bank alerts, your business, your family photos, 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 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 small, hands-on retreat in Honolulu 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.

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 flowing again while you fix the real problem.

You also leave knowing 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 is 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 discover it in month three. Plenty of people decide the trade is worth it. Some decide it isn’t, and that is a perfectly good outcome for a weekend — you will still understand exactly what the big providers are doing on your behalf, and you will never be bluffed about it again.

Who it’s for

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

You do not need to be a sysadmin. You do not 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, this one isn’t for you — you’d be bored, and I’d rather have your seat go 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 is the point rather than an oversight.

This retreat gets built with the people who come, not sold to them. When 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 easier and cheaper to plan as a group than alone.

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

What it costs

It is a paid retreat. I want to say that plainly here rather than let you find it out three emails in.

The cost gets worked out with the group, alongside the dates and the travel, once I know who is coming and what shape the thing takes. I will go through it with you directly, and nothing is settled until you have heard the number and said yes.

Tell me what you want to build

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

Keep in touch while it takes shape

If you’d rather just watch this develop before you say anything, that works too. I write when there’s something worth writing about — including as the retreat firms up.