portmaster VS parsemail

There's a very good relatively new open-source GUI firewall app like this called Portmaster:

https://safing.io/

It's available for Windows and Linux

You can get your own firewall app. Portmaster by safing.io lets you open and close what ever ports you want on your windows system

amazing work OP! what's the difference between zen and portmaster? :) i would like to compare options to see which one fits my needs the best way

For Context: Technical Introduction from https://github.com/safing/portmaster#technical-introduction

Portmaster is a privacy suite for your Windows and Linux desktop.

Base Technology

- Portmaster integrates into network stack using nfqueue on Linux and a kernel driver (WFP) on Windows.

- Packets are intercepted at the raw packet level - every packet is seen and can be stopped.

- Ownership of connections is found using eBPF and `/proc` on Linux and a kernel driver and the IP Helper API (`iphlpapi.dll`) on Windows.

- Most settings can be defined per app, which can be matched in different ways.

- Support for special processes with weird or concealed paths/actors:

--- Snap, AppImage and Script support on Linux

--- Windows Store apps and svchost.exe system services support on Windows

- Everything is 100% local on your device. (except the SPN, naturally)

--- Updates are fully signed and downloaded automatically.

--- Intelligence data (block lists, geoip) is downloaded and applied automatically.

- The Portmaster Core Service runs as a system service, the UI elements (App, Notifier) run in user context.

- The main UI still uses electron as a wrapper :/ - but this will change in the future. You can also open the UI in the browser

Feature: Secure DNS

- Portmaster intercepts "astray" DNS queries and reroutes them to itself for seamless integration.

- DNS queries are resolved by the default or configured DoT/DoH resolvers.

- Full support for split horizon and horizon validation to defend against rebinding attacks.

Feature: Privacy Filter

- Define allowed network scopes: Localhost, LAN, Internet, P2P, Inbound.

- Easy rules based on Internet entities: Domain, IP, Country and more.

- Filter Lists block common malware, ad, tracker domains etc.

Feature: Network History ($)

- Record connections and their details in a local database and search all of it later

- Auto-delete old history or delete on demand

Feature: Bandwidth Visibility ($)

- Monitor bandwidth usage per connection and app

Feature: SPN - Safing Privacy Network ($)

- A Privacy Network aimed at use cases "between" VPN and Tor.

- Uses onion encryption over multiple hops just like Tor.

- Routes are chosen to cover most distance within the network to increase privacy.

- Exits are chosen near the destination server. This automatically geo-unblocks in many cases.

- Exclude apps and domains/entities from using SPN.

- Change routing algorithm and focus per app.

- Nodes are hosted by Safing (company behind Portmaster) and the community.

- Speeds are pretty decent (>100MBit/s).

Portmaster itself is open source (https://github.com/safing/portmaster)

Then install https://safing.io/ (Portmaster); it's free.

It's a pain in the ass right now. Original I come up with the domain hanami.run because I explained here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1p2crPpFIc I feel like wind blow flowers where Hanami blow out emails.

I run an email forwarding services (https://hanami.run if you want to check it out) and I can share some info:

I found https://hanami.run (soon to be mailwip.com due to name conflict with hanamirb.org) to setup email forwarding and a simple blog platform by "email to post" and webhook.

Use it you can consolidate emails from multiple domains to forward to the same inbox. And you can add webhook/slack notification too.

You can look into mine (https://hanami.run) very fast to sign up and have a few cool features about webhook or smtp.

Also, improvmx.com is a great product as well.

If you like open source, https://maddy.email/ is a single binary deployment that can handle everything even IMAP.

https://mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs/ is a dockerize solution with super detail document as well.

If you want to compete with the big players, you have to solve the most important pain point and work upward from that small use base.

My case: I work on https://hanami.run (will soon move to https://mailwip.com due to hanamirb.org conflict) and email forwarding is very competitive. Big and old players are all over the place because at the end of day, setting up email forwarding isn't hard and many open source project did it, heck you can spin up AWS lambda for incoming email in no time.

The pain point is: email will drop sometime, time to time no matter how good an email forwarding service is because they have to scan spam, have false positive, or because of strict DMARC/SPF rule. And I have no tools available to help me out there. So I focus strongly on my maillog features with many level of privacy:

- no log at all

- docker-compose to spin up everything. It's super nice. Again, the deployment is done with a `rsync` then `docker-compose up -f docker-compose-prod.yml`

Eventually when deployment changes very frequent and need scale/ha I added in Kubernetes. K8S is way easiser to setup than you think and it handle all other suff(load balancer, environment variable etc).

And my deploy now become: `kubectl apply -f`

One trick I used is to use `sed` or `envsubst` to replace the image hash.

For backedup, I again, literally setup cronjob from an external server, `ssh` into database and run `pgdump`.

I also have a nice NFS server to centralize config and sync back to our git repo.

I used this whole setup to operate https://hanami.run an email forwarding service for the first 3 months before I added Kubernetes.

So I want to share a story about user asking for a feature then not using it.

I run an email forwarding services(https://hanami.run) basically you add your domains in and add some records.

We had this one heavy users who has like hundreds of domains. So our UI isn't design for that. Who has hundreds of domains? So they approach and asked us for a way to organize those domains into a hierarchy structure.

All good.

They are paid our highest tier ($30 per month) so we prioritize the requests and work on it.

2 days later that same user downgrade to the lowest plan and delete all of their hundred of domains...

That complicated features remain unused to nowadays...

I used hanami.run and they support that. A catch-all then an explicitly deny rule to disable certain address.

Wix doesn't have built-in email forwarding but you can use any email forwarding service. Look into hanami.run and simply follow their onboarding process to add your MX record. https://hanami.run/docs/configure_dns#mx