Samon

Not GP, but at my previous job we had something very similar. The form did offer options for a handful of variables (on-prem VMware vs EC2, vCPU, RAM, disk, OS/template, administrators, etc), but once submitted, the ticket went to the cloud/architecture team for review, who could adjust the inputted selections as well as configure things like networks, firewall rules, security groups, etc. Once approved, the automated workflow provisioned the server(s), firewall rules, security groups, etc and sent the details to the requestor.

Isn't this just the food equivalent of software whitelabeling?

Receiving is only half of the conversation though - eventually you end up in a situation where you need to reply from the same address.

Also, be prepared for the tech support questions, the "I never received an email from X that they swear they sent", the "My emails seem to take ages to come through", the "My emails are ending up in the recipients spam folder", etc...

ImprovMX

In the newspaper industry, the 'Customer' refers to the advertisers who pay for the ads, advertorials, sponsored content, etc that actually make the publication a viable business model.

The individual who buys and reads the newspapaper is referred to as the 'Consumer'.

One of my university professors advised "multiply your best-case-scenario estimate by Pi". It's still absolutely plucking numbers out of the air, but I've found it to be pretty reasonable over the last decade or so...

For me, owning my own email domain is far more about control than privacy. I currently use some MX and SMTP trickery to forward all of my email to Gmail, effectively using Gmail as my 'email client' - but because the domain is mine, I can change that without too much headache, unlike if I were just using an @gmail.com address.

Another very happy (paying) customer of ImprovMX here. I have a dozen or so domains for family and friends configured this way, using ImprovMX for both inbound MX and outbound SMTP (using Gmail as the 'front end' mailbox, but using the custom domain/addresses everywhere).

I too gave up self hosting this all a few years ago - especially when hosting domains for others (family) who aren't tech savvy, I got sick of having to troubleshoot why their emails weren't being delivered. Outsourcing the delivery component to ImprovMX and the mail storage and even inbound spam filtering to Gmail, made things so much easier, even if it does mean relying on a centralised party like ImprovMX.

As an SAU member for almost 20 years, the site is a shadow of its former self. The technical areas tend to be very much a ghost town, with link-rot setting in pretty hard (broken images that were once hosted on imageshack or Photobucket for example really hurt the quality of many of the DIY guides etc). The social areas are mainly a handful of as you say the "old-school crew", but nothing like "back in the day". Other than a handful of motorsport/trackday events each year, the 'club events', especially the 'social' type like cruises and meetups, are almost non-existent. I'm not sure if that's because those events tend to now be organised over social media in smaller circles, or if they just don't happen.

In short, there's just not really much attracting new (or existing, evidently) users to the forum these days. I'd say it's a classic catch-22... people don't frequent the forums so the content (and experience) suffers, and then people don't want to frequent the forums because the content and experience aren't that great any more.

Just in case anyone reading this is considering purchasing the Astro Slide... be very wary. I backed the Indiegogo campaign over 2 years ago, still nothing. The wait isn't the issue here (COVOD and the related supply chain issues are real, I get that), but the major lack of transparency from PlanetCom is abysmal. A quick read of a few pages of the comments on the Indiegogo campaign page gives you a pretty clear picture of how many of the backers feel...

From memory, AliExpress wouldn't accept [email protected], but [email protected] was fine.

SuperMicro 5019D-FTN4 (or 5019A-FTN4 if a little low power Atom CPU would cover your needs)

You can set an organisation policy to disable personal ownership, which forces every password to be saved into an org, unless the user is an org owner or administrator.

Just sold my 1994 Nissan R33 Skyline that I've owned for the last 15 years - currently looking at importing a 2020 Nismo Note S.

Not exactly 'IRL', but many years ago I wrote a simple bash script to submit many entries into an online competition. Yes, I know... I did scour the competition T's&C's and they didn't have anything in there explicitly prohibiting it (its obviously implied, but I was young and bored...). Anyway:

Each entry required a unique email address, which then had a validation link you needed to click. I scripted this up using curl to submit the request using a randomly generated email address via a catch-all on my domain, reading the mail to extract the submission URL, and then using curl to hit that.

I actually ended up winning the 'random draw', but now I get ~18000 copies of their spammy newsletter! Unfortunately their unsubscribe page has the anti-bot protection that their competition page really should have had ;)