Let's Talk About Email

[jnovack]

I will state my bias first. I am viscerally opposed to anything email related. It is such an old and outdated technology and frankly ill-suited for this task (notification). Using email is "boomer mentality".

With that said, I'll try to remain calm and unbiased for the rest of this post.

A Youtube personality I follow talks about a new product for the homelab, and I'm excited to try it out. Download the script, fire up the containers, open the first page, and immediately I am asked for my email. le sigh

It feels to me the design is to use email as a "notification method" which is "the popup you get when your email client when it finds a new message". When there are much better alternatives.

Email is not a notification technology, it's not a chat technology, and it's certainly not an identity provider.

Pop in a fake email address just to get through it, and see in the console:
2025-04-22T09:33:13.057Z error: [EmailService](sendEmail) Missing credentials for "PLAIN"

WHOA. What did you just try to do?

This FEELS like a "free trial". The perception of gating the entire product behind your email address FEELS like "I'm just here to collect your data" when countless of other "homelab" tools just make an initial account (e.g. Portainer, Uptime-Kuma, Grafana, etc).

Homelab is supposed to decouple you from the "corporations" (add implied "MAAAAHN" to the end of the sentence.)

If you want to use email as a method of notification AS AN OPTION, sure, but I do not want to use homelab software that needs me to put in my email address ANYWHERE.

[gorkem-bwl]

Thank you for your message. Notifications other than email (Discord, Telegram, Slack, Webhooks) will be ready in the next release. We also don't collect your data, if you felt that way.

PS: Let’s keep things respectful, like how we’d talk to someone face to face. We’re all human, we’re all grown-ups, and life’s too short for anything else.