Domain Registration

Will Purism Librem One offer Domain Registration? If not any suggestions for a Domain Register Service. I would like to setup a personal Email Server. Not sure who will supply a static IP address & connection as we are building a new home and have not established a phone data link at this time. Thanks to all for help & suggestions.

You can get a static IP address by ordering a corresponding internet access plan from an ISP. This is independent from the registration of a domain.

After registering a domain at a registrar the DNS entries can be configured to resolve your domain to the IP address. I think for an email-server the MX-record is the one that have to be set, but I am no specialist and I am not sure if every registrar allows that.

Often you can order a package for domain registration together with email server and webspace on the registrars servers.

A cheap alternative is dynamic DNS where you can use an ordinary consumer level internet connection with dynamic IP. Every time your IP address changes, your router updates the IP address at your registrar. So that the domain always points to the current IP address. Although I wonder how reliable such a solution is for different hosted services.

Correct - for inbound email.

I have yet to encounter a DNS service that doesn’t - but that’s on a small sample.

Also, the registrar is not exactly the same thing as the DNS service itself.

To be honest, self-hosting like this is a bit crappy. For example, no secondary server. So if your main server or your internet connection is down then mail can’t be delivered. (If trust is not a major concern then you can pay an external party to be your secondary.)

Likewise, I wouldn’t be particularly confident with a dynamic DNS. The problem is caching. Every DNS entry has a Time To Live (TTL) that tells the DNS client how long it may cache the result.

So if you don’t have a static IP address and your IP address changes frequently then you will have lots of small outages as far as clients are concerned. (You would set the TTL low, so that they are small outages but that has a small performance cost.)

A lot of the time though your IP address does not change frequently.

Finally, you need to be very careful what range your IP address is in (whether static or dynamic). Many large players in the email space will just reject your IP address if they think it looks spammy.

None of these three objections is fatal. Go ahead and try. Go ahead and experiment and learn. I just wouldn’t use it with a domain where delivery is important.