I want to thank everyone who replied. I did some research on most of these and think PurelyMail is the winner for me. Feel free to correct me if I got some details wrong. I want to give a shoutout to @mbirth for mentioning Disroot, which looks like a really interesting experiment in federated services.

Also, I know this post is really bending the rules for c/selfhosted, but connecting your selfhosted services to an email provider is essential, and having a reliable and affordable email provider just makes this weird hobby of ours a little easier.

I’m liking what I’m seeing here! Most other services try to be like Google, where you can’t get a mail account without also paying for drive, calendar, office, etc. All I want here is an email service, and this looks good and cheap for that.

I’m still learning myself, but am planning to use NetBird instead of Tailscale to access my VMs and apps without exposing them to the web. So far, it’s been pretty easy to set up.

I’ll check him out, thanks!

That helps, thank you!

Thanks for the clarity! I’ll give this a shot when I get back home.

I feel like dancing! Wiped my SPI, installed the OPi Debian to my eMMC using dd commands, and I’m back in business.

I give it 1 week before I break it again trying to do something stupid.

For the uboot, I think I tried both of these: https://github.com/schneid-l/u-boot-orangepi5 https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/u-boot-orangepi

I’m not sure what exactly changed, I used the same SD card, the same OPi image, used Balena Etcher to burn the image to the card… this time it booted into the live image from my SD! It’s a start!

Now I’m just trying to wipe my SPI of UEFI, reinstall uboot, then do a fresh install of Debian and try again with PXVirt.