czech

I’ve used mailbox.org for the last few years. They are a privacy-focused provider out of Germany. They aren’t restrictive on the app you use, like proton, and offer an integrated PGP-signing solution.

I think I’m overly sensitive because my power is very expensive and my home is getting pretty warm right now!

That’s so much electricity though! That equipment is typically so cheap bc the power draw is nuts. I agree the pi isnt the right move but why burn up so much power when they won’t be using practically any of it, to learn?

I’d suggest a small, used x86-64 mini-pc, throw in 16gb of ram and a HDD. If you dont pay for electricity, like in a dorm, then the old server-grade stuff is the way to go. Plus it will keep you very toasty in the winter.

The mini PC is your best bet. I only have ARM SBCs but they have a lot of limitations. If I needed something new it would likely be a used mini PC. I dont have any suggestions unfortunately. I saw something posted a couple weeks ago that was some university surplus- $30 used mini PC’s, including the case- which will run circles around any ARM SBC. I think shipping was another $30 but still a great deal. Find something like that.

You’d be better off with something that has an EMMC slot (or ideally SATA connection). Running the OS off of an SD card is painfully slow. I’ve also found USB storage to be way more reliable than SD cards, in general. I used an external 4-bay drive connected via usb3 for years and never had issues. Burned through many SD cards over the same period.

Piracy. I couldn’t live with 25%+ of my TV watching time being advertisements. Manually downloading episodes became too much trouble so I setup a Plex/sab/sonars/radarr config on a pi connected to a 4-bay external drive enclosure featuring refurbished HGST 2tb HDDs in an lvm raid-5 config.

Eventually I also substituted my radio with paid Spotify so about the only ads im served are product placements and billboards. Its amazing how much less you’ll spend without ads!