My name is

David Cumps

Freelance polyglot software engineer

A passionate geek, always curious, always learning.

Nobody migrates email in one day. Fetchmail, a receive-only alias domain, and permanent redirects bridge the old world into the new one.

Webmail is the face of the platform, so it got a Gmail-shaped skin, real calendar and contacts integration, and some money spent on polish.

Family accounts on self-hosted infrastructure: onboarding, self-service passwords, 2FA, and what parental visibility looks like in Sieve.

Building the identity layer before there was much to identify against, and the OIDC decision I got to make twice.

One reverse proxy design for the whole fleet, with its routing table in Valkey and its certificates feeding the mail server.

Private networking between data centers with a self-hosted control plane, and a Tailscale sidecar for every container.

Running a mail server is easy. Convincing Gmail that your mail server exists legitimately is the actual work.

Deploying Stalwart across two nodes, with every piece of state pushed out into managed backends.

Full-disk encryption for servers I will never physically see, and why the unlock step stays manual.