Hi there, OP here. You're the only one of these assholes I'll actually respond to. Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you! You get it! To the rest of the Slashdot IT crowd, I shame you for your balls. Your utter lack of balls. Only this guy gets it. I want to abandon Google for personal reasons. Maybe an ex's dad works there and I'm "being watched". Maybe I'm a nudist, and my signature.png doesn't comply with their ToS. Fuck off, it's my business. Yes, I am a hobbyist. I only administer about fifteen servers, all cloud VPS that I've built by hand with love. I am not, however, employed as a sysadmin, hence my claims of "I am not a sysadmin", so I approach everything here with the stance of "I don't know about this as well as the qualified IT professionals who frequent this site." If this email server is just for me, I don't really worry about downtime, etc. My motivation to keep it up is intrinsic. Let's just assume I already keep my own blog hosted (with satisfactory uptime) and I'm not worried about having another service running on the box. If I can't easily provide for myself this base internet "staple good", then my friends, THE INTERNET IS BROKEN. I'm jumping into the deep end, installing postfix/dovecot/roundcube this weekend. I'd rather be SBL'd for coming from a small-time IP than hosted on servers sponsored by Google's Advertising division.

I've gotta chime in here: We hired some Philippines (outsourced, based in the Philippines, while our main office is in San Diego) to work on a few small projects. In the 6 months they worked here, they should have had no trouble finishing the scripts we assigned them. Granted, there were some [massive, devastating] natural disasters in the Philippines during the period I'm complaining about, therefore we elected to fire them and move on, instead of pressing for a refund. In addition to asking for more time, money and vacation, as parent suggested, in one single week -- ONE WEEK -- the following complications arose:

Monday, my employee could not make it to the office due to a fever.

Tuesday, my employee showed up for work at 9am, but the power went out at noon, and the whole office was given the rest of the day off.

Wednesday, as my employee was driving to work, he got in a motorcycle accident, and did not come into the office.

Thursday, my employee worked a full 8 hour day, but did not `git commit` anything, did not email me about his status, and did not, apparently, get anything done.

Friday, my employee was lost in a flood. His manager called me to explain that, while she has no idea where my employee is right now, she's going out into the flood, personally, to search for him.

"[Skynet] It becomes self-aware at two-fourteen AM, August 29.". From Terminator 2. The implied reference is cute.

You must be... a DJ?

what are girls?

As others have said, listen. Always listen.

If something doesn't match your experience, ask why. The answer will teach you something, teach others something, and often both.

Here's the most important thing: Once you get your feet on the ground, you will start to be asked to do things. If you're asked "can you do X?", and you don't, then say so. However, the most important and best answer to questions like that is "I don't know, but I will find out." And then find out, and report back about it at the next meeting WITHOUT BEING ASKED.