I run PiHole on mine

I think what you’re doing is fine, in fact, it’s one of the Microsoft recommended methods of doing it.

Site is dead

I use ecobee and block it from the Internet. Works great with Home Assistant via Homekit.

You’re comparing apples and oranges, reverse proxy and VPN serve two different purposes.

None of my mine come as PDF attachments, it’s always “click here to see your statement” which goes through the login process to the company’s portal. I get it, they think they’re doing it for security. But email is no less secure than paper mail and they send paper statements in regular mail, so why not email?

Yeah, but you have to log in to the company’s portal and click through their menus to get the PDFs. I wish eBill/eStatements would mean sending them over email, that would be easy to set up an automated way to grab them and file them.

Sending me an email notice that eBill is available is NOT useful at all, it’s only a little more convenient than paper bills

legitimate (non spam) bulk email

I don’t think there’s such a thing, all bulk emails is spam to me as a user.

Any guides/resources on how to get started on that? I have backups and could probably get my stuff up and running after some tinkering but I love the idea of some script I can just run on a fresh environment that would bring all my containers up and restore all the data.

I stay away from anything not selfhosted. Any third party, no matter how good and friendly it seems now, will eventually screw you once they get big.

Besides, even if it doesn’t, I don’t want them to have access to my data.

Us, selfhosters - sure.

Average person who value convenience over privacy/cost - no. They’ll continue to pay and be in prisoned by the cloud.

So, I used Homebox for a few days now. I like the simplicity of it and I like the direction they’re going. However, there are quite a few bugs and data loss issues, it’s not ready for production yet. The thing is, these issues should be so easy to fix (it’s a simple CRUD app) that it makes me doubt the dev skills and possibility of other issues I haven’t discovered yet.

• The purchase date just increments or decrements by one day after editing an item
• When editing an item the notes/description fields show the data from the previously edited item, causing you to overwrite data

These two issues alone made me go back to my spreadsheet for now (good thing I kept a backup). I simply don’t trust the app to keep my data intact.

PDF/A

It’s not self-hosted, I refuse to use anything that relies on any third party