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Comment by finnjohnsen2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Thunderbird, but I like that it exists and I hope they survive. Perhaps because it's my life boat if I need to abandon spying web hosted clients (gmail etc).

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These days the word 'spying' is used frequently but somehow ironically (?) Why not be honest to you and say that your laziness is more worth for you than your privacy?

'spying' is perceived as boring or 'it happens anyway' or 'we cannot do something about it'. Of course you can. You have the choice to be slightly less lazy and actually use the alternatives where you can&want, maybe even if they are worse! I'm not implying here that Thunderbird is worse than gmail ;)

Furthermore 'spying' should not have the personal touch (only). Instead companies should take this issue really serious to reduce the possibilities of econmic spying. I know companies fighting hard against Google with their products, having strict NDAs but then yes, they use non-encrypted gmail accounts for everything.

Thunderbird is important like all of these alternatives (be it open source or not like DuckDuckGo) to reduce influence of monopolies. As monopolies are bad for users&customers. Always.

BTW: you can donate here: https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Personally, my choice of words would be 'convenience' rather than 'lazyness'. It's a 100% conscious decision on my part to abandon an unknown degree of privacy for the convenience of free online (ex. google) products. I would expect this to be true for a significant proportion of the technical readers you get here on HN.

But the trust can be broken. Which was my point.

I quit gmail due to the spying in 2013. Running my own e-mail server has been a bit troublesome. The big providers don't often like to accept e-mail from small personal servers, even if you have the correct SPF, reverse-dns, DKIM and DMARC records:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

Then again, towards the end of my time with Gmail, I'd still have friends tell me mail sent from my gmail address ended up in spam. So maybe e-mail is just shit now.

I also like that Thunderbird exists, I don't use it, but my wife does.

That said, if you want a web-hosted client for standard email, why not give self-hosting RainLoop a try?

After reading about rainloop I could see wanting to run it locally, but as soon as you put it on a VM somewhere you're create a very public access point for all of your email accounts if that server gets compromised aren't you? Seems like creating a weak link on purpose.

It's no less safe than running a desktop email client and leaving that computer up 24-7.

I don't think that's true. A home computer can be firewalled with no incoming connections allowed. Your VM in the cloud has potential attack vectors through your own control interfaces (http/ssh/pop/imap) as well as the hosting control panel. In addition it may be listening for incoming smtp. I might trust myself to configure all of those securely but I'm not sure.

You don't need to put it in the cloud. Just run it from inside your local network. If you want to access it from outside, you can setup a VPN.

I don't know specifically about RainLoop, but I usually put services like that behind a BasicAuth on the web server. It's a simple but effective way to protect myself from PHP/application vulnerabilities - at a minor annoyance to the users (authenticating twice, every once in a while).

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