Ask HN: Good alternative to Gmail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good alternative to Gmail?

21 pointsdonohoe38 comments

Looking to drop Google from my life where possible. The big one is email - can anyone suggest a great web based email alternative that is not Hotmail...

CLARIFICATION: Not just any email service, but a feature rich version

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If hosting your own e-mail is OK (or you can get an IMAP account somewhere) but you want a GMail-esque Web interface, http://roundcube.net/ is worth a look.

Further, a very popular "full service" alternative I've seen recommended a lot and have had recommended to me (yet I haven't used it ;-)) is http://www.fastmail.fm/ - worth checking out anyway.

RoundCube looks great, their Search features look impressive.

+1 for fastmail.fm, I've been a customer for some time and like their features. You can point your own domain's mail there, set up fairly comprehensive rules for filtering mail into folders, etc. They have a web interface and it fully supports IMAP so you can point your phone, mail client, etc at it.

FastMail's spam protection is ineffective. I have a secondary account with them, and the amount of spam I receive is unbelievable.

That's funny because I have never gotten a single spam email on my fastmail account ever (and yes I do use it on a regular basis).

The only free version that I found is available with 25MB. To me this isn't really an alternative to the free gmail version.

EDIT: talking about FastMail

Why not run your own sendmail ( or whatever ) server? It's not difficult, or expensive with most modern hosting plans, and provides great flexibility and learning.

I could but I am looking for a feature rich service like Gmail has offered, not just any email solution.

(oh, and I didn't vote you down)

I used to do this but spam filtering became a full-time job. That's the main thing keeping me from trying something else.

When did sendmail become "not difficult"? I thought it was one of the largest and hardest to configure daemons out there.

I've heard bad things about sendmail (hard to configure, but had also a ton of vulns in the past); though I have no experience or hard evidence.

However, I have had good experiences with (and have done my due diligence on) Postfix (and Dovecot) for mail services.

I asked myself the same question, and the best fit I found was zimbra. It's ajax-powered and open source. I use it for SMB clients and host it for them on a VPS. If you're looking for something simple for your personal mail there are several places that host it for $4-$5 /month. http://zimbra.com

I know you said not hotmail, but have you tried the new version? it's pretty feature rich, revamped to compete with Gmail (I use Gmail myself, but it seems good)

If you are willing to pay, you may be able to buy a hosted Microsoft Exchange email? Exchange 2010 has an awesome web interface, and exchange calendar etc support is great.

indeed i can please check out MiniG http://code.google.com/p/minig/ its meant to do what you want exactly. If you have a Duuit! account then its the included email service with smtp, imap, xmpp, and web clients.

Not to imply that this makes MiniG any worse, but I love the idea of "I'm making a stand against Google, let's see... ooh look, Google Code!"

Well i got a alternative to google code as well, check out indefero http://www.indefero.net/ I actually spent a good bit of time last year finding all the alternatives for google products and have implemented most of them.

Personally I have no problem using Google products, and if I did have then I'd go with github (in fact, I'd go with github over Google Code now, too). Just found it funny that the project offered as a solution to not wanting to use Google was hosted by Google.

If github were open source i might consider it as well but as it isnt i am avoiding product lockin by using indefero, setup was easy and its basically a git version of google code so its familiar for most users.

If github were open source

How would that really matter?

The concept of distributed version control makes vendor lockin on a product like GitHub almost a moot point. For instance, see the _why mirror: http://github.com/whymirror - while not the same situation, it is similar.

GitHub's issues and wiki pages are not included in your repository, although I know the issues have a very nice API (I'm not sure about the wiki).

Software management via git isnt locked in i am referring to the issues, wiki and project management pieces.

forgot i wrote a blog post on the installation so hope it helps someone: http://duuit.com/pg/blog/bman/read/552364/how-to-have-gmaill...

I've had very good success with GMX <http://gmx.com/>. GUI is very similar to desktop e-mail clients and spam filters are very good. (I still think Yahoo's spam filters are the best.)

I used to have a gmx.net (same folks as gmx.com, but the site only existed in German back then) account a long, looong time back (late 90s, IIRC). It wasn't too popular back then, so I got <firstname>@gmx.net pretty easily.

I didn't know a whit of German, but they had made a half-assed attempt at an English translation, which I actually made do with, because it was so awesome otherwise (superb interface for its time, POP3 access, open SMTP which didn't seem to get raped by script kiddies - and all this for free). The translation was missed out at certain points, but at least it made me look up words like ubernehmen and abbrechen.

Then one sad, SAD day, after I'd been a steadfast user for nearly 3 years, they sent an email to everyone saying they were shutting down the half-English site completely, and leaving only the German interface up. It was a really nice email too, in which they hoped the users would take this as an opportunity to learn a bit more German. Sadly I was just about finishing up with high school then and headed off to college, and didn't really have the time or energy to tinker with learning a new language as well, so it was with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to my beloved gmx.net account, after downloading all of my email into (one of the more under-rated Windows email clients of its time) Calypso.

Just created an account there again for old times sake, but I wasn't able to get <firstname>@gmx.com this time :(

</nostalgia>

however these days you have to pay even for imap access. also the interface isn't that clean anymore and the whole site is filled up with ads. oh and you get gmx-ad mails all the time.

POP3 still seems to be free though :-)

Zoho or Zimbra do a good job, I think. Plus will extend your non-gmail ajax-y world beyond just e-mail.

I think a big problem with running your own server is that things can go down! Yes, hosted solutions do too, but I think generally most serious providers have a bigger incentive for uptime than a personal box -- especially if that box is in my garage. I'd use my own machines for FTP and demos, but not for something like e-mail. (Or, if I did, I'd be sure to have a back-up redirect, where something else would forward the mail in and maintain survivability. I do this with my gmail anyway.)

If you're at all technically inclined (presumed given your presence here :), getting an ISP that gives shell, email, web is pretty straightforward (and worthwhile). I've been basically happy with PHP Webhosting (http://www.phpwebhosting.com/).

I just tried zoho with my gmail account... seems pretty good to me.

why are you dropping google? e.g. would Yahoo be acceptable if their client was feature-rich enough? or do you need something hosted in your garage... or at prq.se?

Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269

Has anyone tried Rackspace's webmail? I haven't seen a review of their client and was wondering if it's any good?

I used it for a while (and I still have accounts with them). It's pretty good, though it's composer can't create rich text/HTML email. (You can still read and view rich text/HTML email).

Wow! that's pretty shitty if it can't create rich text/html e-mail! How hard could that functionality be to add?

Do they have conversations like Gmail? So far no other e-mail client can match Gmail's and I like Outlook but no conversation threading is really a killer (and no 2010's version is no where near as good as Gmails).

sup mail. http://sup.rubyforge.org/

Warning: is written in ruby, so might not handle unicode (at least on ruby 1.9) very well. It's reasonably fast these days, however.

yahoo. Or your ISP.

www.google.com/mail

This is great email that i have found .... Give it a gooooooooooooooooo

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