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Comment by cmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how you guys feel about this, but personally, I've been avoiding Google services for the last couple of years because I just assume they'll eventually get shut down.

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Same here. Only thing I'm still strongly dependent on is gmail. I don't really think that's going away anytime soon, but out of principle I'd like to move away from it. Takes a lot of energy unfortunately and you probably need to keep a redirect in place for a long time just in case...

Is there a self-hosted web mail service w ux like gmail, that you can migrate to smoothly and pay a license for?

I would consider this move. I just assume no one has ux even close. It would take me at least a year to fully transition from one gmail address.

No afaik. I accepted the loss of usability and moved away anyways.

Not self-hosted, but I am very happy with Zoho [0]. They target companies and their free plan includes lots of features like support for your own domain. The web UI is comparable to GMail (indeed in parts I prefer it) and they offer a very good Android app as well.

[0]: https://www.zoho.com/mail/

Zoho recently removed IMAP and email forwarding from their free tier (though existing users were grandfathered in), so stay away if you value email portability.

Rainloop is very usable. It just pulls everything in via IMAP. I have scripts in place to handle any filtering and organising I need to do.

Yes. I've migrated to other services for just about everything they offer except gmail. I'm still looking but have not found a comparable service in terms of quality and pricing.

If anyone has suggestions I would be really interested in hearing them.

FastMail. It’s great. Comparable interface to Gmail - I like it better, even - great customer service, true and reliable IMAP, easy to use your own domain and easy to migrate from Gmail. Also has Calendar and Contact support.

Isn't this something that you should keep in mind for all services? After all they are basically applications you have no code for, running in computers that you do not control, funded by means you individually cannot affect and owned by companies/businesses making decisions you have no say over. Any element of control you cede to others can be used in ways you may not like or want. So if you want to ensure something will continue to exist for as long as you want it, the only way to do it is to have control over that something and either control all of its dependencies or rely only on dependencies that are widely available commodities that you work with through as many open standards as possible.

For example, for web-based services, if you don't want something to go away (or be abused), then your best bet is to run a fully open source implementation of that version on a VPS (VPSes are on computers owned by others, but they are cheap commodities that you can easily replace, replicate and, if necessary, move to dedicated servers or your own machines). Personally i'd also only use simple applications with little to no (preferably no) external dependencies in case i need to pick up the development myself or make modifications.

(of course having said that, i generally avoid web-based applications altogether and instead opt for desktop-based solutions whenever possible - one major reason being control)

Yes it is, but I think - perhaps counter intuitively to some, that the larger the company the larger the risk of being left without the product or service you grow to like. In the case of Google, Microsoft and some others I'm now wary of even trialling things.

Being owned by a major is bad for life expectancy. Being bought out by one is worse. Google are quite probably the pack leader for shuttering services for no obvious reason (Reader etc) and also buying startups to shutter them or turn them into something unrecognisable.

I try to apply this view when choosing all products and services - I'll favour startup and family owned over multinational brand for everything from SaaS to food and clothing and often pay extra to do so. I'd like to think there's still a chance of individual customers mattering to them.

I also favour desktop where possible.

> I'm not sure how you guys feel about this,

Here's my main problems with google and why I've been trying to get away from them as much as possible.

1. Very poor quality customer service. They might have better customer service for things like adwords (I wouldn't know) but as far as everything I have experience with (business services, google cloud) my experience has always been horrible - good luck getting in touch with a human.

2. (as you mention) A high level of insecurity about whether or not a google service will actually be sustained or whether they will drop it and leave all their users hanging to go try out their next big idea.

3. IMHO unethical business practices, mainly when it comes maintaining their monopoly and violating copyright laws [1].

4. The fact that they control so much of an ever more centralized internet. Regardless of however benevolent one may think they are that much power concentrated in the hands of any one entity is likely a dangerous road to tread upon and one I'd rather not risk going down.

1. https://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-of-Google-acting-une...

I think thats good advice for anything, I would however put the caveat on things that use open protocols. I have no issue using AWS SES (Simple Email Service) because thats just SMTP, I would however never use something like Firebase. Just measure the time it would take you to get rid of it in a project.

I would also never use the sentiment shared on HN much for anything, half of the people here have a stake in their own little proprietary technology they want you to sell :P

They lost my trust after how they treated the 2013 Nexus 7. Great tablet in spite of the company behind it.

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