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Comment by jakecopp | Hacker News Reader

I haven't heard of anyone that hosts both Matrix & Mail/Calendar/Contacts.

That would be a really interesting enterprise solution though - effectively replacing Slack/Teams for internal comms!

Just add some LDAP services for identity management, authentication and it's fairly close to the project I'm on right now. A cursory look at getting a matrix server running didn't work out yet though, with issues for clients to recognise the server at all. I don't mind sysops work but right now a set&forget solution would spare some needed energy.

The Thunderbird+Matrix integration sounds like a match - I hope that holds up in practice as well!

Edit: as others mentioned, Nextcloud has the features.

Do you mind if I send you an email? I am looking for people/companies that might be interested in having a managed matrix provider.

Yeah, it might be a hard sell compared to GApps for most businesses but I'd like to think there are is a subset that would want the F/OSS solution!

I wonder if bundling FF Send would also be useful, see there's a filelink provider for that as well which is interesting.

Fastmail has been that all-in solution. They host Mail/Calendar/Contacts, and they used to host XMPP/Jabber. But unfortunately they made the decision to shut down XMPP (https://fastmail.blog/historical/shutting-down-our-xmpp-chat...) and probably for the same reason won't get into Matrix.

> For intra-business messaging, most companies seem to be sticking with proven multi-user protocols like IRC rather than XMPP Multi-User Chat (MUC), or are moving to more sophisticated proprietary collaboration platforms like Slack.

That sounds true as of 2015, however Matrix now has a large following in open source & in some governments & businesses. I can't find a list of orgs using Matrix but that would be interesting to see.

May I interest you in Matrix (and/or XMPP) for messaging and Mastodon (for social media) on Communick[0]?

I've done some experiments with running an email server as well, but I don't think I would be able to run it as reliably and cost-effectively as the more established players.

> replacing Slack/Teams for internal comms

Also, Mastodon (or Pleroma) can work as a substitute for Yammer.

[0] https://communick.com

Unfortunately matrix is a no go for regulated business (read: you might be required to monitor employees and hand over chats to govt.)

Matrix development is mainly funded by providing deployments for regulated business(!) - ie the French state, German armed forces, UK government, DOD etc. If you search for “audit bot” in https://element.io/enterprise/pricing#features you’ll see all the stuff available for enterprisey deployments from Element.

Thanks!

There is some development in that area. This is from an Element dev, apparently. Not sure if this is very up to date as it’s from about a year ago, but it seems highly topical.

https://brendan.abolivier.bzh/matrix-retention-policies/

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/docs/mess...

If need be, you can require the use of a Matrix client that doesn’t support end to end encryption, or has support for it disabled. Nothing stopping you from doing that, almost all the clients are FOSS.

Even if End to End encrypted, the client has access to the decrypted content and could log it.

Or add a keylogger/eventstore into the Matrix client.

You might be, but you might also live in a country where this isn't a thing.

For some subsets the financial sector, that's highly unlikely.

NextCloud does all this, afaik.

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