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Comment by a1o | Hacker News Reader

Hey, I really want Gmail alternatives, is the best approach going for Apple Icloud account? Are there better services that are expected to last a long time? Thanks!

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You're on hacker news, which means you're technically capable and probably make about $400k/year from google. That means you can do this right.

Setup an AS and buy a /24 (roughly $10k), buy a server and router for BGP, colo them in a datacenter (roughly $1k/mo + $500 initial cost for used servers and setup).

From there, it should be a simple matter to install your preferred email setup, such as postfix + dovecot or such (probably 2 hours if you've done this before, and maybe 2 days if you haven't).

This is a hall-of-fame worthy comment.

It is. I remember spending substantial time getting to know centos and ricing it because it was the technical superior way to do it.

Realised KDE was terrible and none of it was worth the hassle.

I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.

> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.

Can confirm: I have never sysadminned for myself recreationally. After I bungled an Arch upgrade (by failing to read the notes) I bought a Mac and haven't looked back. Yeah, it ships with a weird awk, and the GNU tools it comes with are pretty dated, but it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.

IMO, most of people who always flex bout their skill on using arch or kali linux doesn't really use it and don't have basic knowledge about unix/linux. As a DevOps and sometimes be sysadmin, I've interviewed a lot of self-proclaimed "hacker" (most of them are young) and most of them lack of fundamental knowledge about process, memory and networking, when they are the most important thing to do anything seriously in linux/unix.

> it's close enough for basically everything I want it to do.

People has been making argument for years about the best distro and which distro makes them look like a god. Now, anything which helps me do my job as fast as I can is the best and I think Debian/Ubuntu is the best distro to work with. Large user base, familiar interface and pretty up-to-date software is the selling point of Debian/Ubuntu.

As a Mac user, this also bugged me. One thing that helped was to...

    brew install coreutils

... and then adding gnubin to my path so I can use them without the "g" prefix:

    PATH="/usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"

Now I no longer have to remember idiosyncrasies of the macOS versions, such as:

    # macOS
    cp -R

    # Linux
    cp -r

> I should have just bought a Mac a decade earlier.

I switched to Macs nearly 20 years ago from Windows and have been mostly very satisfied. But a recent upgrade from Mohave to Monterey has changed my opinion. It deleted all directories at the root level that the system didn't know about, including my backup (which I had to recover from Backblaze B2), deleted emacs, protected all the system directories to the point where, if you build things in weird system directories, forget it - it's impossible.

Maybe all this protection is good and necessary for the average user, but for me, it has turned my regular development laptop into a web client and I had to back off to an older Mac for development. Apple shoves more and more rules and restrictions down its users' throats, along with shiny baubles I don't care about, and I'm kinda over it.

I really feel this, and it is so disappointing. Since 2012 my primary development machine has been a MacBook Pro, and my 2020 M1 MacBook Pro is maybe my favorite workstation ever (they brought back the good keyboard, the M1 processor is so fast, and the battery life is insane—even at three years old I will get through half a day of work and zoom calls and only be down to 80%).

But at the same time, I see a slow creep of operating system and interface changes. Especially worrying is the push to make macOS look and operate more like iPadOS. I've loved macOS as a development platform because it's Unix-y enough, but with a polished desktop interface where everything just works without fiddling and tweaking.

Perhaps I'm missing something in their vision or perhaps I'm being too myopic, but I don't understand the obsession with adopting mobile/tablet-style interactions and restrictions.

Will I still be able to plan on using this operating system for development in the next 12 years? I've begun revisiting Linux as my desktop operating system on the side, because I fear the answer is no.

Is this cheaper than just hiring a personal courier to hand deliver your letters?

> You're on hacker news, which means you're technically capable and probably make about $400k/year from google. That means you can do this right.

You know some people will take you seriously however ridiculously stupid that paragraph is, right?

Yeah 400k was so 2019, closer to a million now.

I've been using iCloud Mail since like 2012 and never felt the need to use any other service, let alone the much uglier (in comparison) Gmail UI!

Besides the ads, Gmail also has that annoying "YourRealAddress+alias" which makes aliases useless, whereas iCloud aliases have saved me from a lot of spam, and it's infinitely better now with their new "Hide My Email" feature that lets you create a different address each time.

I’ve used Fastmail for 5 years, and I’ve been quite happy.

I bought a full fast mail account to try it out. It seemed pretty insecure coming from protonmail. They require location data for example. No need for that I can think of for the user. They also don’t do E2E or even what passes for e2e. I wasn’t super impressed at the time. I’ll have to log back in and see if any of it changed.

Australia also seems to be a terrible place for privacy, at least policy-wise.

They haven’t asked for location data for me in iOS. It’s a different intent to proton mail. Most emails I send are not end to end encrypted as the other end wouldn’t accept it. For any E2E encryption needs I use proton or a messenger service.

I’m on year #2 with Hey. But the important question is what you value in Gmail. For example, labeling not nearly as useful in Hey.

I expect Proton and Skiff to last a long time, because you're the customer, not the product.

Check your ISP contract. Some still provide you with an email account. You could've been paying for this email account all this time w/o realizing it. And even if they don't provide it right now, maybe they can do so for extra fee.

If not, different countries have all kinds of programs to give free emails. Usually quite limited in storage, but still. You could start checking that with the post office -- they'd be the likely candidates to provide such a service.

I'm on Migadu for 1.5 years (few domains, about a half-dozen mailboxes). I've chosen them for the lowest price. No complaints so far.

Very happy with proton. Having simplelogin bundled in is great.

I switched my company accounts from Google to Zoho. What I like about Zoho is that each account can be sized individually.

I think few people use iCloud for email.

I do, and I am happy with it. I don’t use the Web interface very often but it does the job just fine when I need it. It certainly does not have many features Gmail has, though. Some bits of iCloud are wonky but email works just fine.

Source? Anecdotally many people do. It's actually quite good imo considering the native GUI and features like hide-my-email.

I've been using iCloud since they announced support for custom domains. You can have up to 5 custom domains, catch all and 3 aliases for each domain as low as $0.99/mo

First time I hear about them having custom domains, interesting.

I am happy with mxroute.

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