Hacker News Reader

Comment by imsofuture | Hacker News Reader

What are the best alternatives to Gmail?

I have been very happy for the past few years using fastmail.fm.

Paying for managed Webspace that includes email functionality.

Who runs a remotely comparable e-mail service, though? I mean, I've tried Windows Live, and that's the closest I've found and is still pretty poor.

A comparable service leads to comparable problems.

Self provide your own email on your own email server.

I think there's a case to be made for self-providing your own dial tone as well, given how simple and cheap that has become, but I can't push that as I haven't even done it myself...

The problem with self-hosting is the setup and maintenance, and risks that goes with it.

I'm quite happy paying for a service because when it breaks, I can reasonably expect the problem to resolve itself.

If I host my own mail, when it breaks I'm up shits creek until I fix it. Which depending on my schedule, could take a week.

There's Zoho which is pretty similar imo.

If you're a real hacker, you should probably manage your own email/file server.

There's a hardware startup opportunity here somewhere: sell a box which does this for an end-user, and makes it really trivial to setup replication mirrors elsewhere.

Probably dies on the platform of "people don't have good broadband".

It's a good idea in general to run a privet cloud. I have been playing with an idea in my had that would make it profitable too, without charging subscription, which is notoriously difficult to do.

Rather then hardware solution, a VPS image solution would be best. A VPS image with core email, web, and file services, and an easy way to add more as needed.

We really need to decentralize the web again before we start connecting to the world wide google or the world wide facebook :)

The recent closure of reader really damaged googles reputation in eyes to the point were I can believe this story completely. It almost feels like they switched their slogan from "do no evil" to "do at least a little evil every day, just for the fuck of it!"

I have a synology box with an SSD, and it works very well. Just make sure you take regular offsite backups.

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