Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
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I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal (http://http://baikal-server.com/) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier to set up and it's been working great so far. There's no web interface unfortunately, and the Thunderbird addon that connects to CardDAV (SOGO connector) is buggy at times too.
Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now. Owncloud is buggy, Sparkleshare seems like a "when you've got a hammer, everything's a nail" kind of solution, and I haven't tried Seafile yet because the configuration is intimidating and I haven't really heard anything about it.
Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Eventually I want to bite the bullet and host my own mail server (I still have nightmares from when I self-hosted email a few years ago) but in the meantime I've really liked Rackspace.
Hacker idea: Create an OSS self-hosted email appliance. Simple setup for a one-inbox self-hosted email server, including DNS, DKIM, spam filter, etc. No matter what anyone says Dovecot/Postfix is not for mere mortals and self-hosted email in general is so full of pitfalls it could be an Indiana Jones temple.
I've set up a few mailservers mostly through manual changes to the configurations and if you just need something simple and secured with SSL/TLS, it's not too bad. From my experiences, the only major headache is how intricate you want your user and password configurations to be.
Even if you have DKM/SPF setup, someone can decide to start spoofing email from your domain to send spam, especially if your domain has been around a while and is relatively clean. Since you don't send a lot of real mail, all of a sudden 99% of the email marked as coming from your domain is spam.
It's not always even obvious that you've been blacklisted; mails may simply be significantly delayed (AOL does this, I guess so they can check for similar messages to other users), etc.
This is an issue for email providers as well, but they have people on staff paid to deal with it.
Even if you only have to deal with this once every 2-3 years, that's still generally going to be worse than simply paying someone $5 a month for a managed email service, not to mention to you have to deal with backups, etc.
If fact, every email server setup I've seen explicitly rejects emails simply due to absent or inconsistent rDNS records.
What kind of spoofing are you talking about? Attempting to spoof the headers is common, but no blackhole list looks at that - they blacklist based on the IP of the machine the spam is coming from.
First and foremost, static IPs are a must. Second, make sure those static IPs haven't been misclassified as dynamic or dialup. Then get reverse DNS setup properly (some providers won't do this). Then setup SPF. On top of all this, make absolutely 100% sure you don't run an open proxy. Then keep an eye on blacklists and your logs, and be ready to call and deal with obstinate tech support for hours on end. DKIM, and having some way to reject emails at the envelope stage (to save bandwidth, avoid double bounces, and punish the guilty rather than bouncing to innocent parties being Joe-jobbed) are also good ideas.
It's not horrible, IMHO, but it's not necessarily a cake walk either. You might need to have an understanding employer so that you can take off for half a day to deal with things.
It was difficult to find it. Dreamhost was great because I can create a lot of e-mail accounts for my company but in the last year there were a lot of outage that complicated my business. On the other spectrum Google/Yahoo/Rackspace could be great but they are expensive when there is a linear relationship between e-mail accounts and price, and we create new e-mail accounts all the time not only for employees but for testing specific pieces of software.
Leaving Gmail might be uncomfortable, but as long as I can backup my e-mail via IMAP and can move my address at a moments notice, it'd just be a nuisance.
I don't see the point in avoiding Google for the sake of it. But I do see the point in making sure the the effort involved in switching a dependency away from them is reasonably contained.
It is Ruby on Rails application with Ruby scripts to autamate installation and configuration of E-mail server. Post-install configuration is done througth web application.
[iRedMail]: http://www.iredmail.org/
It is by no means impossible that everything "just works" for you, but depending on your e-mail patterns, and what ISP you uses, and whether or not there's any spammers or spammer-look-alikes on the same netblocks as you, the level of hassle in ensuring your outbound e-mails actually gets delivered to your recipients inboxes rather than spam-filtered can be immense.
I must have missed something, did Google acquire Dropbox? Dropbox makes their money from the Dropbox product which is exactly why you should use a company like them instead of a borg offering. I prefer Sugarsync but there are no shortage of options.
- Not everyone that pays with their information is aware of the risk they are taking.
- Many people that know the the risks are misjudged their probability of coming to bear.
To be more accurate, you're paying with your privacy. Of course, "information" does sound more pleasant.
No, but I'm sure most people see privacy in a roughly similar way. You want control over what people know about you and your life, and control over who know it. This control is being taken away from us at every turn, no matter what we do online. Most people have no idea it's happening, but most of those who do, would prefer it.
You may be perfectly fine with losing your privacy, regardless of how you might personally want to define it, but most people aren't.
However, you're not talking about "free as in freedom of speech", but rather about being a cheap bastard.
Nothing wrong with that, I am and will always be a cheap bastard myself. BUT sometimes being cheap is different from being frugal and can have a negative effect on your bottom line.
My Dropbox subscription costs as much as 2 Starbucks coffees and man, let me tell you, I drink a lot of coffee. In exchange I get a good Linux client, a good iPad client, plus unlimited history of changes. I also trust them with my data, for now at least.
With Google Drive you may think that you'll always have alternatives to move in case they shut it down. However, by supporting Google, you're contributing to a possible future where no alternatives are left. Also, in case Google ever cuts you out of your account based on a malfunctioning script that calculated some probability that you may be violating their TOS for one of their dozens of services, you will not have the moral right to bitch about it, because you knew the associated risks.
The comment I replied to mentions preference towards Ads-enabled services, just because they are free of charge and when a subscription to a service that keeps your data is the same price as 2 coffees, that's being a cheap bastard dude.
Also, in case this term offends anyone, it wasn't really meant to be insulting. As I said, I'm a cheap bastard myself. For instance I take advantage of a lot of available freebies, like Heroku's free dynos. I'm also a free Google Apps user and haven't made any attempts to escape Google's silo. Nothing wrong with that. But in regards to the price you end up paying, sometimes cheap stuff ends up costing more.
Functionally, the only difference is they can't pay dividends to shareholders. Non-profit's can (and do!) turn profits into executives bonus's or perks, or bloated organizations, etc.
Why do you feel a non-profit would run a service better?
In the UK, it's easy to set up a non-profit as a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shares. Such companies can still make profits, but they can't necessarily be distributed to Directors. It doesn't prevent them from making profits or spending them any other way.
For a comparison, see past discussions about Post Haven (re: pledges to "never be acquired") [1]. Had they set up as a non-profit from the beginning, the purpose would have been clearer and enshrined in the company's legal structure. Presumably fewer people would have had cause to question the founders' motives.
Of course, non-profits are not created equal. There's IKEA and then there's Mozilla or EFF.
The IKEA example is interesting as I think the aim of the convoluted legal structures (inc a non-profit somewhere) was to allow one person to have almost total control over the company.
Edit: For anyone interested in the IKEA web of companies, you read the following article: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139?story_id=6919139
How does that make me a 'cheap bastard'? In fact, I've been looking around, and my conclusion is that if I were to pay for my e-mail with another provider, I'd be paying more for an inferior product.
Please read my reply in the context it was given. Using Google's services when they are the best makes sense. Using Ad-sponsored services, especially in cases where something valuable like access to your data is involved, when better alternatives exist for the price of coffee, well that does not make sense.
You're also volunteering your interactions with other people, their conversations with you and whatnot.
They may not be so spendthrift with their privacy.
I used their service when it was Mailtrust, and continued on after Rackspace bought them without complaint, but that was when I could buy a single mailbox.
I have found their email to be very reliable. The webmail aspect is not perfect, and some of my clients have run into occasional issues with it. I almost always use an IMAP client app and never have an issue. You can get an upgrade and enable full mobile sync using (I think) MS ActiveSync.
git-annex-assistant provides a friendly Dropbox replacement, with a web-based GUI and a magically synced/shared folder. Supports Linux, Android, and (very early stages) Windows and OS X.
> Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Eventually I want to bite the bullet and host my own mail server (I still have nightmares from when I self-hosted email a few years ago) but in the meantime I've really liked Rackspace.
I currently use Gandi's mail servers, which you get free when you have a domain through them. I run my own IMAP server and move the mail to it with getmail, but I let Gandi handle SMTP receipt and delivery.
No, it's $10/month minimum. Even if you are just ine user you have to buy 5 user plan. And even per user cost is $2 and not $1.
There's no such solution that replaces Gmail. You look those services - one here, one there, one compromise, one arrangement etc. I wish there was one.
Looks like it is $2/inbox/month now: http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/
It is Ruby on Rails application with Ruby scripts to autamate installation and configuration of E-mail server. Post-install configuration is done throught web application.
Still in development but already usable. I opensourced it and I hope that somebody could contribute.
Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome.
These are not the alternatives you're looking for. People should definitely care about their privacy, and they should definitely live on platforms that encourage interop. However, these articles focus far too much on trying to frame Google as some evil actor, when we could be championing everything Google has done well and how their competitors -- alternatives -- should be doing better.
I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'm only looking to migrate off Voice because it's not going to be available. I was pretty perturbed when all of a sudden, anyone I ever emailed appeared as a pre-approved contact on Talk.
So, it isn't about Google being evil or not. Google has a responsibility to its shareholders to make money, and I trust that they're trying to fulfill that mandate as well as possible. In doing so, they've shifted their portfolio of properties into a closed ecosystem that does not appeal to me as a consumer.
At this point, I imagine most alternatives suck because there's really no point in going up against free and awesome. Case in point: Reader. Reader really was awesome, and it had no competitors because no one would bother competing with it.
I imagine that as Google does offend more of its users, some competition might heat up, but I'm well aware that for most people, none of this matters in the slightest. It's a narrow cross section of geeks who notice or understand any of this.
What's the software? Google CalDAV support isn't actually going away, it's just switching to a whitelist, so depending on your client, it should be fine. I don't know how that's going to work exactly (is it just an API key? how will that work with open source calendaring software like Lightning?), but if it's even moderately actively maintained software, it's likely that they've already applied for access.
> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection (from the article)
Just FYI, they turned federation back on shortly afterwards. Of course, it's being dropped for the new chat system, but it's worth getting that right.
> Fastmail is owned by Opera Software and operates both free and paid tiers of service
As others have pointed out, there is no free tier, just a free trial. And if you're going to pay for it, I don't really see the difference between that and going full Google Apps, but that's just me. (edit: ah, apparently there used to be a free tier, but no longer)
Regardless, paying for the services you use is a good thing, both for getting better guarantees for service, and for teaching the market that ad-supported services aren't the end-all be-all, that we can have other business models, and maybe even a diverse market of them to support different uses and different requirements.
He listed these things to justify his arguments but almost none of them hold any water.
So many thanks to Ken for finding what appears to be a good alternative. Time to convince my family to switch email providers.
In terms of XMPP, I checked yesterday. After updating the Android Talk app to Hangouts, all of my XMPP contacts disappeared.
In terms of email, using Google Apps on a custom domain would avoid lockin and actually not be a bad choice, at least for now. I went with Fastmail anyway, and I think it's just a better service.
For XMPP, it's the Hangouts app that I was referring to as the "new chat system". Federation for regular google talk was turned back on[1], but you'll need a third party XMPP client now, I guess. Fortunately they're quite common.
[1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-reinstates-federate...
> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which
> will stop working this summer.
> I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk.
If Google actually does shut down support for either of these open protocols, feel free to object as much as possible. I'll be right there beside you. But right now you're jumping from "Google might possibly drop support at some indeterminate point in the future" to "Google will definitely drop support in a month", which is not supported by evidence.
In some ways, they already have. To the best of my knowledge, you can no longer obtain the Google Talk Android app from the Play Store anymore. It has been replaced by the Hangouts app.
You could probably download the Google Talk APK from some third party, but how long will that function on future Android versions when any OS hooks are being altered for Hangouts interoperability?
Sure, you can use a third party XMPP client on Android, but the writing is on the wall here.
> In some ways, they already have. To the best of my
> knowledge, you can no longer obtain the Google Talk
> Android app from the Play Store anymore. It has been
> replaced by the Hangouts app.
> Sure, you can use a third party XMPP client on Android,
> but the writing is on the wall here.
You're complaining about Google doing something bad before Google has announced any intention to do it. If Google actually does drop support for XMPP -- that is, if they announce one day that people will no longer be able to chat with federated servers from a standalone XMPP client -- then go wild.
My last sentence kind of expresses my whole point: "the writing is on the wall". I think that what's left of their XMPP support will be phased out sooner rather than later as everyone jumps ship to the new platform.
That they terminated their app (Google Talk) on their leading platform speaks volumes about where XMPP is going.
To add fuel to the fire, I think Google Voice as we know it is going away, too. :) I can't see how they're generating worthwhile profits on it.
Their resources have not stopped lesser alternatives from doing business, even with a core product (eg. search) of their's, so it's not that. DuckDuckGo is doing quite well with search; those conversations usually talk about quality and speed of results, not on how Google is the new Altavista and how you should switch before Google deprecates HTTP for GTTP.
It's not a stretch to say that Google can't be trusted not to be evil if they've moved in a more evil (or less good) direction.
I do consider a shift toward less openness to be inherently less good. I don't consider Google to suddenly be this evil company.
Google is, however, to be a very powerful company (and therefore a very dangerous company by nature), and a moral regression in policy is certainly an unnerving thing to see. I love a lot of things Google has done. I love a lot of their products, projects, practices, etc. I just can't consider Google to be a safe place.
I aim for clarity (often missing it entirely), and using absolute terms such as 'good' and 'evil' reduces clarity. I'm glad that I found this comment.
Well, there's an account out there with my real name tied to it that I never wanted to happen and to this day have no idea how it got there. I don't have a Google + account. Probably there was something that I clicked when I was tying my mobile phone to my Google account or something. I can't find any way to delete it either.
My YouTube account keeps telling me I should use my real name there as well....
Basically they try to make you give them things - they're an invasive presence. Does this make them evil? I don't know, I don't care. People who want to argue about good and evil are often avoiding arguing about the real issues, like whether someone's a nasty piece of work, or whether they're being abusive. When someone behaves like a scoundrel you know what sort of person they are, whether you can call them evil or not. What I do know is that my next phone is not going to be an android phone - and, when it isn't, I'll delete my google account entirely. I don't want people who treat me like that in my life. They make me feel dirty for associating with them.
In terms of private risk - well, bam. They're OS manufacturers. If they want to screw you, you're screwed. Do either of them seem to be in the habit of screwing their customers? I don't think so. Again, I might be wrong.
I think, in terms of private vulnerability, if you're seriously concerned with that, then you have to start off with the assumption that your device is a traitor. I remember back when we were playing around with using phones microphones to eavesdrop on people even when the phone was turned off. You've got a snitch in your pocket - if you want to do something private from the people who made it, leave it at home.
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All that being, from my point of view, more or less equal then - (and I'm open to feedback on any of this since I'm not religiously tied to either option.) I'm currently leaning towards Windows Phone. It looks like it has a really nicely thought out interface.
A lot of it will depend on which keyboard is better. That was the reason I opted for an android for my first phone - that it had the ability to change keyboard if I didn't like it.
Windows Phone's weakest points are probably the designs of its handsets and the app availability. But I don't use many apps anyway, and the hardware, IMO, isn't worse than iphone, it's just not as good as the best of android.
The things that might lean me more towards iphone is that I want to get a tablet at some point - and I've not seen any good Windows 8 Tablets. If I'm going to be curling up in bed for some reading, I don't really want something that's heavy and hot. It's gonna be easier if my tablet and my phone are both on the same system.
:/
It's far from a perfect solution, whatever I choose. Android has, it seems to me, the best overall experience across tablets and phones, but the pushiness of Google's a deal killer. Windows has the best phone of the two remaining (and according to some of my girlfriends the best phone experience overall anyway) and Apple seem to have the best tablet of the remaining two.
I'm not strongly tied to any option at the moment though. I might even end up getting a Linux device - though the fact that they run on Android hardware which ties back to google is troubling.
Anything that you'd recommend?
I almost wish we could pin a story like this just to cut some of those comments.
There are days when there will be multiple stories on the front page at the same time with comments asking, "what are the alternatives to gmail?" with the inevitable, "well, fastmail is a good choice" and then someone will bring up running your own server, and then someone else will respond about spam and blacklisting and downtime, and someone else will say something about they've been doing it for 5 years and it's not that hard, etc etc etc
Running fastmail's servers is some orders of magnitude harder.
Sorry but the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative perhaps with the exception of performance.
I also object to the lack of a menu bar, for bookmarks in particular. I have an extension that emulates it, but nothing that can properly emulate treeview tabs - I can't imagine ever going to a browser without this.
It does have a menu bar, with bookmarks in particular. http://i.imgur.com/awPDYp4.jpg
"the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative"
...that's saying a whole heck of a lot more than, they made some UI decisions that were personally disagreeable to you but not necessarily to other people.
Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.
This is not going to be a popular view, but here goes anyway...
Depends. I've been using Outlook Web Access since it was first released. Granted, you need Exchange, but these days Outlook.com provides similar functionality (or so I'm told - I use Exchange Online now).
That said, the most useful calendar I've found is Family Room on Windows Phone. I share it with my girlfriend, who has an iPhone, and it works insanely well for us.
I have to use Gmail at work, and find it to be the most obtuse email UX I've ever encountered.
Microsoft's online services are better than Google's. I could list a million and one reasons ranging from being ad-free, document fidelity in Office and the fact that I can't sort my Gmail inbox by sender. And while it has its faults, I have not found a better email client (UX and functional breadth) than Outlook. Here.com is better than Google Maps (true offline being a big deal for me), and Here.com's Transit app is the best public transport app I've found[1]. I don't know how SkyDrive stacks up against competitors, because SkyDrive is good enough for me.
Why exactly do you think Google is better?
[1] It amused me to see Google's transit implementation in Google Maps - it's a horizontal version of the vertically oriented Windows Phone app from Nokia, which's excellent and has been around for ages.
That's pretty harsh. Firefox has always been for me the most awesome browser available.
It's true that Chrome delivered some niceties for user experience and performance, forcing Firefox to follow suit in some areas.
However, Chrome stands on the shoulders of giants, like Firefox and it wouldn't be a good browser without such shoulders. Google should be really thankful to Firefox and I'm sure they are.
Also, Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds lately and after several months of Chrome, I realized that I cannot live without Firefox.
(yes, I'm typing this from Firefox)
The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something?
Also, the article mentions that it "exceeds" the features of Gmail, but where the hell are all the features listed? I see nothing on any of the pages except for features like "Reliability" and "Easy migration" which tell me nothing about how it compares to GMail in features.
If this is an example of the best "alternative" to a Google product then the competition has a LONG way to go.
In terms of additional features:
- Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
- Way faster loading time, snapper interface
- Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.app.net/1/79748/aXTHb4q16UPxgBvF2RCedd9jMSV2u4...)
- Some different interface features that I really like (your mileage may vary), like always showing starred messages on top for specific folders
There's lots more in terms of customizability and different weird configurations they allow you to do. They've done a pretty good job of hiding the complexity for non-power users, but it's still really accessible if you're willing to read through lots of preference screens.
There are some features FastMail does not have that Gmail does. The two big ones for me are undo send and composing in a new window (although you can just open the whole FastMail interface in a new tab and it only takes a second to load; opening Gmail in a new tab could take 10+ seconds in my experience). I use the FastMail web interface full time and am just as efficient, if not more, than I am with Gmail. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same, so there wasn't even a learning curve.
Here's a screenshot from Mail.app: https://files.app.net/1/79773/aTOWGMJ-rQ2Js_Edg-CWLi5FsLEVYq...
I either never knew that existed when I tried Mail.app with Gmail or it didn't work. In any case, it works perfectly with FastMail's "Archive" folder.
In our web interface, there are two buttons - one moves to Trash, the other to the Archive folder.
[1] http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-servi...
In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
I don't ever find a need to undo an email though.
I believe it was only for like 20-30 seconds as well that it offered undo.
| Gmail has it as an option
The code we run in production is all available to anyone who wants to play with it, though the usual caveats about "it's not particularly well tested for any configurations other than exactly the one we run" apply.
https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/branches/fastmail
brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git log --oneline cmu/master..HEAD | wc -l 632
brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git diff cmu/master HEAD | diffstat | tail -n 1 149 files changed, 39060 insertions(+), 4314 deletions(-)
Any previous users of the free tier will still have their account for free, possibly until further notice, but there is no obvious indication that they'll just drop your free account (unless you're inactive for their specified time period).
I have two email accounts with Fastmail mostly because they were the only free email service that supported Yubikey, but aside from that feature, I would call them "just another email service."
1) A black navigation bar across the top that doesn't help with email.
2) 300px wide box across the top right dedicated to a social network no one uses (not email related).
3) A loading screen when the page first loads.
4) New mail compose window (no need for an explanation here).
5) Ads
I'm 100% certain Google lets you get Gmail for your domain. You have to pay for it (but you have to pay for FastMail), and you get other services alongside Gmail, but it certainly exists.
Using Google Apps (which is cheaper than FM)
[1] https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/family.html
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/when-will-our-email-be...
You're still able to get a free one-user Google Apps for Domains account by going through Google App Engine. [1] I've used it to get catchall email addresses for any new domains I've recently registered.
[1] http://lifehacker.com/5967336/use-google-app-engine-to-get-g...
But Gmail/Google's ease of use is its USP. You can have chat in browser, GTalk, Adium, Android , Pidgin and all then synced to mail box.
You can have calendar everywhere, taks..you name it.
So, until some business - like FastMail, PoBox, come up with such close integration I don't think there's much sense to move other than privacy and paranoia. Because once outside you end up setting up a workflow dependent on very different services and worry which one is gonna break when and then look for sth else.
In terms of features, Fastmail does not do a good job of advertising its features. Just sign up for an account and check out the settings page. Its filtering is quite powerful, there's a SOAP API, and you can do stuff like automatically sort mail into folders. Eg, you could do me@bestbuy.kkinder.com and have it go into a "bestbuy" folder.
I switched to Fastmail a few months ago, and I am extremely happy with it. IMAP is much faster (especially search). I love the Sieve support and the domain hosting, and beyond that, Fastmail has all the features I need.
The only downside so far is that the spam filtering is not quite as good as Gmail's. Even spam identical to stuff I have marked as spam keeps reappearing. But it's not bad enough to be annoying.
I'd pay for it.
..
TurnKey Linux: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/tour/cloud/ | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/?id=a05a35...
BitNami: http://bitnami.com/stacks | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/?id=dbe648...
In summary: Bah.
The only FOSS organization which is capable of doing and promoting it on a large scale looks like Mozilla. They already have a few of those, and a Firefox OS phone is coming as well. Mozilla guys, are you listening?
100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage
Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)
It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?
I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.
It is also worth noting that changing the revenue producers from advertisers to consumers doesn't automatically make a business model sustainable. In a vacuum, I have no reason to believe an RSS reader (webmail, instant messenger, or any random service) that I pay for is any more viable than a competitor that serves me advertisements.
Finally, the issue I take with your second point is that a company's motives are going to be dictated by their finances. That may even be a legal requirement if they are publicly owned. Both Fastmail and Google have a financial incentive to keep their user-base happy and growing. One because they are taking cash directly from users and one because they are using users to generate cash. I don't think that slight difference changes their motives as drastically as you might think.
This only makes sense if you ignore switching cost. For example, what if it becomes difficult to get your email out of Gmail (e.g. they drop IMAP support or throttle it).
If there is a switching cost, then you do have a vested interest in choosing companies with (a) sustainable business models and (b) business models that align their incentives with users' interests.
Advertising may satisfy (a) but IMO it does not satisfy (b). My reasoning is that if users pay directly for a service, the company is more likely to listen to their comments/needs/suggestions than if advertisers are paying the bills and the users are only there to look at ads (cynically).
I'm sure this doesn't play out this way all the time, but I do think it is generally true. There also may be some selection bias: people running companies who have user-supported services may have different values than people running ad-supported services. Again, definitely not true 100% of the time.
I think the best example of this is Twitter. Because they need ad revenue, they had to change the API and developer rules. Theoretically, this will not happen with App.net because users pay for the service so they don't have to worry about ads.
I think worrying about ad revenue introduces a set of priorities that may be at odds with what's best for users. There are certainly cases where ads work fine (e.g. Google search), but for something like email I prefer to not have to worry about this.
I can pay for services I use with Google. If I decide that I would prefer to pay for services, why should I choose a non-Google provider?
You're right, doing it properly costs money, and I'm really glad there are enough people willing to pay for good email that FastMail has a viable business model. We've never made stupid-money like the tumblrs or instagrams of the world, but we're growing reliably and at a pace where our infrastructure can be improved gradually.
And we didn't sell for heaps of money either, but then we've been able to keep on operating much the same as before (apart from me getting a 2 year stint in Oslo to do skills and knowledge exchange with related teams inside Opera)
Btw I don't use fastmail (yet) but after checking my town's tap water analysis, I switched to bottled water. This analogy made me think again about what I'd want as a mail provider.
If you use gmail, that becomes your online identity. It's hard to switch. If you use your own domain, you can switch providers without changing addresses, though not without hassle. But switching away from that gmail.com address? It's more than just giving out a new address -- I'm sure that in 1 year, I'll still be getting email at gmail.
So that's the difference. With email, you need to plan way ahead. With water, you don't.
A $40/year e-mail-only service is comparable with the $50/year Google Apps?
https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html
It appears to depend on a physical key that I'll have to carry around with me. Gmail's MFA relies on an app on my iPhone which is far more convenient and they have a backup way of getting into the account with a hand-typed key that is very long.
Why is good web-based email MFA so hard to implement and why has Google been the only one to perfect it?
Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on their chat client.
The author explains why he didn't consider them in his second paragraph: "Moving, for example, from Google Calendar to Yahoo Calendar solves very little in the long run, because Yahoo’s business interests are exactly the same as Google’s: advertising and consumer lock-in."
I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.
I've started looking into this with a view of building something so understanding what's important to folks is v useful.
What I want: 0) User selectable/delegable domains (it's ok IMO to use yahoo/gmail/aol/etc. today, if you know and accept the limitations. It's moronic or at best short-sighted to depend on an @yahoo.com, @gmail.com or @aol.com address, though.) 1) IMAP/activesync (push; imap-idle is nice but not sufficient) 2) Good anti-spam 3) Sane and/or configurable account-recovery procedures. Since email is essentially the master-key to your other accounts which use email-from auth for password recovery, it's a big target. This is a hard technical and policy problem. I'd like it to be something users can configure at account creation time in various ways, ranging from SMS/call from to "can't recover password". A good medium might be "takes 3-7 days to recover password with notification given in advance to all other means of contact, must use postal mail to confirm" or something like that.
It would also be nice to have: 1) Great search 2) Ideally, a webmail client. Ideally, as nice a webmail client as possible 3) Encryption wherever possible. The low hanging fruit is start-tls for SMTP and IMAP, and https for the webmail. Storage encryption would be nice; could be "encrypt mail to a public key as it arrives". 4) Support of S/MIME (and PGP, ideally) keys would be really nice; do some signature checking on the server side in the webmail ui? Run a keyserver? Issue s/mime identities to people who use accounts on your domain? Partner with a CA? 5) Configurable retention policies 6) Group/team/business features (address books) 7) Maybe calendaring 8) Maybe voice/sms too
It's by no means a complete Google Voice replacement (though one could presumably build one with some work using Plivo, the SIP provider I used).
If this is true, it makes fools out of everyone on HN who defended Google and poo-pooed the reaction to the XMPP spam move as being merely geek hysteria and paranoia and a massively overblown fit being thrown by prima donnas, saying that it was merely an anti-spam move and surely not a prelude to scrapping XMPP entirely.
Federation has the inherent problem of spamming. I think whitelisting domains could have been a way out.
Is XMPP spamming really a thing?
Chee Chew said that "we haven't seen significant uptake" in federation with Google Talk via server-to-server connections. The majority of the uptake Google did see was from organizations or individuals looking to bombard Google Talk users with chat spam, Chew said.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-...
This is the original email thread with more details when Google disabled XMPP federation for a while in GTalk: http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...
My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.
He - and the rest of the leadership - have been asked about XMPP/CalDav/CarDav/RSS/Reader/<any topic related that has ever been discussed on HN> in person repeatedly.
Every week there is a global meeting called TGIF. The format is almost always the same - some announcements, a presentation or two about things that various teams are working on - followed by Q&A. There is an internal Google Moderator instance set up each week where questions can be submitted and voted on, and there are live microphones in the meeting room.
Generally at least one of Larry or Sergey are there (usually both) as well as the other senior leadership. They take the questions and they - for the most part - give pretty straight answers.
I can promise you that nothing that gets brought up here on HN doesn't also get brought up internally and debated intensely. The fact that this is possible and normal (even encouraged) is one of the things I love about working at Google.
Whether or not we like the answers that are given we at least get to hear the reasoning behind the decisions and get more insight into the thought processes of the people that are making the decisions.
We get to see, first-hand, Larry and Sergey talking about the larger plans. We get to see what they are passionate about. We get to see and feel their sincerity.
I truly wish I could share more of what we are told. I wish I could get across why I believe in the company and in the larger vision that Larry and Sergey have shared about where the company is going.
There is a reason that so many Google employees are so passionate about the work we do and about the company. It's not because we've "drank the Gool-aid" or because we get great food and other perks. It's because we get to see and experience first-hand what the leadership talks about and cares about - and we believe in what they are trying to do.
It's about making the world a better place. It's about doing things that nobody else can do. It's about doing things that most other people don't even imagine is possible.
You can also set up a personal domain there for free, if you can read/translate Russian instructions at http://pdd.yandex.ru
Their web client for mail is localized into English.
Pros:
* Not google; yandex have rather good reputation here, and like google, they are tech company, with good engineering team
* A nice web-interface for mail (for my use case it's comparable to google's)
* Supports RSS feeds via mail interface
* Like google, there are interesting services: calendar, maps, search, translations, etc.
Cons:
* Basically, yandex is Russian google in terms of business (89% of their revenue is ads); however, they don't do hardware and don't have a facebook/plus-like social network
* Russian-based, so potentially a kgbfsb threat (never heard of any kgbfsb incidents, though)
* Some/most services are not localized for English speakers
We've been having an influx of users for our mail for domains product because it is free compared to what Google provides now. We also have an importer from Gmail that works via IMAP.
BTW, there's an XMPP service too but I don't think we have English docs for that.
I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(
So far I've loved Fastmail. It's great having a real human respond to a support ticket, usually within a few hours!
Has few bells and whistles (which is a plus in a way - not infected with social disease) but does the basic read and sync quite well.
I've been using Feedly since the Google Reader announcement, and am quite happy with it.
Still use Google for search, though.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compar...
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda... [2]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...
Not saying that anything has changed -- I really have no idea -- but I'm not sure how prudent it is to base high-tech decisions off anecdotal data that is 4 years old.
There are a lot of siloed web properties that I use without depending on them: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. I enjoy them but if they dissapear I can live with that.
Two we properties that I do depend on are Dropbox and Evernote, but I am a paying customer of each.
* Horde Webmail (http://www.horde.org/) which brings
* Webmail,
* Calendar,
* Addressbook
* Tasks
* Notes
* Sync via Exchange ActiveSync or SyncML
(most mobiles incl. iOS and Android support it)
* XMPP server (http://prosody.im/)
* Multi IM transports (http://spectrum.im)
* XMPP webclient, Jappix (http://jappix.org/)
* Owncloud for files (http://owncloud.org/)
* SelfOSS for RSS (http://selfoss.aditu.de/)For my part I wrote a node.js server application that acts as a notification central: myhub (https://github.com/PaulFreund/myhub).
It captures events from different sources (xmpp, irc, mail, rss) and makes them accessible via Email summarys, RSS feeds or a webinterface which is only implemented for a Kindle interface right now.
That way I get a mail every five minutes if I got messages and my phone will notify me about that.
I wish more Jabber servers would support http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html and http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html
On my XMPP server (prosody) I modified the message module so it sends all messages to all connected clients and I never miss a message (this solves the "in" part). Additional I installed http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0280.html which unfortunately is not very widespread in clients but I use it with myhub (mentioned above) so I get all messages ( in and out ) for logging.
For the future I'm planning to build a server that will render all these problems obsolte but until then we have to find ways around it.
If you need further ideas how to solve your problem I'd be glad to help :)
Does anyone have experience with both that and fastmail and can compare?
From a cursory exploration, you can get quite a bit (including quite a bit of storage) from zohomail at the free tier, compared to what you get from the $5/year (might as well be free) tier at fastmail. But fastmail may have lots of cool features if you do want to pay?
(Definitely interested in getting away from gmail. I've always had my own domain name for email, but it's currently hosted at gmail, using the no-longer-existing free google apps tier).
I do have two complaints (without having really looked into it yet). The first is that you have issues disabled on GitHub, and the second is that it took some effort to locate the Github link.
I suggest linking to the source in a more prominent way— perhaps on the downloads page. If I'm going to be using this, I'm definitely going to be interested in contributing.
For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.
This is directed more at the linked post than you, but it fits here: Sometimes I get half-way behind one of these screeds, because after all I do believe in open standards (and was pretty peeved about Reader). But then I look more closely and find stuff like this, which frankly sounds like yet another Apple nut trying to stick it to Android via proxy.
[1] Which, of course, maps are not.
iCloud mail interface not just "pretty", but simpler and especially settings. So, after iCloud Gmail looks very cheap, if you don't use iCloud, you should to try.
I'm planning to switch to that one too. Moved away from mail / calendars etc a while ago. Talk has been keeping me attached. If I switch my domain to another XMPP provider using the same email address as in my google apps account, will the migration be seamless for my contacts (who are still using Google talk)?
Since I didn't have Talk set up on my own domain, I'm SOL on that front. I just have to get everyone to re-authorize me.
I doubt your contacts will migrate unless you do it on the client side.
From http://owncloud.org/support/calendars/
> The calendar needs your current position for detecting your timezone. Without the correct timezone there will be a time offset between the events in owncloud and your desktop calendar you synchronise with owncloud. You can also set the timezone manually in the personal settings.
After reading the article, it seems like the author hasn't looked too hard into self-hosted solutions.
It would seem that many server apps support open standards (SMTP, CalDav, XMPP etc.)
Your address book is the new friendlist instead of facebook's. Why not do the same with your email and calendar, etc. ? And dropbox is cool but you can easily have mercurial + watch files with node.js ... I think there's DVCS-autosync and OwnCloud is coming along
For example, would it free from the 13 years old limitation on account ownership?
They have the resources, the browser and the community to make it work.
I always say I'd like to have a myname@firefox.com account from where to manage all my web presence.
Imagine a hundred million people registering just to grab their vanity plate.
From there... profit!
Mozilla guys, if you are interested just reply to this thread, I'll contact you right away to get the ball rolling.
Host: kkinder.com
Common name: .webfaction.com
Alternative subject names: regex([^.]\.webfaction\.com), regex(webfaction\.com)
It's not my certificate, it's your browser, which I assume is Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP? You're using a browser that does not support TLS, a cutting edge new technology that's over 10 years old. Get Firefox or Chromium.
Anyone know if its getting better/actively developed?
However, I suspect it's the free aspect that everyone's bemoaning. :-)
My concern isn't really about the money, though the free calls through voice are nice. It's that Google voice has my number now (as a gizmo refugee), and that + a voip provider + cell provider could be condensed down to twilio on the desktop and wifi, and maybe cell data on a tablet, or prepaid cell as a backup.
The $1/month for a number isn't bad, international sms is awesome for my use case.
Netvibes has AJAX widgets for all one's needs. http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us