Hacker News Reader

Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

The main issue is Google will only drive a small minority of it's customers/'products being sold' away. If you have a problem with Google's current approach, you may want to consider leaving, not to "stick it to the man" but to not have to deal with their services anymore.

I recently deleted everything on my account (G+ & YT included) and it feels great to be free from the constant harassment. I only have Gmail active now. I'm still looking for a new mail provider but once I have one, my relationship with Google is over as far as I'm concerned.

It really depends on how much you need to use Google's services.

View on HN

I feel somewhat dirty saying this, but I'm a fan of Office 365. Exchange support, fantastic customer service, and I feel like if I'm paying money, I'm actually the customer.

NSA's got all my shit anyway, at this point. If I can find an equivalent product that doesn't have the .gov down their throats, I'll jump ship tomorrow. But for now...

"I feel somewhat dirty saying this"

Why? O365 is a solid alternative to GMail. Nothing to be ashamed about.

My anti-Microsoft bias is showing.

I just got an idea:

The hard part about setting up your own email server is, by far, ensuring deliverability. New/dynamic addresses tend to not be trusted by other mail servers, so that is really the most "dangerous"/time consuming part. So, why not do the following?:

* Set up your home server to accept email. If it goes down for a few hours, hey, pretty much every mail server will retry for a few days, so you're pretty much guaranteed to get all messages. * Set up your home mail server to use something like Mailgun or Mandrill to actually send messages. I'm using Mailgun and they have a fantastic interface, giving me a checklist of things I need to do to be able to send emails with pretty much guaranteed deliverability (DomainKeys, SPF, etc).

This would both allow you to receive mail on any domain you wanted, keep your email safe from the NSA/whoever (you can make your home server TLS-only) and ensure that you can send email from any domain you own with great deliverability. Plus, it's free (unless you hit Mailgun's 10k mails/month limit, which is pretty unlikely).

This could pretty much be a Docker image, so setting it up would just be a "docker run some/image". I have various domains, and right now using Gmail is a pain in the ass because I can't change my primary domain. I have to keep my Google identity tied to my 10-year-old email address even though I never use it any more.

I'd lose spam filtering and search, but eh, there are good spam filters around.

I think I might hit 10k emails a month if I subscribe for a few more mailing lists, though I guess I could stand to unsub from a few. Otherwise I think that's a pretty decent solution.

The limit is for outgoing mail so unless your sending 10,000 emails a month to mailing lists, I don't think you'll have a problem.

Ah ok, my bad, I misread that.

I do this (but will argue doing it under some free limit misses the point: man up and pay for your use...); in my case I'm using either AuthSMTP or CritSend for my personal manually-sent outgoing mail (I don't remember which; I have accounts with both).

Of course you should pay for this, but, at $0.5 for the first thousand emails after 10k, you'd have to try very hard to pay even a buck. I use them for all my products, though, and pay them gladly.

I've never considered that.

That's actually a really good idea, especially as reliability will be higher. My connection rarely drops and I have a static IPv6 too so DNS may be far easier to configure.

Edit: An idea to ease transition would be to setup the vacation responder in gmail to remind your contacts about your new address.

You mean if you're using a Gmail address? If you have your own domain, you can just redirect it.

Would anyone be interested in me doing a writeup of this? It sounds like maybe it should be put out there.

I'd be very interested. Even without a writeup I think I'll try implementing your strategy, but a little documentation would help a lot.

Yeah, your mail would be going to your@name.tld and your old address (assuming it's gmail or something?) would use a vacation responder. I'm against forwarding mail as people will continue using my old address. Put your foot down and tell people to use your new address.

Else you'll never be able to close your google account.

+1 for a write up. Last time I tried making a mail server I got it to send mail but it couldn't receive any.

> Would anyone be interested in me doing a writeup of this?

Yes.

Great, setting this up will be my next post, then (for reference, my site is (http://www.stavros.io/, subscribe to my mailing list to be notified of new posts: http://eepurl.com/BbHo5).

Coincidentally, I wrote about the first half of this setup yesterday:

http://www.stavros.io/posts/no-hassle-emails-from-home/

How does this prevent the NSA from reading your email? Your outbound email will be unencrypted in general. If your inbound server only accepts TLS, then you're going to have a hard time receiving email, right? Or do I wildly misunderstand the state of SMTP encryption?

It seems to me that until DNSSEC becomes widespread, there isn't secure way to mandate TLS. (OK you could come up with some hack using HTTPS, like check https://domain.com/smtpsettings for each domain to determine if TLS is required.)

Of course running your own server does prevent wiretaps being implemented by Google, or retroactive access to your mailbox. But it's hardly "keeping your email safe from the NSA".

STLS for opportunistic encryption will increase the likelihood that your outbound mail is in fact encrypted. Still not a guarantee.

A large number of major email providers support STLS, so the uptake is better than you might think. A lot of smaller shops don't. How that affects you will really depend on what your mail use patterns are.

And you can always use PGP/MIME or S/MIME. That's increasingly prevalent in corporate networks, though starting from near nil it's still pretty near nil.

"New/dynamic addresses tend to not be trusted by other mail servers"

Running my own mail server for over a decade, and never had a deliverability problem. Of course, you shouldn't try to send from a dynamic IP, but what is a "new" address?

He means email addresses, not IPs I think.

I mean SMTP servers with no reputation. I've been running my own server for years, but I never looked much into it, I am led to believe that the server must have good reputation to avoid spam lists, is that not so?

An IP gets on spam lists if spam is sent out from that IP, or, sometimes, another "nearby" address. You can't get a good reputation, you're just on one or more spam lists, or you're not. Doesn't matter how long you've been around.

I use FastMail. They seem competent. (This is a high compliment.)

The interface is simple and clean, their mobile site is lightweight and they seem committed to continued improvements. I'd highly recommend switching to FastMail.

I just did today. I closed my google account in its entirety. I got my mom a fastmail account too. I'm just not sure she will end up using it. She is 70 and pretty savvy for her age and even she sent me a email from her fastmail account that simply said "fuck google". She has been bitching about the Google+ nagging for a few weeks and seems pretty eager to get off the google teat.

For some people it is harder. I deleted my personal Google accounts a while ago. Our school e-mail is Gmail. When we visit Youtube after logging in for Gmail, you have an account, just not a channel. A little box telling you about the updated comment section keeps popping up. There is not a great danger to what they are currently doing, but it is annoying.

Your school or company knowing exactly what you're doing on youtube is more than just annoying. It can be extremely harmful.

It depends on the school or company though of course.

Use incognito mode for YouTube.

You still have to log in to comment on or even "like" a video. It's also harder to find the videos you want without being able to see your subscriptions.

I got sick of being logged in when I was searching or using youtube, so two weeks ago I started running my gmail account in a separate profile in Chromium (using the "app" command line option to hide the URL bar that it uses when you use the "Create Application Shortcuts" menu option, but set to use a new profile directory).

It's slightly annoying and I may migrate off of gmail in the future, but for now it prevents this problem.

What about mail.com as your new mail service?

It doesn't seem like I can use my own domain. That's actually extremely important as I don't want to end up in the same scenario I'm in (can't just pack up and move). It seems my options are:

* Host myself and deal with possibly losing mail, high spam, rejected mail or downtime.

* Pay for a service to handle this for me (either partially like Mailgun or fully like FastMail).

If I want more uptime, I could lease a VPS. Either way, I have to pay up somewhere (money or loss of data). If I'm paying, I'd rather back a company that cares about privacy, like FastMail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com