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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

Google's attempt to take over email does not sit with me well. We need better email. But email is too important to be proprietary. We need open standards here. And we need open source developers to kick it in high gear to create better email clients.

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In case you haven't seen it, you might consider Fastmail [0]. They have a great webmail client, they just released native mobile apps (for both iOS and Android at the same time, wow!), and they are very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail.

[0] https://fastmail.com

+1 for Fastmail, and thanks for the heads up on the mobile client that I had no idea about.

very much working to expand the standards to meet the needs of modern e-mail.

Obligatory links:

https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/tree/fastmail http://jmap.io/

Happy fastmail user.

Privacy-wise, personally, I'd just love to see what are my options for self-hosted email service.

Presently it's just Postfix and Dovecot on the physically-owned server and Thunderbird and K9 Mail on desktop and mobile. Quite old-fashioned.

I had seen links to some fastmail support branch for cyrus and some jmap.io, but didn't really get what thase are and all on Fastmail's website suggests it's a service, not software. But maybe I had missed something.

So... is it for me or not?

I don't think the issue is as much with the clients as it is with the spam filtering Google provides. The sheer volume of emails they handle allows them to have the best spam filtering in the world. Something, that will be very difficult to duplicate through OSS.

The issue is with sending mail. Running my own mail server just feels like a loosing proposition as inevitably it'll be blocked because it's not a well known one.

Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you...

(I have been my own SMTP server (hosted by OVH) for a few months now. I was blocked exactly once, by custom filtering from a small provider where the delivery status notification said to appeal to abuse@, I emailed them and they fixed it in minutes.)

Similar story. I couldn't email msn (or exchange, etc.) but there was a web form I could fill out. Annoying, but I got to have some fun describing the type of emails I sent to my "list" and its "unsubscribe process".

> Certainly this is what will happen if everyone thinks the same way as you...

What will happen? More people will block small providers because fewer exists? The issue is much larger than that. There need to be better ways to deal with email than just dropping it for arbitrary reasons.

> I was blocked exactly once

... that you know of

I've worked for companies where our internal mail servers just couldn't email some people; we presume their ISP black listed us and never published it on a shared list. (We only know this because people would call because they never got the email with the link to their purchased item.)

I do not have the time to worry about if every email I send will get delivered. Many systems don't send you a status notification; they just accept and then drop the message, meaning you may not see an error in the logs. You may not show up on public black lists for days. That's not something I want to be sinking my time into. I'd rather pay someone to run a well-known service that is very unlikely to have delivery issues.

Pretending to accept an email and then dropping just seems wrong. Is this something that reputable email providers do?

(From my experience, I have never witnessed a situation where an email I had sent to someone had silently been ignored.)

Yes, it is a practice that big players do.

http://serverfault.com/questions/364132/postfix-says-mail-se...

My understanding of this answer is that the SMTP said it had accepted it, but the sender would have been notified afterwards that the message had not been delivered, had the return addresses correctly been set up. This seems OK to me; I would have received the bounce.

(Also, the mail was sent from www-data, which I think was an acceptable clue to classify the message as spam no matter from which server it came from.)

It doesn't always need to send a bounce if it doesn't want to.

I've never had a problem. I have a VPS I use as a smart relay.

There's no shortage of mail clients. There's even a decent choice of webmail clients. But Gmail offers free hosting with decent antispam, which are things that otherwise cost money.

Unless people want to get syndicalist/cooperative with their email, they'll go with the large free email providers.

Since you can be pretty sure that Google reads and hands over your email just as much as Microsoft does, you should give outlook.com a chance. It has a really nice UI for personal email and, apart from a few UI deviations, is pretty much the same as Gmail was before they started trying to make it "better."

There are couple of problems with the open source clients, one is the front end the other is anti-spam. Many of them are hideous and look like 10 years old. Some of them are functional and look nice, but you still have to deal with bad anti-spam filters.

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