Leaving Gmail Behind (2013)

Don't bother running a mail server. It's hell. I did from 1998 until about last week. I started running it on a cable modem with an old Compaq desktop, migrated to a dedicated server (which hosted a load of other stuff) and finally onto VMs.

I have spent hours getting myself of blacklists after entire IP ranges were reported. I've spent hours working out why the hell Postfix won't talk to dovecot on a local socket, upgrading Linux distributions, postfix and dovecot and being fucked over by config format changes and periodically losing entire mailboxes to IMAP bugs. Oh and SELinux - hours of it.

The thing that finally killed it for me was Yahoo. My landlord uses Yahoo mail for comms and Yahoo just decided to stop accepting delivery from my server. It took a phone call from me asking him why he hadn't sorted something for me and for him to tell me that he didn't get the email to discover this. So I dredged through the logs, found an error from yahoo's mail servers saying I need to hit a web form to prove I was a legitimate sender. So I did that, and nothing, not a sausage happened. Googling around says I need to wait 6 months before submitting the request again.

I have no power in this situation. I can't email my landlord. I need to do business, not piss around with politics.

So in a fit of anger, I blasted my VM on Linode, went to my local supermarket, bought a Moto G2 in cash to replace my Lumia 630 (which was doing IMAP) that I just smashed the screen on, signed up for Google Apps free trial and just moved the domain over to that.

Just can't be fucked with it any more. I run "inbox zero" (i.e. I delete religiously) so there is no cost for me to migrate.

I don't care if they read my email or shop me to the feds; I'm tired of herding servers and software these days. A decade ago I could quite happily spend all day doing it but I have better things to do now.

I'm trying to imagine an article written in 1996 about someone switching their email providers. It would be a complete non-event, there were so many to choose from back then and besides, your own workstation was likely running sendmail. So here we are in the data silo era, where running your own mailserver is seen as something as archaic as soldering your own CPU board.

Fortunately I never made the switch. I do have a gmail account (actually, I have a google account which translates into having a gmail account as well). The only times I've used it is as a fallback for not being able to send mail from my own server because the ssh tunnel was unavailable. This happened maybe twice over the last decade, in both cases I could have avoided the issue if I had thought about it a bit longer.

So gmail was a way out of the bind, but as soon as that was resolved I used my trusty old mailserver again. Setting one up and maintaining it over the years is probably less work than moving out of gmail once you've decided enough is enough. Cost of switching is the way customer lock in is achieved in almost any situation, fortunately google make it relatively easy to get your data out.

Future product: family box. A simple rack mounted appliance a-la synology that takes care of the data, email, address books and so on of an extended family, administered by the family computer whiz. With an backup in the cloud via tarsnap to guard against mishap. A bit like a workgroup server but then applied to a family or some kind of loosely knit group of individuals.

With the option to migrate from one box to another if you want (and with forwarding in case you do).

It's interesting to see several posts about people leaving Gmail in the recent months pop up on HN.

What I don't get about this one is that the author, Christopher, put the email server on a Digital Ocean VPS. If I'm not mistaken, DO is a US company and the gov can probably get access to the server's contents as easily as to a Gmail account.

Of course, if Christopher uses PGP for everything, then the gov would still have to find a way to decrypt stuff. But PGP doesn't seem to be commonly used (yet).

I used to have a Gmail account too but switched to Fastmail about 16 months ago and recently renewed my account for 3 more years. It's reliable and the web client is crazy fast.

I left gmail and ran my own mail server too. It's harder and more stressful than you think.

After a year I decided I'd had enough and moved to runbox[1]. It's not that expensive and the peace of mind know I don't have to worry about my mail server is excellent.

1: https://runbox.com/

I used to run my own mailserver. It was alright, but occasionally I'd screw up the config and not notice for days, or my auto-update of spamassassin would fail and I'd get heaps of spam.

I moved to Google Apps when it was in beta, and I was quite happy for a while, but GMail kept getting worse. I also host my family's email, so when GMail changed I'd get calls from my mum. I use IMAP clients, so I'd also be as stuck as her! Replacing all the nice text buttons with icons really doesn't help, and their spam filtering was getting too many false positives due to others marking mailing lists as spam instead of unsubscribing.

Finally the new compose view was the last straw. I signed up for Fastmail and migrated all my email accounts over, and I haven't looked back. Their web interface is simple and really fast. Search isn't as great as Google, but IMAP to my mail client sorts that for me. Spam filtering isn't as fancy as GMail, but I get fewer false positives - I'd much rather have spam hit my inbox than genuine mail get filtered out.

Plus Fastmail lets you write sieve filters if you're a power user, it's far better than the half-baked filters Gmail offers.

Running your own server is great until something goes wrong and nothing works. It is just too much hassle to run your own mail server these days IMHO. Being blacklisted for spam is a nightmare to sort out and can happen so easily when you stick you server on something like DO. The control and privacy is nice but is there really much difference between running your own server on DO and using Outlook.com or Gmail in terms of privacy?

I'm in the process of setting up my own email system but my biggest worry is incoming spam.

One of the reasons (thee reason?) Gmail is so good at blocking spam is because they have so many users using them that it becomes very easy to spot spam campaigns. But I also think it's true that the longer an email address is in use, the more targeted the spam becomes. Not because some evil script-kiddie turns his spambot up to 11, but because you'll start to get emails from legitimate people about things you're not interested in which aren't as easy to catch in a spam filter.

Another reason Gmail is good at blocking spam is because the answer to "what is spam" is influenced by every single user who tags a message as spam, or doesn't tag a message as spam. This is another critical-mass benefit that a small scale provider can't currently provide.

Given reputation systems and cryptography though, I also wonder if the only reason some kind of distributed email reputation database / system doesn't already exist (or isn't more widely known?) is because everyone assumes it isn't possible.

<pipedream>What if it wasn't you and your email server trying to catch spam, but you and every other independent server admin who runs their own email server. When a new email comes in you could check the reputation of the sender, you could check the reputation on the domain of any links, et al. Reputations would be signed and you wouldn't immediately trust the reputation report from new users, and wouldn't even need to trust reputation reports from email servers controlled by admins you don't know.</pipedream>

Edit: Typo, clarification

Every time I read one of these articles, I go from optimistic of being able to switch over to frustrated by the end, both because of the complexity of setting it up and the end result not looking like something I could give my parents to run even if I got it set up completely. Why is it that nearly every other service that runs on the 'net can be stood up in one or two packages and maybe as many config files?

I use Mandrill for domains I don't use much for email. It's great for sending and you can setup incoming mail. Mandrill has a web hook which can send each incoming email wherever you like with the info in JSON format. So, I just setup a simple Ruby app which receives the email info and then writes that info to maildir format. I have this setup on a VPS and then I read the email directly from there using Mutt.

Right now I don't have sending setup for anything but through my apps. If I get something I really need to reply to (rare) I just email with my main address (setup with Gmail) and mention that this address should be used for further messages.

With a bit more work and getting outgoing email setup, then I'm sure it would work fine for my main address as well.

Anybody know how much revenue gmail makes per user? I'm pretty sure I'd be happy to pay that to not have them scrape through my email. I think they have great services but am turned off by the idea of them owning all of my data as they are pretty up front about looking through it to sell advertisements against me. They are also getting really good at sifting through it with all the latest deep learning neural networks. I'd like to see google open the business model to include selling me a service up front rather than incrementally selling my data. Of course, I've been saying this since 1996 and always have had people look at me odd, shrug and say "but it's free and it works great".

I've just setup a box especially for some mail accounts on DO by using https://mailinabox.email Looks like a pretty complete package for the job, let's see how it holds up.

Mail through EMACS? Why go to so much trouble?

I have an IMAP mailbox at an ISP, and all my web sites forward to it. The desktop and laptop machines use Thunderbird, and Android phones speak IMAP just fine. IMAP has pretty much solved the problem of multiple client devices accessing the same mailbox, and everybody has good spam filters and lots of disk space now.

So what do you need GMail for, anyway? Or any webmail system?

The only alternatives I will consider to Gmail are other web providers that take a few clicks to set up and can hold all my email forever.

I know that's not very 'hacker-ish', but, everything this article describes sounds so utterly unpleasant to suffer. Gmail obsoleted hosting your own mail, as far as I'm concerned.

I run my own email server on my VPS that also hosts my site. Works pretty well.

Got it setup with Virtualmin which auto sets-up ClamAV and SpamAssasin + email accounts and also installed Roundcube for webmail. Works a charm with any IMAP/POP3 email client I've tried it with too.

Gmail has made the email ecosystem much worse than it was. Sadly it just marks your domain as spam eve if you do ptr, SPF, dkim, dmarc etc. Really sad

Mykolab is a good alternative.

Post should be dated with "(2013)" appendage.

What's with these endless bouts of Google-hate on HN? seemingly if there isn't anything going on at the moment someone would readily whip something out from the archives just to keep the Google-bashing going and they will be generously rewarded with karma.

What have they ever done to you?!