I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle.
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 been working on removing myself from the Google silo ... Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now."
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.
I prefer these services free and have no problem being tracked for more personalized ads. I don't wanna pay with my wallet - I am OK with paying with my information.
By principle I prefer software that's free as in freedom of speech and services that are managed by non-profits.
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.
Huh? Google is happy to give me a very good free e-mail account if I let them process my e-mail and serve me ads. I'm perfectly fine with that, so I'm taking the deal. Similar deals exist for calendar and talk (for which, admittedly, I
have limited use for - my work Outlook calendar is canon and I have maybe two persons I IM with on Google Talk).
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.
I'm fine with robots looking at my email too. I'm worried about the stories of people getting randomly locked out of their gmail though. My gmail powers nearly everything. It is responsible for pretty much all communications with all of my other accounts, and that includes accounts with automated payments. If I get locked out of my email, it would be a huge burden to regain my digital life. That said, I still use gmail, but that will be only temporary if these stories continue.
As I said in another comment I'm also a free Google Apps user and have made no attempt or thought about escaping Google's "silo".
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.
what is inherently better about non-profit running a service?
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?
Non-profits may not run a service better but it does mean they can't be bought (or it's just more complicated to do so). It can be a clear way to signal the intent behind the organisation and restrict what can be done by the company.
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.
You also forgot one thing - non-profits also do not have the contractual obligation to have profits or growth, like public companies do. Big difference.
Of course, non-profits are not created equal. There's IKEA and then there's Mozilla or EFF.
Ah, yes of course. That would actually be the biggest difference (and I completely forgot it). In my example, there are no shareholders so the obligation to maximise value for them doesn't exist.
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.
The comment I replied to does NOT mention hosting free software by yourself, a route with which I agree if you're so inclined.
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.
That's where you (and by some extension most computer science people) are completely off-base. You don't get to define what is private for me or what privacy means for me. It is a social construct. I have a select set of information that I do not want in the hands of a select group of people - THAT constitutes MY privacy.
That's not how it works. My privacy perception has nothing to do with another person's trust in me. And no I did not say I am volunteering ALL the information I am privy to - I did say that I have my boundaries. How I define those boundaries will obviously take into consideration what I think is a mutually understood contract between me and another person. But those boundaries vary from person to person and so it is futile to try to define someone else's privacy perception objectively.
> You don't get to define what is private for me or what privacy means for me
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.
Lots of people are OK with something until it bites them. Plenty of people are 'ok' with not backing up their information (e.g. family photos), until a storage failure takes it all away.
Yes it's called taking risk. I am aware of it - people like you seem to get offended that we actually take that risk in exchange of the convenience (free and more or less stable services).
For me, and a few other people, 'personalized ads' is something that sounds very, very bad in itself, even if separated from the privacy issues. There really is a point on the scale of ad effectiveness where it stops being useful information and becomes brainwashing.
> 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.
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.
A lot of your short comment history is about Tonido. If you're affiliated with them in some way, you should disclose it when you talk about them on HN.
I have used Rackspace mail for 5 or 6 years, since I gave up trying managing email servers for firm and my clients. All it took was one client getting a spamming virus, and all email from the IP address would get black listed.
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.
For folder synchronization Bittorrent Sync is a pretty good alternative to Dropbox. Of course, you don't get the web interface and all, but you get the same functionality for folders, for free, with your own server.
I agree that email is scary and downright complicated, but it is definitely not an unreasonable task.
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.
Setting up email servers, especially ensuring that they don't get blacklisted by other servers, is a huge pain and definitely not worth the trouble for an individual or a small team. If you're concerned about Google, there are lots of other providers out there, and whatever they're charging is probably a bargain relative to rolling your own.
Can you elaborate on the blacklisting part? I've had my mailserver for a little over a year now and never had any issues with my mail going to spam, but my uses for that mailserver only revolve around 2-3 email accounts.
Sorry, I was a little unclear - the setup is easy, it's the maintenance that's annoying. (I've run mail servers in one way or another for ~15 years. I use Google Apps for my personal email now but still maintain some servers that do about 10,000 emails a day.)
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.
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.
You may be right on this ... spoofing is still an aggravation because of the bouncing. Most of the time I haven't been able to find out exactly _why_ a particular provider has an issue (not blacklists), only ask for them to change their mind.
AOL, as far as I'm concerned, is a lost cause. They will block on rDNS alone, and no amount of calling or emailing will convince them otherwise. Recently, Verizon has gotten pissy about domain names matching the sending server, without even checking SPF.
In my 10+ years of running an SMTP server for SOHO use off of first business DSL (where Verizon refused to change rDNS), then cable modem, AOL was the sole server I encountered rejecting on mismatching rDNS alone.
Managing black lists is definitely a pain in the ass. If you can do outgoing spamassassin it definitely helps. I also use MXToolbox's free plan to monitor my two outgoing mail servers for blacklist. Alternatively, you can use Nagios to monitor blacklists.
You've been lucky so far; I have been running my own personal SMTP server(s) for quite some time, and while it's usually setup and forget, it can be an all-nighter headache.
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.
Can you make a recommendation? I want something in the middle of a cheap hosting like Dreamhost and Google/Yahoo/Rackspace.
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.
Honestly, I use Google Apps for Domains myself, behind a domain I own (so I can leave down the road if I want.) I don't think folks moving off Gmail to leave Google want to do that but it's worked well for me. It's been long enough that I can't remember what I used before that for my email.
Same here. I'm more concerned with reducing data lock-in.
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.
For an OSS self-hosted e-mail appliance, I've been using iRedMail. It's built on dovecot/postfix with a decent management interface for free. I run it on Ramnode for 2 bucks a month with no other costs. Works fine.
I think ISPs should firewall SMTP by default, and if they don't provide you with static IP they absolutely should add their dynamic IP blocks to the DUL / PBL etc. Almost all of the spam rejects from my mail server are from dynamic IPs. Them's the breaks. FWIW my ISP were perfectly happy to relax the firewall rules when I asked.
I'm working on this right now! It's going to integrate with both Amazon S3 for file storage and Amazon Glacier for backup. I hope to get it working with the BitTorrent Sync protocol so I don't have to write my own app that watches a dir and uploads files to the server.
As others have mentioned, it's not really the technical aspects of SMTP that make hosting your own email difficult. It's the entire deliverability ecosystem that's developed (ostensibly to protect from spam), such as most residential providers blocking outgoing port 25, or most mailservers filtering incoming mail from dynamic IPs.
I used iRedMail to setup department mail server and it just worked. I had no problems with configuration: IMAP, SSL, SMTP - everything works out of the box. Spam protection is also adequate, at least for a relatively low-volume usage.
You're not addressing what majelix mentions. How about DKIM? SPF? Do you know if/when you end up on any block-lists? What about deferrals from the major providers?
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.
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.
For replacing dropbox I recommend copy.com - they give you 15GB for free (or 20GB if you use my ref link: https://copy.com?r=alqolW) instead of dropbox's tiny 2GB. Their client app looks and behaves very similar to dropbox and they support all important platforms.
Rackspace's hosted mail is $2/inbox/month now, and they have a minimum of 5 mailboxes.
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.
As for dropbox, its only upside is great mobile apps, for other tasks SpiderOak works for me. Actually, I have both and have SpiderOak put everything I often need on mobile into Dropbox.
i also ise rackspace mail (almost entirely via imap/smtp), and it has been very reliable. Their lack of 2-factor auth is making we consider fastmail though.
>>Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month.
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.
You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own server.
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.
> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer.
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.
Speaking as someone who uses Google Apps for personal email, it sucks. I hate having a google apps managed account under my personal email address (my primary google account is a gmail address), I hate the limited filtering options that Gmail provides, I hate the faux-IMAP layer that Gmail has, I hate the fact that every time I switch networks with my laptop I get a "too many simultaneous connections" error from the Gmail IMAP server, and I hate many more things about this.
So many thanks to Ken for finding what appears to be a good alternative. Time to convince my family to switch email providers.
Wow, that's terrible. Thanks for the link. It's one thing to see Google ditching open standards, but silently violating them instead of ditching them seems possibly even worse.
The software is KDE (Akonadi), Thunderbird (Lightning), and a few small utilities. It seems probable, though not guaranteed that Lightning will keep working. But I don't want to bed the farm on that, I doubt KDE will be supported, and I'd really rather just use a calendar that faithfully implements the standard instead of whitelisting the standard for certain clients.
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.
I have to disagree on the whitelisting as breaking an implementation of a standard; nothing in a standard like that requires it be universally accessible...you're already authenticating to get the CalDAV data in the first place, for instance. Whitelisting clients is not really different and is quite common, though I'm not sure if Google ever gave an explanation other than "our API is totally awesome", which is not much of one. I definitely do understand reluctance to depend on future support because of reasoning like that, however.
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.
> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which
> will stop working this summer.
Which software is that? If it's currently working with Gmail's CalDAV support, then it ought to continue working into the future. Google is not dropping support for CalDAV.
> I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk.
This also ought to continue working. Talk is still based on XMPP, and server federation is still working.
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.
> If Google actually does shut down support for either of these open protocols, feel free to object as much as possible.
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.
That's not the same as shutting down support. The Gmail app doesn't use IMAP, but you can still connect to Gmail with any IMAP client.
> Sure, you can use a third party XMPP client on Android,
> but the writing is on the wall here.
That's like saying that google.com is going to drop support for HTTP because Chrome has support for SPDY.
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.
I think you're under the impression that I am more emotionally-involved here than I actually am. I'm not particularly upset about Google's actions. It is what it is.
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.
Wait, what is this about? Is Google changing _something_ about CAlDAV? Now I'm worried, even though you are assuring us I shouldn't be, heh. What's changing exactly?
Thanks for the post. What're you doing about Listen? I've been happily using it even after they've discontinued it. But I assume it'll stop working for good once Reader is shut down. I've seen other Podcast apps on my friends' phones who weren't "grandfathered" into Listen, and I'm not impressed.
I skipped over that because there are actually pretty straightforward choices in Play Store. I switched to BeyondPod, but I'm hearing good things about AntennaPod.
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.
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.
Buy and run a server, Windows Server, Exchange, IIS, in 2003? Did you just tell me to go fuck myself? [0] I think MS has made up a lot of ground and is comparable to Google, for online services, in a lot of ways, but they're not better and would probably be on the same end of the stick, if they commanded the same lead Google does for these services.
I had MSDN and TechNet subscriptions, and because I was doing a lot of work from home had an old desktop set up as a server anyway, so the cost was low. DynDNS made it easy to host out of my house.
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.
No one has enough interest to simply leave a pretty compelling ecosystem, so you have to couch it in a way to makes it sound like an ethical imperative. You know, for blog views.
That's probably partially true, but that's not really true on HN. Every thread on "Google shutters product X" has at least one person asking for alternatives to gmail et al.
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
I ran my own mail server for 5 years, and it wasn't that hard - but then I didn't do much with it. A system with 3 users and not corresponding with anyone outside a few systems it easy.
Running fastmail's servers is some orders of magnitude harder.
That's charitable but Google really has been behaving as an evil actor lately. Just because they have essentially unlimited resources doesn't mean that they should be immune to critique.
No, it's not evil to make or ask for money to use your product; it's not evil to discontinue services, especially not with 6-24 month advanced warning; and it's not evil to literally want to be the omnipresent center of everyone's lives. How exactly is Google evil?
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.
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.
This isn't really a constructive observation. When MS was dominant, plenty of people still used Office. It didn't mean they didn't recognize that MS acted like a monopolist in a lot of ways. And it didn't mean that every aspect of MS was the same.
I don't know yet. Neither of those companies, (I believe? - might be wrong), has active social strategies. So, they're unlikely to use my data in ways that would increase my public risk by much. Either of them would be an improvement from that perspective. Neither are they likely to be particularly pushy when it comes to other services simply because I don't use much else that's made by 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.
#
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.
Google used to support openness, and now it is being less open, and therefore less "good". A step in a direction that is less "good" is a step towards "evil". It's not unreasonable to say that Google is being more evil.
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 think you're applying a a value judgement to a technical issue. "Open" pertains to the nature of certain software and standard. It's not inherently good or evil; you're just choosing to assign that value based on how it correlates with the world you'd like to see. I'd prefer things be more open too, but I don't agree that being less open is somehow inherently "more evil." You can have an entirely non-open company that's totally "good" - good/evil is about the actions of the company, not the wording of its license.
I don't consider closed-source software to be inherently evil. I do consider openness, transparency, et al to be inherently good, however, as these things are beneficial to the world at large. That doesn't mean that all alternatives are instantly evil or that openness is the One True Path.
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.
The concept of "good" and "evil" is inherently a value judgement. Less open is more evil for some people. That's not wrong, you just don't agree with it. It's values, not everyone will agree.
It's a way of framing an argument that discourages rational discussion of the actual merits of each side. It's not whether or not I agree with that value judgement that matters; it's that assigning those kinds of judgement is often a way to preclude any deeper or more nuanced discussion.
Google supports openness just fine and not statistically less than yesterday or n-days ago: https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google. Regardless, I'm dubious to believe having closed software makes one evil; just the same for discontinuing a product. Three steps forward; one step backwards; not evil, even by your ridiculous terms.
Honestly my greatest fear is that my account would be shut down for some obscure infraction and their support would be so terrible I'd never get it back. What would be the recourse then? Storming into their offices and demanding an answer?
Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.
Tabs in the title bar is a better UI decision. The URL box belongs to the tab, so it should be part of the tab. Your objection here seems to be 'Firefox mimicked Chrome and this is a bad thing', rather than these things being objectively bad.
Tabs in a treeview is better again, and is not possible with Chrome.
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.
Those things are all subjective, plenty of reasonable and clueful people will disagree as to whether any of those are good or bad things (or neither). When you say something like...
"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.
What operative system are you using? On GNU/Linux
- http / https are visible in the url bar
- tabs are under the url bar (and under any other bar you activated)
- menu is still there
- status bar can be toggled on/off
> 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.
Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.
I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing.
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.
- 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.
Under the hood it's all Cyrus IMAPd server with a ton of customisations (seriously, it's a lot - it's kind of getting out of hand - I need to tidy some up and push them back upstream)
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.
What would make it a bad idea? Just delay sending it for a user-specified amount of time (I think Gmail does 5s, 10s, and 30s), then have the UI for undo-ing the send disappear after the time elapses
Supposedly Gmail added this as an option because their infrastructure was setup in such a way that the delay was already there. They just made hooks so that you could cancel it before it was sent.
Any chance you could hunt down a reference for this? I regularly test email servers from my Gmail account (amongst others) and I've found that their outgoing messages hit my mail servers almost instantly.
Does Fastmail.FM have the equivalent of the "Archive" action in Gmail? Mail.app on OS X and on iPhone seem to play well with Archive and it's not something that I really want to give up.
No, and it's really annoying. I have an "Archive" mailbox in my Fastmail account, and Mail on both OS X and iOS recognize it as special (they give it the same "archive" icon as a GMail account), but don't override the 'delete' function. I haven't found a Radar for it, but I imagine that many of same have been closed as "works as designed".
Mail.app's "Archive" isn't the same as Gmail's. In Gmail, it just removes it from the current mailbox but leaves it in All Mail. Mail.app actually moves it to a specially-named IMAP folder.
Yes, there is an archive button. There is a difference, mail in Fastmail is in traditional IMAP folders and don't use tags as folders, I assume that you just tell the mail client not to download the archive folder.
I've been using Fastmail for about 2 months now. I much prefer it overall, but it is incorrect to say it has all the features of Gmail. It has just about enough of the right features that I want though, so no real issues there. The interface is superior in my opinion, of course the lack of adverts is wonderful, about the only thing which really gets me scratching my head is the way they handle multiple credentials, it is mind-boggling how many options there are yet none of them seem to allow a third party client to send/receive email but not have access to the account settings, a very strange ommission or just very badly documented. So no, it is not perfect, but it is a fantastic Gmail replacement.
I've created a ticket in our bug tracker to fix that ommission if it's not available, or document how if it is! I wrote the initial one-time support many years ago, but I haven't worked on the authentication subsystem for a while now. Thanks for the suggestion.
I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. FastMail has archiving, great search, and a superior interface. The Gmail interface is pretty bad IMO. It's cluttered with a lot of stuff that have nothing to do with email like:
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).
> I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does.
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.
Looks like you have to get a business account. Which is reasonably priced. So yeah, I was wrong, it's still possible to get it. Kind of a hack, but you can get it.
I pay $15 per year for a FastMail family account,[1] which allows me to use my own domain. The account includes only 200MB of space, but that works for me because I delete email from the server so that the US government can't access it, which they can do without a warrant.[2]
> For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does.
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.
When I migrated back from Windows 8/Phone 8 to iOS, I looked at this - but this loophole, from everything I've read, has been closed for a few months now.
Yes, I agree the new interface is a killer(as in bad).
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.
Hm, I thought it did. Perhaps it used to. Thanks for the correction.
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.
To clarify and to add onto what masnick wrote, the article _was_ right. The free tier was an option previously, but FastMail has recently dropped that tier in favor of a free trial and, I'm assuming, a lower tier that has a lower cost.
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."
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.
It would be really great if somebody wrapped up all the open source material available and made an image available to AWS and other VPS users. Use the image, have email, an XMPP server, etc -- out of the box. On your own dime.
The Citadel groupware suite[1] provides provides KVM and VMWare images[2] that could easily be imported into EC2. Found it as part of my own research into reducing my reliance on Gmail and other hosted services, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
I installed them, and the service seems really reliable. And is also really easy to install. The main drawback is the horrible interface. But you can use your favorite email cliente with smtp.
The biggest problem with moving back to XMPP now is that Google us cut us off from anyone now using Hangouts. Less than a year ago I drank the Google Kool-Aid and started using GApps instead of my personal server running Postfix/Dovecot/EJabberd. Since 87% of my XMPP contacts are on the GSuite, by going back I lose all IM connectivity with them. I almost feel like I'm being held hostage at this point. I've also invested a few grand in services, software, and hardware that ties into the GSuite, providing further disincentive to move away.
I don't understand. I thought Google's Hangouts app didn't use XMPP but everyone with a Google account still has a gTalk account and you can still communicate with XMPP. Am I wrong? Would those chats not show up in gMail? And would they not possibly also show up in the Hangouts app?
The GTalk and Hangouts appear to be two entirely different things. Once I switched over to Hangouts, folks subscribed to my presence information no longer saw me online, and from within GMail I have no way of messaging them without switching back to GTalk Mode. On Android I don't even have a way to switch back.
A lot of people here are suggesting moving from one closed ecosystem (Google) to another. Unless you are really moving to a fully open source alternative which has all - email, calendar, cloud storage, may be a browser and an integrated smartphone etc. I don't see much point behind doing that, especially since Google doesn't have much track record of "misusing" your data in practical terms (that I know of at east).
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?
The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.
"and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email."
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?
It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model.
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.
I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail.
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.
> I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail.
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.
We could certainly operate more cheaply if we didn't have every email replicated to another server (and a third in a second datacentre) as well as backed up daily to yet another machine with a different operating system and different security model.
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)
Google apps with a custom domain is 52$ a year, so it's not cheaper.
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.
I can drink a glass of water and forget about it. Water is a commodity. Email is not a commodity.
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.
Are there any good alternatives to Google Calendar? If not, seems like there may be a gap in the market for a next generation calendar service, as the core of Google Calendar has been the same for a while, I'm sure there must be some innovation available there.
The best replacement I found was to host my own instance of Kolab 3[1] which was a pain to setup, but seems to work pretty well and looks nice. I couldn't find any good hosted solutions though.
All I know is that I sleep a lot better that I have two-factor authentication turned on for gmail. I would leave gmail quickly if a good alternative had that. Looking at the OP's recommendation of fastmail.fm, it seems to have multi-factor authentication:
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?
I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat.
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.
> I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned ... Also, Yahoo ...
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 never heard of Lavabit before; it looks like they're still operational, although their website hasn't been updated much since around 2007. Looks interesting.
I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.
Can you break down what "high-quality" means for you? eg Web UI, specific features, hosted/self-hosted etc. Are you rolling your own at the moment or on gApps?
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
I've been using them for quite a while and found their service to be reliable. Even their webmail access is decent. A con is that their spam filtering isn't as good as gmail.
> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really.
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.
I’ve been using XMPP for quite a while, first on jabber.ccc.de, then on my own server (and on a Google account in parallel), but have so far not received a single spam message.
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.
I've used their docs for years.. but found them buggy. For example bigger documents formatting would just start acting in a weird way (where i just couldn't set the text size correctly anymore).. copy/paste wasn't consistent.. wasn't crazy how regular browser shortcuts were overridden .. mobile app was locking..
i do command them for coming out with a great free product ahead of the the competition, but it does feel like Google leapfrogged them as far as UX and multi-platform support.
I used Zoho for a while in the place of Google Apps, and migrated back to Google Apps after about 9 months as I absolutely hated Zoho Mail. Webmail interface was awful, and it didn't play nicely with the POP client on Android.
I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.
> I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP
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.
Thank you for the info. I am glad that you are passionate about your work and have faith in your company's executives. There are many groups of humans on earth who believe they hold special knowledge, are able to do things no one else can do, and are intent on making the world a better place. You can imagine from the outside that we might be skeptical. But I hope for the best.
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 recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat.
I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(
I have tried all usually mentioned clients (oldreader, newsblur etc) and didn't like any of them. I switched to bazquux - pretty, minimal, awesome keyboard shortcuts and ability to view comments (if the article has any).
If you need calendar and contacts synchronization, a hosted Exchange account might fit your needs. For example, Microsoft sells accounts with 25GB storage for $4 per user and month.
Unfortunately CalDAV and CarDAV are not supported natively by Android. In order to utilize a CalDAV or CarDAV server, an android user needs to purchase both a CalDAV adapter [1] and a CarDAV adapter [2]. Both of these products are in beta and last time I checked they were lacking support for much of the protocol. It's really a shame that Google doesn't support open standards for contacts and calendar in Android.
The biggest problem with Gmail alternatives is missing hotkeys. Outlook.com is the only one I've found that even comes close, but things are still different enough to be irritating.
So basically this article finds no good open source / self hosted alternatives, but instead lists a bunch of paid services. And even those don't live up to the "Google Silo".
I've been eyeing some of the some of the Zimbra hosts (01.com, xmission.com) as a possible home for my email accounts, as we've been testing Zimbra at my day job for a possible Exchange replacement and I've liked the experience so far. Anyone have experiences with Zimbra (and the hosts) to share?
I don't have a dog in this fight, but to be fair, that thread is 1434 days old.
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.
I went through this process a few months ago but I chose to still use some silos. I moved my blog (blog.markwatson.com) from Blogger to a cheap Wordpress host, maintaining article URLs. I asked people to start using my email at my own domain; I still forward it through GMail but I back it up frequently. I can flip my domain email to my VPS email hosting service very quickly. I could live with loosing my calendar so I left it on Google.
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.
I left Google in favour of self hosted applications:
* 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/)
Jappix looks really nice. Is there a lightweight Android client that polls every few minutes for new messages? I would need to be notified about new messages when the phone is inactive (screen off). A browser is too big for that.
There are many ways to accomplish that. As Jappix requires an XMPP account you can also use a native android client like Xabber (http://www.xabber.com/).
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.
Sorry, I was not verbose enough: It is sync between multiple clients I would be interested in. So if I used XMPP on my mobile and accessed the mobile interface via a browser elsewhere, would both show the same messages (in and out)?
I exactly know your problem. I don't think Jappix makes this possible but I have a solution that works for me.
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 :)
I've been considering zohomail for gmail alternative.
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).
Also another suggestion, for a Google Analytics replacement you could try using Piwik, an open source web analytics platform. Of course I think you'll have to provide your own hosting for it.
Piwik seems to be exactly what I've been trying to find. I'm pretty excited at a glance.
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.
I'm not directly associated with Piwik, but your complaints are valid. The Piwik project recently moved to Github, and some of that transition is lagging as most effort goes to the code itself.
I don't see how protesting against Google's perceived abandonment of open standards[1] by using a Microsoft product makes any sense.
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.
I think the obvious alternative would be Open Street Maps. Microsoft is no better than Google in these regards, they're just not the current market leader.
I posted this as a comment on the article, but I figured I should mention it here too: I’ve switched to Twilio + OpenVBX (http://openvbx.org/) as a replacement for Google Voice. The per-month cost is low (something like $2/month per number), though you do have to pay a per-minute charge when you’re actually handling calls. I think transcription might be an additional fee, too.
I don't like that Google killing some great technologies, like Reader or push-email for iPhone (especially last one). I was Gmail user for a long time, but switch on iCloud recently, because i'm looking something fresh and easy-to-use and still want to have push in my iPhone.
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.
When evaluating communication services you should give extra credit to hosts that are located in a different country than the one that you live in in order to get some privacy from government spying. It might not stop spy agencies like the NSA but it should at least stop the local police, and in some cases even the FBI, from casually snooping your email at their whim.
Not necessarily. If you are a US citizen and all your commu ovations are with US citizens, then mostly what you expect happens. But if you are a non-US citizen passing data through the US, different laws apply. AANAL, so I will not quote specifics, but I do believe that your advice might not be accurate and warrants more research.
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)?
I'm using hosted.im with my own domain. It works fine, except you can't add GTalk contacts right now, since Google is blocking incoming contact requests from other servers.
I doubt your contacts will migrate unless you do it on the client side.
The issue he is discussing with ownCloud and timezones is not a limitation that applies to their CalDAV implementation, it is just an issue with their web client. If you use a CalDAV client that supports time zones properly (most do), it will work fine.
> 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.
You can change the timezone on the web GUI, but that's just the offset. The issue is that CalDav PUT requests included a timezone, which the server just discards. You can try it yourself. Setup OwnCloud with Lightning or something. Create an event and specify a timezone in the event itself. Close and reopen the app, or use another app, and you'll find that OwnCloud simply truncates the data and stores it as UTC with no adjustment.
Why not just host your own email, calendar etc? You can even do it in your personal cloud and replicated it SECURELY to machines who won't give out your information at the drop of a hat or are hacked by a high profile attack.
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
I actually just switched my personal email over to Zoho today (before reading this). It's pretty nice; I was surprised not to see it mentioned here as a Gmail/Google Apps alternative.
Mozilla should build a whole suite of services like mail, calendar, docs, files, photos, etc so they can start offering free ad-based or vip ad-free subscriptions.
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.
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.
I am especially looking at alternative after Google started charging for the use of GMail for small businesses (in spite of their promise to support up to 50 users free). I am sure the alternative will not be as much polished, but I can roll my own postfix+roundcube and run it for 100+ users at < 100$ a year vs Google's $5000 a year! I don't need all the social shit Google throws in with an account, just mail and chat will do.
Lavabit. I use lavabit and either run a desktop IMAP client or I run a roundcube [1] instance for webmail. Lavabit also provides an XMPP server and address to its users, so you can use any XMPP client for chat. Since lavabit supports IMAP you can use any IMAP client, not just the minimal web client on their site.
It is a very active project. I'm using it at home with a 12Tb server for a central storage point in our household. It's been great for us. It is quite basic at the moment, but has a tonne of promise. Haven't found it to be buggy myself.
As other said it's actively developed. The disadvantage is that the UI/UX so far is not exactly great for now. I tried it for 2 months but I stopped using it as Google is far easier to use. I'll probably give it another try in a year or so.
I haven't seen a lot of voice to sms services, or SMS forwarding. Getting SMS-enabled voip trunks is hard, or at least was hard the last time I checked (admittedly a few years ago)
I had been thinking of that, though Twilio's pricing would probably be prohibitive. They actually charge more than my cell provider for minutes. But everything you'd need is right in the API.
Yeah, it wouldn't work with free, since even their (whatever) -> client is 1/4 c/ minute.
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.
I'd be willing to pay something on the order of ~$8/mo for what Google Voice offers, especially if you added better filtering and an API. But I wouldn't pay more than my cell phone bill.
ZohoMail seems to be a decent replacement for Gmail/Docs. I've set up one of my domains there now (free for up to 5 users). Looks pretty nice. Has email/docs/wiki/chat/calendar. It's very much designed to be a gmail alternative. I like.
For a Docs replacement, do give https://hackpad.com a try. It's web-native and optimized for collaboration and sharing (vs trying to bring a desktop experience to the web).
google's silo is as good as or better than most, and I trust Larry Page not to do the-wrong-thing more than most CEOs out there... just always keep a backup and don't worry, be happy
I guess this is a backlash (albeit an opportunistic one for some) against Google's previously touted love for openness. I agree with the OP that unlike Larry Page, Eric Schmidt was the one who always talked openly (forgive the pun) about openness.
This is probably not gonna be a popular sentiment here but I actually like the G+ integration with all the services. The main reasons for that are my expectation of better personalization and synchronization, and a better experience with Google Now. And BTW I'm an iOS user.
If you want to run your personal cloud please check us out at tonido.com. we have an awesome workspace that can take care of your tasks, calendar and contacts, dropbox like sync and really good mobile apps for ios and android. We don't have mail app though. But tonido is a platform and so something to consider in our roadmap.
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.