

Ask HN: Know of a Gmailish Interface for Self-Hosted Email? - gierach

I'm a long-time Gmail user and love the slick web interface.  I love the searchability, threading of emails, intuitive reply mechanism, built-in chat, etc.  However, I don't have full control over it.  I would like to run my own mail server, with my own domain, and host a comparable web interface to it for my own purposes.  Built-in chat would be great (maybe compatible with XMPP so I could still chat with my Gmail contacts).<p>Does anyone know of a package out there that fits the bill?  I'm not looking for "Google Apps for your Domain".  Does anyone else think this would be useful?
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gexla
I would advise against running your own web server unless you really know what
you are doing. I'm sure you know how to setup a web server, but email
deliverability (getting past spam filters of the big email providers) is a
huge pain in the __*. So much that I don't even attempt it these days, I just
outsource my email.

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gierach
Ok, let's change the context then. What if I run a web hosting company and
want to offer an installable package that includes an MTA, MDA and a front end
for viewing/sending mail? (I don't run a web hosting company, so I'm sure
there are other things that need to go into that mix.) The customer would
click a button and we would configure everything on their VPS or whatever. If
that's not plausible enough, maybe I'm a web hosting company that just offers
to host your email and now I've got enough scale to make it worth investing
resources to ensure deliverability and spam filtering. At some point it's got
to be worth running your own email infrastructure and for those scenarios, is
there an installable front end that has the Gmail special sauce?

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jaddison
Given the fact that server failure is a 'when', not an 'if', I'd recommend
using "Google Apps for your Domain". It takes the hassle out of it all (as you
already likely already know!) and leaves you (and your team?) free to focus on
making money.

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bobf
I don't know of anything that will give you anything even close to Gmail as
far as an interface/search/chat. Also, running your own email server is
basically saying "sign me up for an endless source of pain". At my current
job, when we were hosting our own email, I was spending 4-5 hours a month on
email issues on average. Google Apps is either free or $50/user/year -
although it is a bit less flexible, it is well worth it to me.

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joezydeco
Clarify what "I don't have full control" means in this situation. Do you want
to run procmail? Bulk sends? Mailing lists?

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underdesign
I was pointed here as an installable Gmail alternate: <http://roundcube.net/>

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gierach
Thank you for the concrete suggestion! From the screenshots, Roundcube looks
like a very good webmail client. It looks like they're going after Outlook
though with their feature set and layout.

[Edit] But this is exactly what I'm looking for in terms of being an
installable package that can be thrown on a web server and hooked up to an in-
house or third party email infrastructure.

