

Ask HN: Good alternative to Gmail? - donohoe

Looking to drop Google from my life where possible. The big one is email - can anyone suggest a great web based email alternative that is not Hotmail...<p><i>CLARIFICATION</i>: Not just any email service, but a feature rich version
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petercooper
_If_ hosting your own e-mail is OK (or you can get an IMAP account somewhere)
but you want a GMail-esque Web interface, <http://roundcube.net/> is worth a
look.

Further, a very popular "full service" alternative I've seen recommended a lot
and have had recommended to me (yet I haven't used it ;-)) is
<http://www.fastmail.fm/> \- worth checking out anyway.

~~~
nreece
FastMail's spam protection is ineffective. I have a secondary account with
them, and the amount of spam I receive is unbelievable.

~~~
Qz
That's funny because I have never gotten a single spam email on my fastmail
account ever (and yes I do use it on a regular basis).

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brk
Why not run your own sendmail ( or whatever ) server? It's not difficult, or
expensive with most modern hosting plans, and provides great flexibility and
learning.

~~~
maqr
When did sendmail become "not difficult"? I thought it was one of the largest
and hardest to configure daemons out there.

~~~
kngspook
I've heard bad things about sendmail (hard to configure, but had also a ton of
vulns in the past); though I have no experience or hard evidence.

However, I have had good experiences with (and have done my due diligence on)
Postfix (and Dovecot) for mail services.

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cwtann
I asked myself the same question, and the best fit I found was zimbra. It's
ajax-powered and open source. I use it for SMB clients and host it for them on
a VPS. If you're looking for something simple for your personal mail there are
several places that host it for $4-$5 /month. <http://zimbra.com>

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rodh257
I know you said not hotmail, but have you tried the new version? it's pretty
feature rich, revamped to compete with Gmail (I use Gmail myself, but it seems
good)

If you are willing to pay, you may be able to buy a hosted Microsoft Exchange
email? Exchange 2010 has an awesome web interface, and exchange calendar etc
support is great.

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bman
indeed i can please check out MiniG <http://code.google.com/p/minig/> its
meant to do what you want exactly. If you have a Duuit! account then its the
included email service with smtp, imap, xmpp, and web clients.

~~~
corin_
Not to imply that this makes MiniG any worse, but I love the idea of "I'm
making a stand against Google, let's see... ooh look, Google Code!"

~~~
bman
Well i got a alternative to google code as well, check out indefero
<http://www.indefero.net/> I actually spent a good bit of time last year
finding all the alternatives for google products and have implemented most of
them.

~~~
corin_
Personally I have no problem using Google products, and if I did have then I'd
go with github (in fact, I'd go with github over Google Code now, too). Just
found it funny that the project offered as a solution to not wanting to use
Google was hosted by Google.

~~~
bman
If github were open source i might consider it as well but as it isnt i am
avoiding product lockin by using indefero, setup was easy and its basically a
git version of google code so its familiar for most users.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
The concept of distributed version control makes vendor lockin on a product
like GitHub almost a moot point. For instance, see the _why mirror:
<http://github.com/whymirror> \- while not the same situation, it is similar.

GitHub's issues and wiki pages are not included in your repository, although I
know the issues have a very nice API (I'm not sure about the wiki).

~~~
bman
Software management via git isnt locked in i am referring to the issues, wiki
and project management pieces.

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tdjones74021
I've had very good success with GMX <[http://gmx.com/>](http://gmx.com/>). GUI
is very similar to desktop e-mail clients and spam filters are very good. (I
still think Yahoo's spam filters are the best.)

~~~
shrikant
I used to have a gmx.net (same folks as gmx.com, but the site only existed in
German back then) account a long, looong time back (late 90s, IIRC). It wasn't
too popular back then, so I got <firstname>@gmx.net pretty easily.

I didn't know a whit of German, but they had made a half-assed attempt at an
English translation, which I actually made do with, because it was so awesome
otherwise (superb interface for its time, POP3 access, open SMTP which didn't
seem to get raped by script kiddies - and all this for free). The translation
was missed out at certain points, but at least it made me look up words like
_ubernehmen_ and _abbrechen_.

Then one sad, SAD day, after I'd been a steadfast user for nearly 3 years,
they sent an email to everyone saying they were shutting down the half-English
site completely, and leaving only the German interface up. It was a really
nice email too, in which they hoped the users would take this as an
opportunity to learn a bit more German. Sadly I was just about finishing up
with high school then and headed off to college, and didn't really have the
time or energy to tinker with learning a new language as well, so it was with
a heavy heart that I bid farewell to my beloved gmx.net account, after
downloading all of my email into (one of the more under-rated Windows email
clients of its time) Calypso.

Just created an account there again for old times sake, but I wasn't able to
get <firstname>@gmx.com this time :(

</nostalgia>

~~~
coffeejunk
however these days you have to pay even for imap access. also the interface
isn't that clean anymore and the whole site is filled up with ads. oh and you
get gmx-ad mails all the time.

~~~
shrikant
POP3 still seems to be free though :-)

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sabj
Zoho or Zimbra do a good job, I think. Plus will extend your non-gmail ajax-y
world beyond just e-mail.

I think a big problem with running your own server is that things can go down!
Yes, hosted solutions do too, but I think generally most serious providers
have a bigger incentive for uptime than a personal box -- especially if that
box is in my garage. I'd use my own machines for FTP and demos, but not for
something like e-mail. (Or, if I did, I'd be sure to have a back-up redirect,
where something else would forward the mail in and maintain survivability. I
do this with my gmail anyway.)

------
blahedo
If you're at all technically inclined (presumed given your presence here :),
getting an ISP that gives shell, email, web is pretty straightforward (and
worthwhile). I've been basically happy with PHP Webhosting
(<http://www.phpwebhosting.com/>).

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run4yourlives
I just tried zoho with my gmail account... seems pretty good to me.

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lsc
why are you dropping google? e.g. would Yahoo be acceptable if their client
was feature-rich enough? or do you need something hosted in your garage... or
at prq.se?

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markstahler
Duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121269>

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bosch
Has anyone tried Rackspace's webmail? I haven't seen a review of their client
and was wondering if it's any good?

~~~
kngspook
I used it for a while (and I still have accounts with them). It's pretty good,
though it's composer can't create rich text/HTML email. (You can still read
and view rich text/HTML email).

~~~
bosch
Wow! that's pretty shitty if it can't create rich text/html e-mail! How hard
could that functionality be to add?

Do they have conversations like Gmail? So far no other e-mail client can match
Gmail's and I like Outlook but no conversation threading is really a killer
(and no 2010's version is no where near as good as Gmails).

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jbeluch
sup mail. <http://sup.rubyforge.org/>

~~~
vegai
Warning: is written in ruby, so might not handle unicode (at least on ruby
1.9) very well. It's reasonably fast these days, however.

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tjpick
yahoo. Or your ISP.

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stevoo
www.google.com/mail

This is great email that i have found .... Give it a gooooooooooooooooo

