
Open-source alternatives to GMail - jehb
https://opensource.com/life/15/9/open-source-alternatives-gmail
======
tbrock
Why does everyone make these with PHP? Serious question.

Maybe it "just works" but all of these projects feel ancient to me because of
their stack despite being brand new. Sure as a user it doesn't matter but as
the maintainer/administrator I just don't want to deal with it. Modphp? Yuck.

We don't always need to use the new new thing all the time but I can't shake
the feeling that the same person who runs this is also rocking an unpached
PHPMyAdmin and PHPMySQL.

~~~
de_dave
Projects like this were often started many years ago, back when PHP was _the_
language of choice.

~~~
tbrock
Ok, so then the right question is why aren't people starting these projects
today?

~~~
pan69
Who wants to run their own mail server? No thanks.

~~~
tbrock
The point of the article was to showcase open source gmail alternatives so I'm
guessing that the people reading it would be interested in doing so.

Plus, who can you trust nowadays?

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leejoramo
The are not real comparisons with Gmail with is a web-based client, an email
server and a managed service.

On this list, I believe at only Zimbra provides all of these options, but the
article really only looks at the client.

Having run my own email server for about 10 years (1996-2006), I eventually
gave up due to the huge amount of work it took to stay secure, current with
email server "policy" and deal with spam.

I have always either run my own server or paid for the service. I have never
used Gmail beyond a use as a testing and backup email account.

~~~
stinos
Maybe have a look at mailinabox [1] on your own server, that would actually
come close to a proper comparision? Have been running it under Docker for half
a year or so and had no real problems so far. Setup is easy enough in
comparision with a complete DIY server. Community is fairly active as well.

[1] [https://mailinabox.email/](https://mailinabox.email/)

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ChrisArgyle
Unfortunately this article neglects one of Gmail's strongest features: superb
turnkey spam filtering.

Anyone with an email address older than 5 years is going to be buried in spam
thus will need spam filtering with a super low false positive rate.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Google's spam filtering is currently useless, IMO. It's too aggressive, so you
have to regularly check your spam box for messages. If I have to check the
spam box regularly, why bother having one?

~~~
gopowerranger
This is true of any spam filter. You either have it set as too aggressive or
you don't. You either put up with spam that gets through or you check your
spam box more often. Google's is better than most.

~~~
bryanlarsen
How do I set the google spam filter to be less aggressive?

~~~
gopowerranger
I don't think you can but that wasn't my point.

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joshmn
There is no open-source alternative to being a sysadmin, and there is no open-
source alternative to your sanity.

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moreentropy
Featuring: PHP, obsolete PHP, commercial software and a project that didn't
have any commits in over a year.

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lorenzhs
There's also Mailpile, which looks and feels a lot more modern:
[https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/) \- unfortunately, the
demo seems to be broken at the moment.

~~~
jagermo
Looking forward to the release, but it will take some more time. And I'm fine
with that.

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bastion1704
Is it a joke ? SquirrelMail as a gmail replacement, did you used it ? I did
for years and it is a pice of ... Zimbra is the only real contender here.

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werber
I've tried roundcube & squirrel mail, and wasn't able to maintain the switch.
I support open source anything, but I need gmail level service for my e-mail.

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adders
I've used Virtualmin and Horde for my personal email service. Virtualmin does
a very good job configuring Dovecot, Spamassassin, Postfix, DNS, Apache/Nginx,
etc and Horde is a very good web client for email, contacts, calaendar etc.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm happy Virtualmin is working well for you. We've been working quite a bit
lately on making Usermin nicer as a mail client, as well (not to discourage
use of Horde or others; we also provide easy installers for Roundcube,
SquirrelMail, and a couple of other webmail clients...some are even free in
the GPL version).

We're planning a major new release as soon as I finish the new website and we
get some integration work done, that completely overhauls the UI in
Virtualmin/Webmin and Usermin, which I think is the biggest issue with Usermin
for webmail and one of the reasons I don't even use Usermin heavily for mail
(I use Thunderbird on my laptop and GMail on my phone).

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pascalmemories
I'm really surprised there is no mention of SOGo
([http://www.sogo.nu/](http://www.sogo.nu/)).

It has a nice mail interface plus calendaring and even provides mobile device
integration via an Exchange compatible interface (so your mobile device
calendar and email integrates using the Exchange connector).

I've never understood why it does not get more traction (or mention on HN).

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quadrangle
They failed to include ProtonMail
[https://protonmail.ch/](https://protonmail.ch/) which is actually hosted and
secure and probably the closest thing.

~~~
lorenzhs
It doesn't fit into the article as it seems proprietary. The article is about
open source webmailers.

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x5n1
The problem is never the mail client and always delivering the actual mail.

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astazangasta
I used nmh + sendmail on a Dell sitting in my upstairs bar for years and never
had much issue with delivery or receipt.

~~~
x5n1
Well you must have a magical IP because I ran my own mail for 10 years and
always have had delivery problems. Especially with Microsoft domains.

~~~
stevekemp
Things like DKIM, SPF, and sensible reverse DNS make a difference.

I've been running my own mailserver for ~10 years and pretty much never have
problems with deliverability.

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chojeen
If you don't need open-source, but instead just want to migrate away from
advertising-supported email, I find that FastMail works pretty great and is
cheap to boot.

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zo1
I've found the mail app from Zoho to be very good (assuming you have your own
domain). It's obviously not perfect, and there are always pros/cons when
switching between apps.

I found it relatively quick to setup and get working. And compared to Google-
apps for business, it is free for X amount of users per domain.

Not affiliated to them in any way, just thought I'd share what I've been using
recently alongside my main gmail user account.

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jakeogh
It's not an alternative if you are looking for a web based interface, but I
wrote gpgmda[1] (which integrates the alot MUA) to move myself off gmail when
the TOS changed a few years ago.

[1] [https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda](https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda)

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vblord
Just curious here... what is wrong with gmail? What does the open-source
alternative have that gmail doesnt?

~~~
moreentropy
Self hosted. Not hosted in the US. Sadly that's increasingly becoming an
important aspect for the rest of the world.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Let's remember Gmail's primary business model is snooping and selling out
customers. Best to not do business with such companies, esp if you have
valuable data. Self-hosting was a great idea even before the Snowden leaks
made it a better idea.

~~~
moreentropy
Google's business model is about data mining and targeted advertising, not
about selling someone's private, identifiable data. That's a big difference.

Actually I trust Google more than anyone else that they do everything they can
to keep anyone's private data private. The problem is that that doesn't help
when a government agency walks in with a secret court order, be it legitimate
or illegitimate.

That's why european end users (and corporations w/ valuable IP) walk away from
US based cloud providers or even want to go back to being all self hosted. You
can't be 100% sure about your data safety with them and you'll be in deep
trouble with your own customers if a data breach - be it lawful under US law,
but not under european law - should happen.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's what they tell us and their main model. I'd have to carefully read the
ToS to be sure. And regularly.

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thehooker
Why almost all of them look like they were made in the 90's?

~~~
SwellJoe
Some of them were. And, UI is a hard problem that rarely gets a lot of
attention in Open Source. For many reasons, designers very rarely donate time
and effort to helping out OSS projects, while coders much more often do...so,
even if the technical side of an OSS project is solid and reasonably modern,
the UI may trail many years behind.

It takes a few years to build a solid mail client with volunteer labor (or
even with paid labor; Mailpile, while promising, is nowhere near ready for
production use, for example), so none of the full-featured, stable, ones
you'll find are newer than five+ years old, and many are much older, and often
the designs were made as an afterthought by the developer rather than someone
focused on design.

Open Source has always had a problem with UI quality. That's not new, or
specific to webmail. I don't know the solution (the webmail I work on,
Usermin, is getting its first UI overhaul in about a decade, as we speak, and
only because a good UI person stepped up and started working on it on a
volunteer basis, and then we started paying him).

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alexvoda
just for the completeness of this tread there is also this alternative from
the makers of the Opa language: [http://peps.in/](http://peps.in/)

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jdhawk
No mention of iRedMail (Roundcube included)?

~~~
jlgaddis
TFA was simply a look at webmail clients. Since, as you pointed out, the
webmail client installed as part of iRedMail is Roundcube, there wasn't any
point in explicitly highlighting iRedMail.

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