
Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more - corywright
https://kkinder.com/2013/05/21/leaving-googles-silo-alternatives-to-gmail-talk-calendar-and-more/
======
acabal
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.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> 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.

~~~
thezach
Rackspace is one of two providers I will never use... the second is Linode

~~~
ceol
Is there an interesting story behind your reason for avoiding the two?

------
thezilch
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.

~~~
kenkinder
As the OP, let me respond.

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.

~~~
magicalist
> _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.

~~~
eridius
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.

~~~
leephillips
Here's something else you can hate:

<http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/>

~~~
eridius
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.

------
eggbrain
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.

~~~
masnick
The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free
trial.
[https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc...](https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&account=full‎)

In terms of additional features:

\- Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)>

\- Way faster loading time, snapper interface

\- Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual
folder:
[https://files.app.net/1/79748/aXTHb4q16UPxgBvF2RCedd9jMSV2u4...](https://files.app.net/1/79748/aXTHb4q16UPxgBvF2RCedd9jMSV2u4Op1RIz_cylUtlNJ24EMpnKkWGY0LS_B1IAlYQAK016MxTBSk_tMNIYeao_taf_GZRPR0yQj2Y4pgeDMRh_JX8q3yZVHpw0b72NseiwIhZkn1-49z_RrMft70I1MO-
PxoGhU7tRQsSLTKB7xC7s1bUQvfkCctCG44BiK))

\- 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.

~~~
zrail
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.

~~~
jfb
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".

~~~
brongondwana
Surely "Delete" is more "Move to Trash"?

In our web interface, there are two buttons - one moves to Trash, the other to
the Archive folder.

~~~
jfb
I don't use webmail; I was referring to the way that iOS recoginizes GMail's
"All Mail" and overrides the delete function.

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

I'd pay for it.

~~~
Gygash
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.

[1] <http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/doku.php?id=start>

[2] <http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/installation:appliance>

~~~
jackbravo
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.

------
subway
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.

In summary: Bah.

~~~
stanleydrew
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?

~~~
subway
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.

------
piyush_soni
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?

------
arunabha
Fastmail.fm seemed to be good till I read the fine print. For the personal
account you have

 _100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage_

Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)

~~~
masnick
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.

~~~
slg
_"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?

~~~
masnick
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.

~~~
slg
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.

~~~
masnick
> 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.

------
zerovox
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.

~~~
justjohn
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.

[1] <http://kolab.org/>

------
300bps
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:

<https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html>

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?

~~~
aroch
Erm, literally a few pixels under the Yubikey entry:
<https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_google_authenticator.html>

------
arindone
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.

~~~
SEMW
> 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._ "

~~~
gurkendoktor
I don't think Microsoft cares about advertisement to the same degree that
Yahoo and Google do. Of course they will still try to lock you in.

------
rdl
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.

~~~
amirmc
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.

~~~
rdl
I roll my own now.

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

------
masnick
For those interested in replacing the Gmail's built-in voice calling feature,
I wrote up instructions for setting up a SIP endpoint:
<http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/>

It's by no means a complete Google Voice replacement (though one could
presumably build one with some work using Plivo, the SIP provider I used).

------
gwern
> 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.

~~~
aniket_ray
Umm ... XMPP is not being dropped only support for XMPP federation.

~~~
claudius
And what’s the point of XMPP if you drop federation?

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Well, you can continue using third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin.

Federation has the inherent problem of spamming. I think whitelisting domains
could have been a way out.

~~~
claudius
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.

Is XMPP spamming really a thing?

~~~
nileshtrivedi
That's what Google claims:

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.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/05/hands-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2013/05/hands-on-with-hangouts-googles-new-text-and-video-chat-
architecture/)

This is the original email thread with more details when Google disabled XMPP
federation for a while in GTalk:
[http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...](http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001571.html)

------
jph
Zoho provides good email, calendar, and many of additional apps for business
such as CRM, invoices, etc.

My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email,
calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.

~~~
BoyWizard
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.

~~~
nkorth
Yeah, I also noticed that POP doesn't work with Zoho on my Nexus. I switched
to IMAP and it works fine.

------
latj
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.

~~~
mvgoogler
> 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.

~~~
latj
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.

------
xentronium
There is always yandex, if you aren't afraid of a Russian company.

<https://mail.yandex.com>

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

~~~
kapranoff
I am from Yandex Mail team.

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.

------
vertis
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 :(

~~~
easyfrag
I've switched to feedbin.me ($2 a month), web app is ok, iPhone Reeder (iOS)
can sync but not yet iPad version.

Has few bells and whistles (which is a plus in a way - not infected with
social disease) but does the basic read and sync quite well.

~~~
CrazedGeek
Seconding Feedbin. Still missing a couple things (feed renaming...), but seems
to work the best out of all the post-Reader RSS readers.

------
RexRollman
Personally, I closed my Google account when my CR-48 died. I don't think
Google is evil, so much as they simply had too much information about me.

Still use Google for search, though.

------
andor
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.

[http://office.microsoft.com/en-
us/msproducts/exchange/compar...](http://office.microsoft.com/en-
us/msproducts/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans-hosted-email-
for-business-FX103764022.aspx)

------
themstheones
How well would all of these tie in with android or some other mobile OS?

~~~
prg318
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.

[1]
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.caldav.lib)
[2][https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.Sync)

~~~
seagreen
Ouch. Thanks for the info. Switching to CarDAV is one of my upcoming projects
but I'm not looking forward to it.

------
codereflection
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.

~~~
unicornporn
Outlook.com has an option for using the Gmail keyboard shortcuts.

~~~
xwei
They put half of my important mail into Spam. The shortcuts is used to mark
all spam as important as fast as possible.

------
dorznak
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".

------
rufugee
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?

~~~
namityadav
I was also looking at Zimbra some time back. But threads like this made me
stay with Gmail: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662348>

~~~
k3n
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.

~~~
rufugee
Agreed. Our testing at work has shown it to be fairly reliable.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
PaulFreund
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/)

~~~
aw3c2
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.

~~~
PaulFreund
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/>).

For my part I wrote a node.js server application that acts as a notification
central: myhub (<https://github.com/PaulFreund/myhub>).

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.

~~~
aw3c2
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 wish more Jabber servers would support
<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html> and
<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html>

~~~
PaulFreund
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 :)

------
jrochkind1
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).

------
tbirdz
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.

~~~
imperialWicket
Senseless self plug: I'm working on a saas piwik platform and looking for beta
users. Email is in the profile.

~~~
nsmartt
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.

~~~
imperialWicket
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.

~~~
nsmartt
Ah, I misunderstood. I'll try to get in touch with the team. Thanks for
letting me know.

------
canthonytucci
"Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives to some Google properties.
Maps...."

For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can
be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.

~~~
dublinben
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.

~~~
hexis
Furthermore, Mapquest has an Open Street Map layer, if that suits you -
<http://open.mapquest.com/>

------
jspiros
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.

------
imonkey
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.

------
guelo
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.

~~~
IgorPartola
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.

------
eknkc
Anyone using hosted.im?

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)?

~~~
stevejohnson
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.

------
jarjoura
I have been extremely happy with the Office 365 service. It works perfectly on
my Mac and iPhone.

------
mutantmonkey
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.

~~~
j-kidd
I am pretty sure ownCloud web client does have timezone support, but he didn't
change the setting.

From <http://owncloud.org/support/calendars/>

> 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.

~~~
kenkinder
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.

------
rpicard
I use Zoho Mail and I definitely recommend it. I've never had any problems
with it.

------
EGreg
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

------
nkorth
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.

------
hrktb
A side point: Does it make signifiant difference from a legal point of view to
have the mail provider in Australia ?

For example, would it free from the 13 years old limitation on account
ownership?

------
Thiz
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.

------
freehunter
Fix your certificates! Your cert is signed for webfaction but you're hosted at
kkinder.

Host: kkinder.com

Common name: _.webfaction.com

Alternative subject names: regex([^.]_\\.webfaction\\.com),
regex(webfaction\\.com)

~~~
kenkinder
OP (as in the site) here.

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.

~~~
richardwhiuk
I assume you mean SNI, not TLS?

------
anuraj
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.

------
darxius
Does anyone know of a secure (like lavabit) web mail service (that doesn't
look like crap) that integrates chat (irc, google chat, etc)?

~~~
prg318
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.

[1] <http://www.roundcube.net/>

------
pwelch
I was actually considering owncloud but there seems to be a lot of negative
experiences.

Anyone know if its getting better/actively developed?

~~~
socceroos
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.

------
wiredfool
I'm wondering if there's a twilio based replacement for google voice. It's got
most of the building blocks.

~~~
scott_karana
There are plenty of paid replacements for Google Voice, so a Twilio one would
fit right in.

However, I suspect it's the _free_ aspect that everyone's bemoaning. :-)

~~~
rdl
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)

~~~
wiredfool
Pretty sure that's a twilio api.

------
logn
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.

------
kofman
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).

------
cpursley
AOL Alto makes a nice alternative than Gmail. And a much better one at that.

------
plg
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

~~~
rogerchucker
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.

------
eduardo_f
We have a free migration tool that you can use to move your email in and out
of Google Apps:

<http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud>

------
khafra
A man said to Google, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied Google, "That fact
has not created in me "A sense of obligation."

------
kghose
lavabit isn't accepting new users right now.

------
tocomment
I just switched to commafeed for rss. My only complaint so far is the iphone
display.

------
pagekicker
The article does not state a major problem which is that fastmail.fm is not
free.

------
PonyGumbo
I rolled my own Google Voice using the Twilio API. It's not free, but it
works.

------
lifeguard
mail.com + netvibes.com

Netvibes has AJAX widgets for all one's needs.
<http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us>

------
jksmith
Is DDG reading this?

------
lorenzfx
does anybody know a decent CalDAV web GUI? I have been using agendav and
caldavzap for the last months, but am not super happy with any of them.

~~~
janmate
Why you are not happy with CalDavZAP? Have you tried the upcoming 0.9 version?
<http://www.inf-it.com/CalDavZAP_0.9rc4.zip> demo: <http://www.inf-
it.com/caldavzap-next/> ... please send me your problems with CalDavZAP to
jan.mate at inf-it dot com.

------
xwei
silo? oh, just because of THE READER again...

------
rogerchucker
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.

------
tteam
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.

------
alifaizan
there arent many alternative to move out of the google's domain. But sooner or
later we will all have too as google's privacy policy Sucks...
(Source:<http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/>)

------
yanw
Sigh. It's the same anti-Google post on HN again.

