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Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

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Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#121

Post by zatara »

MtotheThird wrote: post #99

Disclaimer: I work for Google, this is my personal opinion, yadda yadda yadda. I've used (and continue to use) Fastmail for many years behind a personal domain. To call Fastmail reliable is a bit of a laugh. They've had at least three severe outages in my time there (we're talking 24+ hours without mail access). To their credit, nothing was lost in the end, however I was fuming by the end of the last one and determin…

" it was tricky in Gmail to import a complicated set of folders like I have and retain the structure"

I did it through a client (mail.app), synching with IMAP. It worked flawlessly.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#122

Post by bjdixon »

bmichel wrote: post #98
wicknicks wrote: post #8

I'm just curious -- what specific privacy intrusions are you worried about? Google lists its privacy policy here[1]. Also, web based email services can always look at your personal content, if not today, tomorrow. If you really need absolute privacy, I'd recommend setting up your server. You can retain your Gmail address, by just setting up the right forwarding options. [1]: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/pri…

Maybe it's just me, but I'm scared by this sentence from the Google ToS: "When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, pub…

Taken in isolation this could sound scary, but as zalew says here[1] it's needed for them to operate. Seriously, think about what would happen if google suddenly started publishing your (private) content. They'd lose all trust from the wider population. For them to publish or publicly display your content in a way that would violate your privacy would be an absolutely stupid move. Google hasn't gotten to where they are now by being absolutely stupid. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3582421

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#123

Post by greyman »

AmazingWill, in my opinion, if you want to ensure privacy, online service with IMAP is not the solution, because:

1) You don't know who has (or will get) access to the emails stored at the servers.

2) You don't know if your account will not be hacked.

In my opinion, you either need to:

a) host your own email server, or

b) periodically download your emails through pop3s to your own encrypted drive, not leaving them on the server

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#124

Post by icebraining »

sridharvembu wrote: post #103

(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho) We would invite people to try Zoho Mail. We have come a long way in the past few years, and we are investing in a ton of R&D to ensure we are world-class. We offer our consumer edition free-of-cost and ad-free and we intend to continue this indefinitely, and we charge only business customers. This is the same policy we follow with our Office suite as well - whatever we offer free, w…

Needing an email address to sign up for your email hosting is slightly ironic ;)

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#125

Post by icebraining »

mseebach wrote: post #78
SMrF wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google's ad revenue is best protected by them respecting their users privacy." Their economic incentives are aligned in exactly the opposite direction. The more they know about you the more money they make, ergo the recent privacy policy changes which now tie your data across all of their services. In my opinion this is already a privacy violation, even if they don't sell my data to unscrupulous marketers. It should…

First, I do not consider munching my data algorithmically to serve me ads is any more a breach of privacy than SpamAssassin feeding my email into a Bayesian corpus of "ham". Many people seem to have a problem with the outcome of the process being ad revenue rather than spam suppression, I emphatically do not share that concern. > But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't resell my da…

it's downright trivial to switch mail providers

Yes, but on the other hand, that only prevents them from getting any new emails; they still have all your emails up to the moment you decide to change.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#126

Post by icebraining »

yabai wrote: post #92

I have successfully left Google and Gmail. I began to worry about the amount of information Google had of mine (about 8gb worth of email). I now pay for email. I have thought about setting up a mail server - perhaps that will come in the future. I have also installed tiny tiny rss (because I used Google Reader) on a server. I also installed Coppermine to host photos. So far, I am very pleased with my shift away from…

There's more to OAuth than that, though, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Its original purpose - letting services access user accounts on other services without forcing the users to give out their password and complete control - still makes perfect sense and is often extremely useful.

Using OAuth as a authentication solution is the dangerous part; personally, I won't sign up for anything that doesn't provide either email/password or OpenID as an alternative, but I don't see what else can one do to "battle" that.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#127

Post by icebraining »

readme wrote: post #94
yabai wrote: post #92

I have successfully left Google and Gmail. I began to worry about the amount of information Google had of mine (about 8gb worth of email). I now pay for email. I have thought about setting up a mail server - perhaps that will come in the future. I have also installed tiny tiny rss (because I used Google Reader) on a server. I also installed Coppermine to host photos. So far, I am very pleased with my shift away from…

I run my own mailserver on a linode VPS. For my own personal use, it's extremely stable and hasn't been down once for the 4 months I've been using it. I've got fail2ban, logwatch, and logcheck set up to monitor security. The distro is ubuntu server. They have a great guide for setting up postfix and dovecot. Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

I pay for Cable TV and yet I'm still their product.

It's not as clean-cut as that; you need to read the small letters and always use caution, paid service or not.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#128

Post by altano »

Maro wrote: post #39

Microsoft's Office 365 online office suite has an Outlook webmail client which was flawless well when I gave it a shot using Firefox. I think it costs $6/mo, no ads, no spying, because you pay for it. I don't know how well the search and spam filters work. http://www.office365.com Here's a demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOpCmUXLmTA Note: This is _not_ the same thing as Hotmail.

(Disclaimer: I work for MS)

It's $5/mo (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx). If that sounds like a lot, keep in mind that you get:

  * No ads
  * 24/7 phone support
  * Uptime SLA
  * Proper mobile support (everything supports Exchange w/ proper syncing, push email, device wipe, searching the server, etc better than IMAP)
  * Calendaring and other Exchange features
  * Great webmail (I like the latest version of OWA a lot)
  * Custom domain support
  * Etc
I want my email provider's business model to be getting dollars from me. If I didn't work for MS I perhaps would have done some more research into everything everyone else is mentioning, but I've been very happy with Office 365's email hosting and haven't needed to do any comparison shopping.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#129

Post by antoncohen »

MtotheThird wrote: post #99

Disclaimer: I work for Google, this is my personal opinion, yadda yadda yadda. I've used (and continue to use) Fastmail for many years behind a personal domain. To call Fastmail reliable is a bit of a laugh. They've had at least three severe outages in my time there (we're talking 24+ hours without mail access). To their credit, nothing was lost in the end, however I was fuming by the end of the last one and determin…

I've done a few migrations to Gmail/Google Apps, I'm actually in the middle of one right now. It's pretty easy to retain your folder structure, especially if you have IMAP and are going to Google Apps. Nested Labels has been moved from Labs to a standard feature. I think there is a still a 40 char folder path limit, so make sure your folder names are short enough before migration, e.g., rename "Mailing Lists" to "Lists".

Google has the Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool, which does IMAP sync with any normal IMAP server. The tool is Windows-only, they used to have a web-based version but they discontinued it (WTF Google?!). It requires 2-legged OAuth, which requires Google Apps for Business. But Google Apps for Business has a free trial with no billing info required. So what I do is sign up for Google Apps Free, upgrade to Business, do the migration, and downgrade to Free.

If your mail in stored in a mail client (POP3-style), you can add Google Apps IMAP to your mail client, and drag and drop your folders/mail from the old account to Google IMAP. Be sure to hold down the Ctrl key (or whatever) to copy not move. This method also works if you are going to normal Gmail.

There is also imapsync, a Perl command line tool, and a few other tools that do things like Maildir to IMAP sync.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#130

Post by antoncohen »

What privacy concerns do you have? Real people reading your email? Computer programs scanning your email? Is it about ads and not privacy?

It's my understanding that virtually no one at Google has the access privileges required to read your email. That won't be the case at most smaller mail hosts. If the host supports IMAP, they can read your email, there is no way around that. I trust Google's security way more than most companies.

If it's about programs scanning your email, well, spam/virus filtering has to do that. And I personally don't care what some computer bot knows about me, as long as a real person doesn't snoop around.

In my opinion ads are not an invasion of privacy, and if you want free you will get ads. Google Apps for Business can have ads disabled, only $50/year.

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