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Open-source alternatives to GMail

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11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#11

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.

Going through the hassle of setting up SPF and DKIM for my domain reduced the amount of spam I get quite a bit.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#12
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.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#13
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.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#14

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.…

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/

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#15

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.

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?

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#16

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.…

With CloudFleet, we're trying to provide the complete self-hosted service for Mailpile.

https://cloudfleet.io/

(currently in development - looking to launch around November)

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#17

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.

When it comes to spam, Gmail has an advantage of scale. For example, if the same message is sent to thousands of email accounts, Gmail can detect this and mark the message as spam (or increase a penalty).

I'm not sure how one could parallel this kind of behavior in a self-hosted mail solution.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#19

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.…

Same experience here running a client's email server (Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, ClamAV) for 2 years.

Spam filtering techniques (and subsequent techniques for circumventing them) are constantly changing.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#20

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.

Going through the hassle of setting up SPF and DKIM for my domain reduced the amount of spam I get quite a bit.

How do those affect the amount of spam you receive? I thought they were just to make it less likely your outgoing mail would be marked as spam by someone else.
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