Just curious here... what is wrong with gmail? What does the open-source alternative have that gmail doesnt?
Open-source alternatives to GMail
31–40 of 70 posts
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#32Just curious here... what is wrong with gmail? What does the open-source alternative have that gmail doesnt?
Self hosted. Not hosted in the US. Sadly that's increasingly becoming an important aspect for the rest of the world.
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#33Why 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 als…
I agree. It's bad for performance, security, and maintenance. Any time I see PHP I'm thinking: is what they did worth the re-write effort? Despite that, people keep making good apps in it. Starting to wonder if it's worthwhile to do an automated porting tool along lines of Semantic Designs' DMS toolkit. Just to keep the apps, current and future.
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#34Why 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 als…
What's the successor to PHP?
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#35They failed to include ProtonMail https://protonmail.ch/ which is actually hosted and secure and probably the closest thing.
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#36Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#37Just curious here... what is wrong with gmail? What does the open-source alternative have that gmail doesnt?
Self hosted. Not hosted in the US. Sadly that's increasingly becoming an important aspect for the rest of the world.
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.
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#38I'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.
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).
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#39Why almost all of them look like they were made in the 90's?
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).
Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail
#40Why 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 als…
What's the successor to PHP?
Anything that's not PHP.