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Open-source alternatives to GMail

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Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#41

Post by moreentropy »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #37
moreentropy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#43

Post by gopowerranger »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #15
ChrisArgyle wrote: post #8

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?

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.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#44

Post by SwellJoe »

tbrock wrote: post #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 als…

"Modphp? Yuck."

It's very rare to find someone deploying with mod_php today. The security implications are too dire, and the performance/memory usage is problematic. There are a number of ways to run PHP under a reasonably modern app server model, and with the security of suexec. FPM being the most modern, but there are lots of mod_fcgid deployments out there, as well.

I'm not a fan of coding in PHP, but it's still a reasonable choice for developing applications that you want to be able to run everywhere. In fact, if your goal is to make something people will use very widely, PHP may still be the best choice for web apps. There are still lots of shared hosting accounts out there (I know, I can't believe it either, in a world with so many low cost virtualized options), and many can only reasonably run PHP apps.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#45

Post by prodmerc »

pmalynin wrote: post #29
prodmerc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Kite's JavaScript + Python better? Asking as a noob who started learning JS and Python :-)

If you're doing JS you might as well drop python and do NodeJS. Or Meteor which is even better

Ok, thanks for the advice!

It makes sense to go all JavaScript, especially since Node.js seems to offer some advantages over Python.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#46

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

prodmerc wrote: post #45
pmalynin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're doing JS you might as well drop python and do NodeJS. Or Meteor which is even better

Ok, thanks for the advice! It makes sense to go all JavaScript, especially since Node.js seems to offer some advantages over Python.

I'd be careful going this route.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#47

Post by oberstein »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #33
tbrock wrote: post #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 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.

> It's bad for performance, security, and maintenance.

Compared to what, exactly? Ruby? I'll give you Node for double performance and roughly equivalent (and annoying) maintenance, but PHP's security story, with or without the various popular frameworks, is at least as good. Any stack built on the JVM has its own set of tradeoffs -- I would rather maintain PHP than any standard JavaEE solution, but I would rather maintain anything built on Clojure's Ring than PHP. These days Python with Flask is my go-to solution for quick things where I might have used PHP in the past, but even then there are tradeoffs, near the top being you can't just deploy to any shared hosting service that's been around for over a decade.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#48

Post by forgottenpass »

lorenzhs wrote: post #23
tbrock wrote: post #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 als…

The same goes for forum software, but what bothers me more than PHP is that these things usually only work with MySQL. Is this due to shared hosting providers usually only supporting MySQL and not PostgreSQL, or what is the reason? I honestly don't understand.

The Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack was the hotness about a decade ago, so that's the kind of hosting that was most available. Shared hosting was much more popular (physical hosting was more expensive, VMs were expensive and new, and tooling was worse).

In 2025 someone might ask why $oldStack developers don't always do $newHotness. It's often the timing of popularity that tools grow together.

This is just apocrypha, but MySQL was popular during the rise of PHP because MySQL was more performant on small databases on developer workstations.

Re: Open-source alternatives to GMail

#49

Post by bryanlarsen »

gopowerranger wrote: post #43
bryanlarsen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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