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Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

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Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#51

Post by mbreese »

jdietrich wrote: post #23

Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

I think the bigger question is if there are any open source webmail apps that can support Gmail-like usage.

Setting up your own mailserver is easy. But getting a gmail-like experience is pretty hard. For example, I tried Roundcube a while back with my full Gmail mail dump. It tried to keep up, but there was just no way it was going to handle 2gb of mail going back years.

I'd love to see something that either ran off of a standard imap server or that was a mail-delivery agent (MDA) that had a gmail-like web interface, complete with full text search.

I haven't found anything like that yet.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#53

Post by neilc »

jbr wrote: post #49
mrduncan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations for open-source webmail?

http://squirrelmail.org/ is out there. Can't personally recommend, since I've used gmail exclusively since I got an invite, and desktop mail apps (plus hotmail) before that. My college used squirrelmail before they switched to http://www.horde.org/webmail/ .

Compared to the GMail UI, SquirrelMail is pretty terrible.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#54

Post by ori_b »

jdietrich wrote: post #23

Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

There are also plenty of open source desktop IMAP clients; I personally strongly prefer clients like mutt or sylpheed over webmail interfaces. with ssh, I can even look at my mail from anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#55

Post by rufugee »

mbreese wrote: post #51
jdietrich wrote: post #23

Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

I think the bigger question is if there are any open source webmail apps that can support Gmail-like usage. Setting up your own mailserver is easy. But getting a gmail-like experience is pretty hard. For example, I tried Roundcube a while back with my full Gmail mail dump. It tried to keep up, but there was just no way it was going to handle 2gb of mail going back years. I'd love to see something that either ran off…

http://www.zimbra.com. Better in some ways, worse in others, but by far the most capable open source webmail available. I used it for a few years and loved it.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#56

Post by johnpaulett »

neilc wrote: post #53
jbr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://squirrelmail.org/ is out there. Can't personally recommend, since I've used gmail exclusively since I got an invite, and desktop mail apps (plus hotmail) before that. My college used squirrelmail before they switched to http://www.horde.org/webmail/ .

Compared to the GMail UI, SquirrelMail is pretty terrible.

Already mentioned by sucuri2 in another thread, but roundcube (http://roundcube.net/) looks much more attractive. Still not GMail, but much nicer than squirrelmail.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#57

Post by rufugee »

jdietrich wrote: post #23

Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

Did it for years. Loved it. The only problem? Hosting providers and colos often reuse IPs that have been blacklisted because of spammers, so one day you realize some folks just haven't been getting your mail. I use a leased server and would switch back from GMail to Zimbra in a heartbeat if I thought I could reliably insure my email would not get blacklisted. There are services out there you can pay for that offer smtp gateways, but they often charge on a per domain basis, and I need to send/receive email for 50+ domains. Pretty expensive.

If anyone has any suggestions to get around this sort of limitation, I'm all ears and will be back on Zimbra before the weekend is out ;-)

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#58

Post by vaporstun »

grandalf wrote: post #40
vaporstun wrote: post #29

Related question, does anyone know of a mail webapp that allows you to have a unified inbox with multiple IMAP accounts? In other words, something like Thunderbird or Outlook Express but web-ified. I started doing a custom fork of RoundCube to do just this a few months back but never finished it...does anyone know of anything off-the-shelf that will do this?

Gmail supports this.. you just create each one as a google account, have them forward to the one you like best, and then set it up to let you send mail as each of the other accounts... I have about 50 google accounts and use my regular gmail this way...

Yeah, I currently do that as well, but in the spirit of this thread, I'm looking for a non-Gmail way of doing this...

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#59

Post by carbon8 »

jdietrich wrote: post #23

Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

One big downside is that spam filters are very agressive these days. It can be a huge PITA getting your mail through, even when you've gone through the trouble of setting up domain keys and spf records and submitting the appropriate forms. Some providers, like hotmail, will silently drop emails, too.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?

#60

Post by mmelin »

rufugee wrote: post #57
jdietrich wrote: post #23

Run your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.

Did it for years. Loved it. The only problem? Hosting providers and colos often reuse IPs that have been blacklisted because of spammers, so one day you realize some folks just haven't been getting your mail. I use a leased server and would switch back from GMail to Zimbra in a heartbeat if I thought I could reliably insure my email would not get blacklisted. There are services out there you can pay for that offer sm…

AuthSMTP is priced with a fixed number of "email From: addresses", but what they don't tell you on the pricing page is that you can add a whole domain (wildcard *@domain.com) and it just counts as one address.

Looking at their pricing page it looks like you'd be out about $150-160 bucks per year. Up to you to decide if it's worth it, but hardly expensive in the normal sense of the word.

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