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Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

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Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#31

Post by lucideer »

fwgwgwgch wrote: post #27
lucideer wrote: post #26

There are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page. In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to: what do I use email for and how else can that work. I…

Up voted because I'm one of the guilty people you mentioned I wish there were a standard of sorts in im space. It's not signal because it doesn't allow for saving conversations.

> standard of sorts in im space.

As mentioned, there's XMPP.

As well as Signal, there's also Matrix.org which is used by Riot.im.

You could argue there's now too many competing standards (ActivityPub has some similarities in a way too), but without having ever implemented an XMPP client myself, seemingly people had enough issues with it for there to be significant traction given to replacements like Matrix.

Personally I was always a fan of XMPP, and the idea/concept (just not the implementation) of Wave really excited me at the time. Momentum behind XMPP seems to have slowed so I've been giving Riot.im a trial. Sofar I really love it, so I'm once again hopeful.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#33

Post by p2t2p »

Oh, didn’t read your question carefully as well. IDK, there is no viable alternative as of now. Asynchronous, federated messaging system that replicates messages to every host in the chain (you have it in sender’s client, on recipient server and on recipients devices, all of them, provided its IMAP). I don’t know, I really think it is wrong to speak about email as about particular tech. It is bunch of protocols and technologies that form a _concept_. It is hardly possible to replace the concept. If you change everything, but keep the way people interact with it you will get same email simply delivered through different protocols. Like Fido. Almost the same thing but through different protocols. I think we’d better off advocating for people to pay for their email services than change the concept of email itself.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#34

Post by arpa »

Email. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#35

Post by zhte415 »

lucideer wrote: post #26

There are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page. In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to: what do I use email for and how else can that work. I…

I think the repliers didn't understand the question. And I didn't understand it very well either. I still don't think I understand it.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#36

Post by lucideer »

arpa wrote: post #34

Email. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.

Yes. This.

The unique link solution is a tricky one, transmitting the credentials is a chicken egg problem. Something like keybase.io is designed to solve this kind of problem but of course not everyone uses PGP and they never will. It will remain a tricky problem.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#37

Post by lucideer »

zhte415 wrote: post #35
lucideer wrote: post #26

There are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page. In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to: what do I use email for and how else can that work. I…

I think the repliers didn't understand the question. And I didn't understand it very well either. I still don't think I understand it.

"alternative to email" doesn't seem too difficult to parse.

Beyond that, if you're looking for a "why", the OP could have elaborated on that alright. Another user, @davewasthere, has explained this well below though.

Re: Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

#39

Post by arpa »

lucideer wrote: post #36
arpa wrote: post #34

Email. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.

Yes. This. The unique link solution is a tricky one, transmitting the credentials is a chicken egg problem. Something like keybase.io is designed to solve this kind of problem but of course not everyone uses PGP and they never will. It will remain a tricky problem.

The only way to transmit credentials, I believe, unfortunately, is via out-of-band communication, e.g. sms/IM/phone/face-to-face. Not exactly convenient, but if you need the message to stay secure from human adversary, it is probably the only way. If your adversary is a machine (your peer in gmail is in control of his/her account, and is not wiretapped by an actual human/you simply don't want google to feed on your emails/you are not an enemy of mossad), a captcha would probably do, along with something like we see in email verification links.
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