Every time I email someone else who uses Gmail I'm right back to the same predicament.
Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
61–70 of 267 posts
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#62Two-factor authentication is a big feature for me. I don't have to worry about anyone logging into my account without my cell phone.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#63Funny. I just asked for alternatives to Gmail and other hosted software on the Richard Stallman post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3551345 Harald's suggestions boil down to - share the administrative and financial effort with friends - use hosting form NGOs or non-profits - use small companies and ISPs The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?…
Plug servers. Google it. Marvell ARM chips mostly. I have been thinking about trying to build a little turnkey linux OS to run on those things that can provide similar functionality to what you are talking about.
Alas the technology does not seem to be quite there yet and the work required to get basically a full personally hosted webapp suite is not trivial. That said, I think in the future we will see a lot more 'appliances' that run as VMs or on low cost low power all ways on hardware. Backed by a business model something like wordpress. Meaning that there is a dot com where you can get it remotely hosted for you, and there is a dot org where you can download and host the app yourself.
Plus stuff like the personal router project http://pr.lcs.mit.edu/ would make a pretty interesting paradigm change.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#64Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#65Here are two reasons: it is convenient and it is easy to always have an up to date copy of GMail and other Google services data on my laptop which I then backup locally.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#66I'd like to be off of Gmail, but I don't know of a good alternative. I'd pay a couple bucks a months for a viable Gmail replacement if I really trusted its security and reliability, and if the UI, keyboard shortcuts, feature-set etc. were just as good.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#67well, i don't. spamassassin works fine. mairix on ssd searches as fast as google. mutt is an excellent reader; it can be used remotely via ssh.
none of this is hard. it doesn't require huge amounts of maintenance. and i own my own data.
before this, when leaving gmail, i looked around for an alternative webmail provider and almost went with runbox http://www.runbox.com/ - they seemed to be the best of the bunch, avoiding many of the issues with gmail (being based in norway). but in the end it seemed easier to just do it myself.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#68deliverability.
I can't post to W3C administered mailing lists from my real email account because my domain gets bounced.
I've lost out on business deals because mail from business account gets blocked at the firewall in some places.
You can avoid all that with gmail.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#69Because GMail users have different values than the OP does, and it's morally presumptuous to assume everyone makes the same tradeoffs the OP does. Why their choices don't make sense to him is because he hasn't taken the time to understand the value systems of GMail users.
This point can't be made often enough. I can't say that I think there are "too many" (or even "an increasing number") of posts on HN that seem to assume that everyone here has precisely the same set of (often extreme) values, but these kinds of presumptuous, somewhat self-righteous postings do pop up from time to time, and this is precisely the reaction I always have. The definition of "self-respecting hacker" does, after all, probably very between self-respecting hackers.
Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?
#70Sorry, when I just throw two links in, but the people who like GMail for the way you handle your emails with it there are at least two interesting projects.