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Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

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Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#131

Post by tedunangst »

dshep wrote: post #90
melvinmt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't use IMAP for backups, use POP3 instead. If your e-mails are deleted in the cloud, your local IMAP e-mails will disappear as well.

Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.

gmail's POP server doesn't delete mail. What it does do is disappear them from the POP listing (ignoring any client "leave messages on server" config), although even this is resettable through the web interface.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#132

Post by kev009 »

eschulte wrote: post #103
kev009 wrote: post #3

It obviously boils down to "good enough" and "free enough" but I've planned on moving back to Postfix/Dovecot at home for the reasons outlined, just a time thing.

I've been thinking of doing this myself as I've heard great things about Dovecot. An ideal setup for me would be a VM hosted somewhere in the cloud (presumably my hosted VM can't be warrently searched in the same way as email), running a barebones Arch+Postfix/Dovecot. The only inhibitors are cost of hosting and time of setup, if anyone has information on either good hosting solutions or setup information I think it…

Running out of the home may be seem a bit asinine but the home is still somewhat sacred with respect to search warrants in the US and moving email around is insanely fast if you work out of the home.

Of course you'll likely need a business class connection with static IP and configurable rDNS and no port 25 block so not everyone will be lucky enough to be able to do it. But something like a plug computer will keep the cost pretty reasonable if you don't currently have a home server and for me it's cheaper than a VPS + consumer cable connection.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#133

Post by pyre »

melvinmt wrote: post #52
emu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back up your email! Just because your data is in the cloud doesn't mean you shouldn't make a backup. I just run getmail which retrieves mail via Gmail's IMAP interface every now and then. If Gmail went away tomorrow, I wouldn't be _that_ sad.

Don't use IMAP for backups, use POP3 instead. If your e-mails are deleted in the cloud, your local IMAP e-mails will disappear as well.

IMAP is just a protocol. You're talking about syncing over IMAP. You can just fetch over IMAP too.

Also, POP3 is not folder-aware. You can only access your inbox over POP3. If you want to backup anything (e.g. drafts, sent mail, etc), then you need more than POP3.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#134

Post by ishbits »

I self hosted mail til 2008.. Sometime in 2008 we were travelling more than at home so I moved to a virtual private server. During those travels, the VPS had catastrophic failures so I bit the bullet and moved the domain to google apps and it worked quite well. The intention was to move back to my own hosting when settled again, the gmail keyboard shortcuts are so good (not quite mutt) which has kept me there.

I use offlineimap to keep a local backup of my email, and like anyone should, I think of emails as postcards. If its only to be read by the recipient use encryption!

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#135

Post by Deadsunrise »

api wrote: post #92

1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc. 2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice. 3. Filters mail at the server side. 4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscati…

Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc.

Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filters on the server, roundcube as webmail (on a new product I would pay for @mail), decent spam filter (right now we run our own system based on commtouch and spamassasin), etc. You can export the whole cyrus mail storage folder or export mail to other server with imapsync, same thing with the database that contains the account, domains and aliases, so you are not locked. Billing can be done by hard drive space or accounts. They are also good as outgoing mail servers because you are on your own ip.

I run everything by myself, right now we have 126 servers with about 12300 accounts and thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin. I've always thought that I should try to do it by myself.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#136

Post by pavel_lishin »

rdtsc wrote: post #71
mrschwabe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for willing to pay for secure email.

Ok that's 2 customers who are also HNers. I think you'd need to do better than that. We are hardly a representative of the general consumer. There is another problem, US govt' need to get access all these messages. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail , people seemed to have signed up, but Hushmail was forced to provide plaintext messages to US govt upon request. So they sort of compromised their main se…

I was actually talking about writing a front-end that you could host on your own server, not a gmail clone. (I wish I could update my original comment.)

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#137

Post by hammock »

Deadsunrise wrote: post #135
api wrote: post #92

1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc. 2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice. 3. Filters mail at the server side. 4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscati…

Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc. Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filte…

Why pay when you can get it from Gmail? :)

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#138

Post by linuxhansl »

I'm a self-respecting hacker and I use Yahoo mail. I guess this would put me even lower in author eyes.

It's just convenient (where I can access the Web I can access my email, no spam). As long as I am aware of the that fact, I can encrypt my mail if necessary or use alternate means of communication (such as a different email service possibly my own, etc).

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#139

Post by coopdog »

pyre wrote: post #124
davidw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that, back in the day, but it just wasn't enough.

One could always mooch off of Gmail's spam filtering... Use SpamAssassin in conjunction with a gmail account that is only used as an attempt to attract as much spam as possible. Then just download the spam folder over IMAP and use it to teach SpamAssassin...

Gmail's spam filters are so good because they have a network effect going though, I doubt one spam folder would achieve much, you need a much bigger sample of all the spam than one account could ever attract
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