141–150 of 267 posts
Because 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.
Why don't all people make their own food? The same argument applies to almost any category of product, with varying ramifications unique to each. If I made my own soda, I'd leave out high fructose corn syrup. Why do I let Coca Cola poison me? And so on and so forth.
I do not think that this is a valid comparison.
It would be more like, why don't farmers produce their own food (and rely on packaged food instead).
Now I need to host it. I want my email to be highly available. So I want to cluster two Zimbra servers in one data center, and cluster two backup MXs in another data center to store and forward my mail if the Zimbra DC drops off the net. Zimbra supports HA clustering with Red Hat Cluster Suite or through the HA clustering of virtualization like VMware. RHCS requires a highly available SAN as backend. Damn, an HA SAN is going to be expensive. Maybe I'll do VMs. But virtualization products like VMware and RHEV will require an HA SAN or NAS. Fine, I'll build an HA NAS with open source.
I'll deploy two ZFS heads in an active-active cluster... wait, clustering will require purchasing licenses from a company like Nexenta. Or I can get active-passive from iXsystems. So I'll buy the cheapest Nexenta license which is $1725, plus the HA Cluster license for $4900. I'll connect those heads to a dual-controller SAS JBOD which only costs $3795.
I'm now going to fly all this gear to a non-US-friendly location to install it in a data center. Each piece of hardware as redundant power supplies. I will connect the power supplies to separate power distribution units, the PDUs are on separate circuits. Each system has dual Ethernet going to separate switches, which in-turn uplink to dual-clustered routers, which uplink to the multi-homed internet provided by the data center. Because I'm on the other side of the world I'll also have a console server, and the PDUs can remotely cycle power.
Awesome! I now have the email setup I want, and it only cost me $30,000 and a month of my time!
Or I can sign up for Google Apps, where they will host my domain's email, and provide all the features I want, and have a better interface, and not require maintenance, and have better uptime, all for free!
I've administered old school sendmail+procmail setups without webmail. I've administered Postfix+Dovecot+Roundcube+LDAP. I've administered Zimbra. I've administered Google Apps for Business. It isn't worth my time and money to do anything other than Google Apps.
so now i use gmail. no matter how much i try to screw that up, my mail still comes through.
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...
The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system.
One example is when the Hotmail team first enabled keyword filtering. When the spammers found out experimentally, they began injecting HTML comment tags into high-weighted words like "free", breaking the model. When the Hotmail team took steps to combat this problem, the amount of spam that employed this technique dropped from 5% to close to 0%[1] in a matter of days.
Spam detection is complicated and hard.
[1] Hulten, G., Penta, A., Seshadrinathan, G., and Mishra, M. Trends in spam products and methods.
I run my own mail/irc/web/file/etc -server. Postfix on OpenBSD with maybe 10 config variable changes to add a DNS blacklist of my choice + secondary MX for a friend. FDM for sorting mail and piping stuff through bogofilter. Mutt and SSH to read mail from anywhere.
I post my email address everywhere and get about 10-15 spam mails per day that escape the blacklist. Of those, 99% are sorted out by bogofilter. I scan them for false positives like I scan other mailinglists for interesting topics. There are about 700 mails from various ml's every day. The maintenance time this setup "costs" is recovered in less than a week of not having to click through the slow gmail interface. There is nothing to do. Backups are done via rsync and cron, but they have to be done anyway.
Point is, running a private mail server is easy. But then I don't call myself hacker...
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups? Because we're lazy. you give away control over your personal data Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that. you put your…
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. Eventually, as it happens in all public companies, the "do no evil" people are going to be out , and the "maximize the buck" people are going to be in .
1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point. 2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is. 3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't…
> 2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is. Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is if you don't want a potential competitor, potential acquirer, or just a large amoral corporation, to have an informational advantage over you.
I would LOVE for someone at Google to violate their TOS and read my mail. That would be far more profitable than any business idea I will execute this year.
Why do you assume that you would ever learn about it?
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups? Because we're lazy. you give away control over your personal data Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that. you put your…