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Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

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Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#81
post #3

The reason Gmail is free is because they have ads. I wouldn't expect to find a free and good email service. Here's one that costs some money: http://fastmail.fm/

i, too, used fastmail for years. these days i do everything through gmail, which i switched to because i needed the larger quota it provided and had no money at the time to pay fastmail for it. Fastmail offers a free 'guest' account, which is what I had, and should totally suffice to give you an idea of the service, which I would definitely recommend.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#82
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard about Lavabit before, I'm going to try it out. But I have no clue what web interface they have, maybe the parent can tell?

Overall gist: http://i.eho.st/pp22pqgf.png When you view an email, only text is shown. You can "View as HTML", but images are blocked. http://i.eho.st/pp2fukzy.png Personally, this renders the web interface useless to me, so I view my email through Outlook.

Looks like SquirrelMail, Aurelius is probably right.

http://squirrelmail.org/

Makes sense, it's sort of the goto open source webmail app.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#83
Recently, the company i work for decided to move out of G apps(paid). The top mgmt got some doubts abt google employees reading our emails. We were trying to close some deal with Google. I think they did it after some credible suspicion.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#84
I've moved my family's email to Rackspace's hosted email (not exchange). I have an SLA, and I own data. So far the loss of spam filtering and webmail are my biggest aches, soon achieve searching will be added to that list. I sometimes wonder if Google didn't have the same role as anti-virus companies did. Secretly promote viruses to over value their software... Google's spam filtering is amazing now that I have to contend with RS's lackluster spam services, so it's another case of "you need us, because it's a scary world out there."

Whatever the case, I'm happy to be off gmail.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#85
post #80

I highly recommend Tuffmail. They are awesome. I am a longtime customer: http://www.tuffmail.com/ Edit: It's not free. It costs like 2 dollars a month for the smallest account.

Another suggestion for tuffmail. Used them for years. Stable and does what you need.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#87

Why not host your own? It's not that hard. I run my own using exim4 + dovecot. It's pretty easy to set up. Plus, as a bonus I set up mutt on my server as well so when I am somewhere else I can just ssh into my box and read my mail.

This is much more of a pain that it seems. To ensure deliverability you need to ensure that you manage SPF/Domainkeys records, that you're not running an open relay, and configure your own spam filtering. It's all quite easy to mess up, so I'd only recommend it if you know what you're doing. Your time is probably worth more than the few currency units/month for someone like fastmail.fm to do it properly.

There are several[1] guides[2] that demonstrate how to set up a full-featured and secure e-mail system. Personally, I run my own e-mail on Exchange Server 2010--complete with a multi-copy database availability group and multiple front-end servers--but I'm known for overkill.

1 - http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html

2 - http://www.mail-toaster.org/

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#88
It's not Google who you should be afraid of it's your government, if your government cares about data protection, than Google will not risk it, it's not worth it, even if they are evil,

But if your government forces Google to make a wiretap interface for them, they have no choice.

Either way they are in the hands of the government.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#89

Why not host your own? It's not that hard. I run my own using exim4 + dovecot. It's pretty easy to set up. Plus, as a bonus I set up mutt on my server as well so when I am somewhere else I can just ssh into my box and read my mail.

I've been considering this, my main problem is that my cash flow is fairly spotty at times for a dedicated server and I would prefer not to have to worry about the security of my box, uptime and the like. However if I must, I will.

A guide I mentioned earlier (http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html) shows how to set this up on Amazon EC2. If you haven't partaken, Amazon is still giving away a free-for-a-year tier of EC2.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#90
post #9

What is exactly the privacy concern that makes you move away from gmail?

When I consider targeted advertising and the sheer amount of data that I've pumped into Google services over the years it's scary to see how accurate of a picture advertisers and co have of me.

Why does this scare you though? I am curious as to why people are so afraid of advertisers seeing their interests. Personally, I don't care if I get served targeted ads, is that really going to harm me?
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