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Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

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101–110 of 150 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#101
I've used Rackspace E-mail for years (formerly called MailTrust) with my own domains. It's $2 per mailbox per month, minimum of $10 per month. POP, IMAP (with push notifications) and a decent webmail client I don't use. You get an actual SLA and 24x7x365 support by phone/web/email.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#103
(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho) We would invite people to try Zoho Mail. We have come a long way in the past few years, and we are investing in a ton of R&D to ensure we are world-class.

We offer our consumer edition free-of-cost and ad-free and we intend to continue this indefinitely, and we charge only business customers. This is the same policy we follow with our Office suite as well - whatever we offer free, we offer it ad-free.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#104
Tangentially related -

I would pay for an email service with an off-site delivery for Gmail recipients. Basically, it should hold any email that is to be sent to GMail servers and instead send a note saying "You've got mail, pick it up here " rel="nofollow">https://. Anything like this out there?

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#105
post #4

Lavabit is pretty good. I've been with them (Personal Account plan) for about 4 years now. No downtime, IMAP and a stated goal in caring about their users privacy. The webmail interface is pretty modest, but they do provide a way to set pretty advanced regex server-side filters. You have to upgrade to a paid plan if you want decent SPAM filtering though. They're also planning a surprise upgrade soon. http://lavabit.c…

Sorry, but for real work the ZOHO web interface is unusable. I'm not the only one who thinks that :) Especially if you are used to Gmail, ZOHO works like it has been written by drunk people. Lavabit seems quite interesting. Anyone going to write a Gmail clone for installation on your own servers finally? I would pay quite a bit for that.

(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho) If you could take a moment to tell us what you find unusable about Zoho Mail, I would assure you we would listen to the critique seriously (and perhaps even do something about it if we agree!). You can also contact me at svembu at zohocorp com and yes we use Zoho Mail intensively in our 1400 person company.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#106
post #98

I'm just curious -- what specific privacy intrusions are you worried about? Google lists its privacy policy here[1]. Also, web based email services can always look at your personal content, if not today, tomorrow. If you really need absolute privacy, I'd recommend setting up your server. You can retain your Gmail address, by just setting up the right forwarding options. [1]: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/pri…

Maybe it's just me, but I'm scared by this sentence from the Google ToS: "When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, pub…

Last time people spread panic about this exact same phrasing was when Dropbox updated it's terms, it's needed to provide their services.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#107
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.

I use google extensively, gmail for years, google docs, etc. I must have clicked the right things in the privacy checkboxes since when I go to that "what does google think of you" page, it just says it "does not have enough data".

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#108
post #98

I'm just curious -- what specific privacy intrusions are you worried about? Google lists its privacy policy here[1]. Also, web based email services can always look at your personal content, if not today, tomorrow. If you really need absolute privacy, I'd recommend setting up your server. You can retain your Gmail address, by just setting up the right forwarding options. [1]: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/pri…

Maybe it's just me, but I'm scared by this sentence from the Google ToS: "When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, pub…

Thats pretty standard with most web services.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#109
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you choose to run Exchange?

Because I like it, I'm good at it, and it plays nice with all my devices that support ActiveSync. Cloud providers have added support for ActiveSync, but I'm too much of a control freak to give up my self-hosted setup (both due to perceived privacy problems and spam concerns). At this point my Exchange environment is a collection of virtual machines spread across two physical machines (and two disk sets in one machine…

Fair enough.

My employer uses Exchange (for some reason still running Exchange 2003!!!) and I have always struggled getting mail clients to play properly with exchange. I have finally given up and am running Outlook virtually.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#110
fastmail.fm has a free account, but it's nowhere near the space that gmail provides. But it's good enough.

I originally used fastmail's free account just to have a backup smtp server for when gmail or whoever I was with at the time went down. gmail does go down, happened more than once to me.

fastmail has a $5/year account, which is probably where you want to start if you're concerned about "free."

I think their next level up is about $20/year.

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