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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

#131

Post by antoncohen »

altano wrote: post #128
Maro wrote: post #39

Microsoft's Office 365 online office suite has an Outlook webmail client which was flawless well when I gave it a shot using Firefox. I think it costs $6/mo, no ads, no spying, because you pay for it. I don't know how well the search and spam filters work. http://www.office365.com Here's a demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOpCmUXLmTA Note: This is _not_ the same thing as Hotmail.

(Disclaimer: I work for MS) It's $5/mo ( http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx ). If that sounds like a lot, keep in mind that you get: * No ads * 24/7 phone support * Uptime SLA * Proper mobile support (everything supports Exchange w/ proper syncing, push email, device wipe, searching the server, etc better than IMAP) * Calendaring and other Exchange features * Great webmail (I like the latest…

$6/month to match Google Apps features (Docs, Chat, Sites, anti-virus). Plus the $6/month doesn't include phone support ($5/month does). $10 adds phone support, but you lose Docs editing. They spent way too much time creating complicated pricing.

Google Apps for Business gets you all the features of P1 and E1, for $50/year ($4.17/month), or $5/month if you pay monthly. And Google Apps Free gets you most of the features at $0/month.

Also, Office 365 has silly User Agent checking, they don't support any Linux or Chrome on Mac, even though they support Firefox and Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Mac [1]. My understanding is if you change the User-Agent string it works in Linux.

Silly pricing, silly compatibility restrictions, less features at a higher cost than Google Apps. I'm not getting the appeal.

[1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/office365-enterprises/ff6525...

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#132

Post by icebraining »

jonknee wrote: post #64
goodside wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think nobody is reading his mail? In September of 2010 an employee was dismissed for spying on the mail and Google Voice calls of four underage teenagers he had been meeting in real life. There have to be people at Google who have authority to read read the mail of users for less scandalous reasons for this to even be possible.

This will be the case for any mail provider. If you host yourself you still count on the fact that traffic to your server isn't being snooped on and always have the possibility of the authorities going in and snatching your box if they need to see your email (that won't happen with Google, but Google will comply with any requests and turn over your mail). Encrypt your email if you want privacy. For even better privac…

always have the possibility of the authorities going in and snatching your box if they need to see your email

Encrypting your incoming email[1] fixes that particular problem. It's still not as good as getting others to use PGP, but on the other hand, it doesn't require getting others to use PGP ;)

[1]: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#133

Post by porker »

sridharvembu wrote: post #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, w…

How do you respect privacy any more than GMail does? Your email isn't hosted in the EU, what extra protection is in place?

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#134

Post by Andrenid »

porker wrote: post #133
sridharvembu wrote: post #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, w…

How do you respect privacy any more than GMail does? Your email isn't hosted in the EU, what extra protection is in place?

This is the clincher for me. Anyone trying to compete with Google needs to be up front and detailed about how they handle your privacy, and what they'll do to protect you.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#135

Post by mseebach »

icebraining wrote: post #125
mseebach wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I do not consider munching my data algorithmically to serve me ads is any more a breach of privacy than SpamAssassin feeding my email into a Bayesian corpus of "ham". Many people seem to have a problem with the outcome of the process being ad revenue rather than spam suppression, I emphatically do not share that concern. > But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't resell my da…

it's downright trivial to switch mail providers Yes, but on the other hand, that only prevents them from getting any new emails; they still have all your emails up to the moment you decide to change.

While I'm sure the wrong people can do nasty things with a large back catalogue of e-mails, for marketing purposes knowing what you're up to now is vastly more valuable. Which means that if Google start scaring people and they leave, their current, profitable business model is hurt.

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#136

Post by mseebach »

porker wrote: post #133
sridharvembu wrote: post #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, w…

How do you respect privacy any more than GMail does? Your email isn't hosted in the EU, what extra protection is in place?

And more relevant - how do you ensure that you will keep this respect?

While I'm very sympathetic to your business model, it's still a loss-leader for your business offering. Can you guarantee that you will never attempt to monetize this (probably) huge and growing dataset? Tomorrow, next year, and (especially) after a private equity manager starts waving cheques with many zeros on them in under your nose?

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#138

Post by sbarre »

dnlk wrote: post #43
sbarre wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Darn I was hoping Gmail was in that list. Purely out of curiosity I'd love to download the 20,000 messages I have in there to do some analysis..

Gmail is not in that list, because they have IMAP access ( http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail ). You can just setup your account in for example OSX Mail, after synchronizing your messages will be in ~/Library/Mail (albeit not in a really nice folder structure like pure mbox or maildir, but you should be able to convert them without much hassle). Or you could use offlineimap ( http://www.offlineimap.org ), whi…

Thanks for pointing out the IMAP approach. I use IMAP on my phone but never really considered using it download all my mail.

I'll give offlineimap.org a look..

To answer your other question, I have 20k emails because Gmail doesn't delete by default, so I just archive as I go..

I'm a zero-inbox type so I use labels and searching a lot. Those 20k emails are surprisingly well organized..

Re: Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail

#140

Post by davyjones »

icebraining wrote: post #127
readme wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run my own mailserver on a linode VPS. For my own personal use, it's extremely stable and hasn't been down once for the 4 months I've been using it. I've got fail2ban, logwatch, and logcheck set up to monitor security. The distro is ubuntu server. They have a great guide for setting up postfix and dovecot. Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product. I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product. I pay for Cable TV and yet I'm still their product. It's not as clean-cut as that; you need to read the small letters and always use caution, paid service or not.

> I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

Your HN usernames are required on the YCombinator app forms. There is a good chance that they will go through your comment history to get a feel of your personality. I would think that this figures in their "buying" process (they are buying a part of your company after all). If you look at it like that, you are the product.

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