Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

googleenterprise.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 475 posts

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#421

Post by jrockway »

vacri wrote: post #303
jrockway wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had any problems with mail delivery and I've never paid anyone a dime. I even violated one of rfc-ignorant's rules (a fake tertiary MX record) and still didn't get blacklisted :) There are no internet authorities that control mail delivery, either, BTW. Many sites use heuristics to control mail acceptance, however, including third-party whitelists and blacklists. It can suck if you get on a blacklist, but…

Hrm. Perhaps it was a certificate issue with SSL which the guy uses on his mailserver? I'm really not up to speed with configuring much beyond msmtp. In any case, from a decade of listening to the random things he's had to deal with, I certainly have to agree with your final comment.

SSL'd SMTP is a non-standard extension that nobody uses. (In fact, the port assignment for it was revoked in 1999!) TLS on port 25 is how you do secure email (mostly so you can advertise AUTH PLAIN safely.)

I think there are probably some MTAs that will STARTTLS for normal SMTP connections, but again, I've never heard of anyone using SSL/TLS as a spam-filtering criterion. (I might look through my old logs to see if anyone other than me ever issued STARTTLS on my mail server. But I'm guessing the number was near zero.)

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#422

Post by jrockway »

Shorel wrote: post #376
jrockway wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap, running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day a…

I'm sure it will be a lot cheaper on AWS.

The smallest instance running 24/7 is $175.20 for 365 days. Add in S3 storage for 25G of data, and that adds $28.50.

This does not include incoming bandwidth, bandwidth used by your IMAP or webmail client, or DNS lookups that you'll do for every message received. (Also, spam filtering is CPU-intensive, so if you get a lot of email, a Micro instance may not be big enough.)

This doesn't include a secondary MX, either. (I like the DynDNS secondary MX service, personally, which is ~$30 a year IIRC.)

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#423

Post by shuzchen »

galactus wrote: post #377
shuzchen wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems most of the people recommending alternatives are only thinking of email. I use gapps for my family, and we take a huge advantage of having a domain-specific calender and docs.

What is the advantage of using domain-specific calendar/docs over using them with your personal google account?

It's a lot easier to have your data be shared with the whole team. Otherwise, with a personal google account, sharing a document with a team requires adding each individual person to each document. There appears to be a feature of adding a group to a document, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to define groups, and even if it were possible it'd be a few extra steps to manage as well as to keep track of, since the document overview only shows "shared" but not the people/group it's shared with.

With a domain-specific account, it's easy to set a document to be shared with the group - added benefit is if you add a new user to the domain, she is automatically given access to those documents. Also, the document overview is much easier to manage since anything marked "shared" usually means teamwide.

I get what you're saying, everything can be accomplished with the still free personal google account, just it includes a constant daily drain on mental processing power.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#424

Post by robbiemitchell »

indiecore wrote: post #66
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty pessimistic view. Customers are self-interested too: they want free content and services, but they also want absolute privacy, to ad-block everything, and generally cut off any possible revenue stream. This seems like it leads to a sort of local maxima where you produce the minimum quality required to drive users, with as little cost as possible. By cutting off ad-supported free users, Google is atte…

by cutting off free users they just opened themselves to getting undercut by a smaller company that can offer fewer, cheaper, targeted options. I just wanted an email for my domain and that's not worth 50 bucks a year. I'll just set up my own email system at this point, call it a learning experience and never be exposed to the rest of whatever was in Google Apps.

Paying Google to make email problems go away (and get nice features to boot) is worth it on $ alone if you plan to need even a handful of hours of outside help/year, plus equipment. Plus the peace of mind (and your saved time) of not even worrying about it.

Email is a solved problem that is totally worth it to outsource or pay someone else to manage in-house. If you feel comfortable setting up your own mail server, managing spam, updating it, etc., and WANT to do it, then you're probably not Google's target audience, anyway.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#425

Post by Erwin »

riobard wrote: post #401
corin_ wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? SLA generally just means they'll pro-rate a refund for the downtime, so even if they only achieve 99% over a year it won't cost them a huge amount.

That's not the point. The point is NO ONE can promise 100% uptime. One can promise a 99.999% uptime and refund for the downtime. If one promises 100% uptime, either he's lying or he's just stupid.

I don't know the details of the email SLA, but for infrastructure: power, networking etc. on our hosted Rackspace servers, we have a 100% SLA. And it's not a lame prorated thing: they pay 5% of the monthly cost back for 30 hours of downtime.

So 99% power/network uptime in a month would cost them 70% of what we pay per month.

http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/support/serviceleve...

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#426

Post by wildcard0 »

jeltz wrote: post #339
sliverstorm wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, ok. Thanks. (I ask because I'm still trying to get an idea of just how vulnerable your garden-variety server is, user stupidity aside)

Virtually all SSH attacks are of the nature mysql:mysql or mysql:password, so you should be safe as long as you can trust your users not to be stupid. The attackers prefer quantity over quality when looking for targets. And if you use SSH keys you should be totally safe. Remember to apply security fixes though since the automatic attacks also probe for ancient versions of SSH servers.

If you're worried about ssh brute force or just don't like all the noise in your logs, moving the port tends to drop off about 95% of them. In addition, running iptables tarpit rules (or your OS equivalent) tends to kill the rest fairly quickly.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#427

Post by TheYComb »

I would even pay $50 a year if Google stopped making "improvements" to the UI. The new composer looks nice at first but it slows me down when I need to use different fonts, etc AND they removed background color AKA highlight. I do not use Evernote just because they do not have highlight... and now they decided to removed it from Gmail too. If it is not broken, don't fix it :-/

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#428

Post by duckworth »

mcherm wrote: post #364
mokash wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never thought about using Google Apps like this. It actually sounds pretty cool to be honest. If my whole family was using it, then I'd probably consider paying $50/year for the service.

But would you pay $50/family-member? (Which is presumably a significantly bigger amount of money.)

Yeah, Same situation here. Set up my family and one for my in-laws, and a few others. Not worth $50 a month per family member.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#429

Post by kylek »

kalleboo wrote: post #389
fusiongyro wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do this. It's not easy, but it's not as bad as most of the comments here would lead you to believe. If you have the wherewithal to run things on a server it's definitely within reach, albeit probably not a cost-effective way to spend your time. Let me make a few recommendations. I'm not a sysadmin by trade but I know a few things you can do that will improve your lot in life running mail. - Postfix and Dovecot. The…

I ran my own email server at home for many years, but in the end I switched to Gmail/Google Apps about two years ago since - I kept a mostly "if it works don't break it" approach, but about once a year there'd be some alert about security issues with some specific software and I'd run a "aptitude update". Invariably it'd update the packages out of order, libc would get screwed up, and I'd have to reinstall the whole…

Ran into the same issues years ago (though this was only for myself and a couple family members). Didn't think I'd get myself blacklisted so easily. You really need to be up to par on spam filtering etc. Gapps is quite elegant for my needs most of the time.

Re: Google Apps stops accepting free sign-ups

#430

Post by jfb »

Shorel wrote: post #376
jrockway wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to run my own one-user email system. The hosting alone cost $240 a year. And I had to spend a lot of time configuring exim4 (and spamassassin and clam-av), figuring out which email indexer to use, setting up offlineimap, running cron jobs to archive mailing lists, coercing a friend to run a secondary MX for me, etc., etc. I didn't enjoy it all. And no matter what I did to reduce spam, about 10 messages a day a…

I'm sure it will be a lot cheaper on AWS.

Why use EC2 for this? You don't need the elasticity, and you can get cycles a lot cheaper elsewhere.
Post reply on HN