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

Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

flailingmonkey.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#111

Post by reeses »

sentenza wrote: post #109
Karunamon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not a "cunning plan," it's self-preservation Fair enough, and I can see the value in keeping a local backup just for redundancy and convenience purposes (being locked out of my Google account for whatever reason would suck ), but using it as your daily driver? Ehhhhhhh.... As far as shutdown fears, though? Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail are the core-est of the core products. They're tied directly into the Androi…

Are you really sure about calendar being a core product? Because the userbase size (without knowing what it actually is) probably isn't all too different from that of reader. It will probably be around forever as a part of google apps, but the free calendar for everybody might eventually face the chopping block.

As part of google apps, it's a mediocre solution. It's not good for collaborating with people outside your organization (clients, patients, whatever else ends in -ients) but it's just good enough to prevent me from going with a hosted Exchange solution or to go back to administering our own infrastructure. I suspect it's prioritized to remain at that level.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#112

Post by MattJ100 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #56

The only thing really stopping me from migrating to my own platform is email. I've had many terrible experiences and heard many horror stories about running mail servers, I just don't want to deal with it. Suggestions welcome.

Mmm. I'm sure people have had bad experiences. However I run my own mail server (and no others who also do) for myself, my company and a few other domains I host with almost no effort. It's true I have fewer than a dozen users, but I'm sure most people would be the same way.

I just upgraded it this weekend, otherwise I haven't actually had to touch it in the 5 years since I originally set it up. Support ends for the Ubuntu LTS release it was based on next month, and I chose to migrate to new server software (dovecot) without much difficulty at all. I think anyone moderately skilled with sysadmin tendencies could manage it.

A good guide is here (though I am not running the described spam or virus filtering, and neither am I using EC2 myself): http://www.exratione.com/2012/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-1204... - there are many other guides online.

But I confess I personally have a gmail account that I use most of all. I receive lots of mail daily, and none of the open-source clients (webmail or otherwise) have managed to compare in terms of usability. Priority Inbox is the most recent example of something that I would struggle to live without.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#113

Post by reeses »

hp50g wrote: post #65
[deleted] wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I've run my own mail server since I got my first permanent connection in 1995. It's not hard to keep it up and reliable, especially on a small scale. It's not much harder to keep a large one up (I designed and operated a huge qmail hub in the late 90's). Everything is on hard drives just as it is at google and all the other providers. I don't use rack and data center distribution for redundancy or even RAID to be hon…

As for functionality, Maildir with your MDA of choice gives you all kinds of rube-goldberg opportunities with text files. No silly "max connections" junk when your phone and your laptop hit IMAP at the same time.

The one thing I really liked when going from procmail/postfix/dovecot to Google Apps was spam filtering. I hated keeping up to date with the various new methods spammers discovered to offer me good times with farm animals.

Today, I get a lot of false positives, especially with the "this is spam because other people marked messages like this as spam" emails from my bank. I miss emails from family members, travel vendors, and even online shipment confirmation messages. I've had to create rules to catch them and move them to folders/labels as well as have a client-side process occasionally search for a whitelist and "rescue" the messages.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#114

Post by reeses »

hnriot wrote: post #99
bhauer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touché. Those are awful. I'd say Oracle should be ashamed, but I'm sure Larry Ellison is feeling really bad about himself in between counting stacks of money.

Oracle installers aren't meant to be pretty, but rather practical, they are run mostly by IT professions who know what they are doing. Remember an Enterprise solution has to conform to ADA in 57 different countries and be fully translated, must work on version current-15, must work on lynx, IE5, csh, bash, ksh, windows 31, osx and vms :) your convenience is pretty low on their priority list...

No, the enterprise solution means it can run only on versions ancient-x, ancient-y, and ancient-z of these OSes on approved hardware and must use this JVM and accept applets and plugins. :-)

This is what happens when the buyer is not the user.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#115

Post by reeses »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #85
adestefan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the wording wasn't great, it is a valid concern. If you already have a server running Postgres, then maintaining a separate MySQL install really is a pain, especially when it comes to being up to date on security.

Which is fine. It's the idea that software can "pollute" is absurd. Give reasons and arguments, not slander. Already having a python/postgres stack is a valid reason to want a piece of software that runs on it. Just saying php/mysql "pollute" is a terrible mindset. It's like saying "I won't pollute my mind with German" instead of "I have no use for German in my everyday life". One is very trollish, the other is a val…

I think "pollute" conveys the idea much better than the German example. Yes, it can create an emotional conflict, as you've demonstrated.

However, I would say that adding PHP and MySQL to a public server just increased the attack surface as well as operations management overhead. In my eyes, that is an increase in risk/cost/etc. for that server. That justifies "pollute", "infect", "degrade", etc.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#116

Post by reeses »

jvdh wrote: post #77

"Click “Advanced” and select your database options. A MySQL DB will be way faster than a SQLite DB." Do you really think you can really notice the microsecond that MySQL will be faster than SQLite? We are talking about a database that is going to host what, maybe 5 megabytes worth of data? We are talking about calendars and contacts here, this is not stuff that you will sync every second, and will not contain large a…

Some people have the pathological habit of creating meeting requests and attaching 500KB+ spreadsheets, project plans, Word docs, etc.

It's best when they send it as a recurring appointment and then send an "updated" version in a separate email.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#117

Post by jimktrains2 »

MattJ100 wrote: post #112
jimktrains2 wrote: post #56

The only thing really stopping me from migrating to my own platform is email. I've had many terrible experiences and heard many horror stories about running mail servers, I just don't want to deal with it. Suggestions welcome.

Mmm. I'm sure people have had bad experiences. However I run my own mail server (and no others who also do) for myself, my company and a few other domains I host with almost no effort. It's true I have fewer than a dozen users, but I'm sure most people would be the same way. I just upgraded it this weekend, otherwise I haven't actually had to touch it in the 5 years since I originally set it up. Support ends for the…

What about other people's spam filters? That's the biggest problem I've heard about is being blacklisted because of being an unknown sender or on some VPS service or something like that.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#118

Post by spinchange »

mitchty wrote: post #108
spinchange wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an opinion. In the case of WebDAV, they are, in fact, moving away from open standards. It's also not about data export - it's about making commitments to businesses that pay for these services under contract and in conjunction with software that may or may not work with the apps in future.

You mean Caldav not webdav correct?

Correct. I meant CalDAV/CardDAV by extension.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#119

Post by Groxx »

niggler wrote: post #39
Sunlis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not bad for an "advertising company".

How does the way back machine and other sites compare to google cache?

In my experience, other sources tend to have significantly better caching (google's don't even have images), (archive.org) multiple versions, but way way slower to pick up new content.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#120

Post by mark_l_watson »

tiziano88 wrote: post #100
mark_l_watson wrote: post #25

Nice idea. I have just gone through the minor hassle of switching my blog off of Blogger and relegating Gmail to my backup/secondary email service - all in the spirit of controlling my own stuff. I only calendar share with my wife, so setting up something like this is probably something I will do also. Any JVM based open source projects? I would rather not deal with PHP.

Not sure that's a smart move, if you care about your data. Do you think you can achieve better uptime and reliability than Google does with their engineers and servers and distributed data centres? I mean, it sounds cool and everything to do it yourself, but if you just dump all your data onto your local server (or EC2 instance), it's just a centralised storage that can fail any time, not a "cloud" any more.

Except that I use cron jobs to save my mongodb and postgres databases to S3.

The only thing I lose is perhaps being offline fr several hours if one of my servers goes south.

Post reply on HN