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Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

kkinder.com

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Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#61

Post by MatthewPhillips »

eggbrain wrote: post #27

I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something? Also, the…

I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. FastMail has archiving, great search, and a superior interface. The Gmail interface is pretty bad IMO. It's cluttered with a lot of stuff that have nothing to do with email like:

1) A black navigation bar across the top that doesn't help with email.

2) 300px wide box across the top right dedicated to a social network no one uses (not email related).

3) A loading screen when the page first loads.

4) New mail compose window (no need for an explanation here).

5) Ads

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#62

Post by CrazedGeek »

easyfrag wrote: post #54
vertis wrote: post #13

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat. I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

I've switched to feedbin.me ($2 a month), web app is ok, iPhone Reeder (iOS) can sync but not yet iPad version. Has few bells and whistles (which is a plus in a way - not infected with social disease) but does the basic read and sync quite well.

Seconding Feedbin. Still missing a couple things (feed renaming...), but seems to work the best out of all the post-Reader RSS readers.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#63

Post by magicalist »

kenkinder wrote: post #35
thezilch wrote: post #20

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…

As the OP, let me respond. I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'…

> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer.

What's the software? Google CalDAV support isn't actually going away, it's just switching to a whitelist, so depending on your client, it should be fine. I don't know how that's going to work exactly (is it just an API key? how will that work with open source calendaring software like Lightning?), but if it's even moderately actively maintained software, it's likely that they've already applied for access.

> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection (from the article)

Just FYI, they turned federation back on shortly afterwards. Of course, it's being dropped for the new chat system, but it's worth getting that right.

> Fastmail is owned by Opera Software and operates both free and paid tiers of service

As others have pointed out, there is no free tier, just a free trial. And if you're going to pay for it, I don't really see the difference between that and going full Google Apps, but that's just me. (edit: ah, apparently there used to be a free tier, but no longer)

Regardless, paying for the services you use is a good thing, both for getting better guarantees for service, and for teaching the market that ad-supported services aren't the end-all be-all, that we can have other business models, and maybe even a diverse market of them to support different uses and different requirements.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#65

Post by thezilch »

indubitably wrote: post #36
thezilch wrote: post #20

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…

That's charitable but Google really has been behaving as an evil actor lately. Just because they have essentially unlimited resources doesn't mean that they should be immune to critique.

No, it's not evil to make or ask for money to use your product; it's not evil to discontinue services, especially not with 6-24 month advanced warning; and it's not evil to literally want to be the omnipresent center of everyone's lives. How exactly is Google evil?

Their resources have not stopped lesser alternatives from doing business, even with a core product (eg. search) of their's, so it's not that. DuckDuckGo is doing quite well with search; those conversations usually talk about quality and speed of results, not on how Google is the new Altavista and how you should switch before Google deprecates HTTP for GTTP.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#67

Post by kenkinder »

eggbrain wrote: post #27

I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something? Also, the…

Hm, I thought it did. Perhaps it used to. Thanks for the correction.

In terms of features, Fastmail does not do a good job of advertising its features. Just sign up for an account and check out the settings page. Its filtering is quite powerful, there's a SOAP API, and you can do stuff like automatically sort mail into folders. Eg, you could do me@bestbuy.kkinder.com and have it go into a "bestbuy" folder.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#68

Post by rufugee »

k3n wrote: post #52
namityadav wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also looking at Zimbra some time back. But threads like this made me stay with Gmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662348

I don't have a dog in this fight, but to be fair, that thread is 1434 days old. Not saying that anything has changed -- I really have no idea -- but I'm not sure how prudent it is to base high-tech decisions off anecdotal data that is 4 years old.

Agreed. Our testing at work has shown it to be fairly reliable.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#69

Post by masnick »

zrail wrote: post #56
masnick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free trial. https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc... In terms of additional features: - Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language) - Way faster loading time, snapper interface - Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.…

Does Fastmail.FM have the equivalent of the "Archive" action in Gmail? Mail.app on OS X and on iPhone seem to play well with Archive and it's not something that I really want to give up.

YES! And Mail.app on OS X actually works better with FastMail's Archive than it ever did with Gmail's (in my experience).

Here's a screenshot from Mail.app: https://files.app.net/1/79773/aTOWGMJ-rQ2Js_Edg-CWLi5FsLEVYq...

I either never knew that existed when I tried Mail.app with Gmail or it didn't work. In any case, it works perfectly with FastMail's "Archive" folder.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#70

Post by jmillikin »

kenkinder wrote: post #35
thezilch wrote: post #20

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…

As the OP, let me respond. I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'…

  > I actually do use desktop calendaring software which
  > will stop working this summer.
Which software is that? If it's currently working with Gmail's CalDAV support, then it ought to continue working into the future. Google is not dropping support for CalDAV.

  > I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk.
This also ought to continue working. Talk is still based on XMPP, and server federation is still working.

If Google actually does shut down support for either of these open protocols, feel free to object as much as possible. I'll be right there beside you. But right now you're jumping from "Google might possibly drop support at some indeterminate point in the future" to "Google will definitely drop support in a month", which is not supported by evidence.

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