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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

#81

Post by ineedtosleep »

acabal wrote: post #59

I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal ( http://http://baikal-server.com/ ) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier…

I agree that email is scary and downright complicated, but it is definitely not an unreasonable task.

I've set up a few mailservers mostly through manual changes to the configurations and if you just need something simple and secured with SSL/TLS, it's not too bad. From my experiences, the only major headache is how intricate you want your user and password configurations to be.

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

#82

Post by ValentineC »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #61
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 use…

> For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does.

You're still able to get a free one-user Google Apps for Domains account by going through Google App Engine. [1] I've used it to get catchall email addresses for any new domains I've recently registered.

[1] http://lifehacker.com/5967336/use-google-app-engine-to-get-g...

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

#83

Post by nsmartt »

thezilch wrote: post #65
indubitably wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Google used to support openness, and now it is being less open, and therefore less "good". A step in a direction that is less "good" is a step towards "evil". It's not unreasonable to say that Google is being more evil.

It's not a stretch to say that Google can't be trusted not to be evil if they've moved in a more evil (or less good) direction.

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

#84

Post by dragonwriter »

masnick wrote: post #18
arunabha wrote: post #15

Fastmail.fm seemed to be good till I read the fine print. For the personal account you have 100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)

The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.

> The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps

A $40/year e-mail-only service is comparable with the $50/year Google Apps?

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

#85

Post by slg »

masnick wrote: post #48
slg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?

It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model. I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ ), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.

I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail.

It is also worth noting that changing the revenue producers from advertisers to consumers doesn't automatically make a business model sustainable. In a vacuum, I have no reason to believe an RSS reader (webmail, instant messenger, or any random service) that I pay for is any more viable than a competitor that serves me advertisements.

Finally, the issue I take with your second point is that a company's motives are going to be dictated by their finances. That may even be a legal requirement if they are publicly owned. Both Fastmail and Google have a financial incentive to keep their user-base happy and growing. One because they are taking cash directly from users and one because they are using users to generate cash. I don't think that slight difference changes their motives as drastically as you might think.

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

#86

Post by dannyr »

magicalist wrote: post #63
kenkinder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 activel…

Add his argument on Podcast. Google discontinued the Listen app and not Podcast standard itself.

He listed these things to justify his arguments but almost none of them hold any water.

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

#87

Post by runjake »

jmillikin wrote: post #70
kenkinder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 work…

> If Google actually does shut down support for either of these open protocols, feel free to object as much as possible.

In some ways, they already have. To the best of my knowledge, you can no longer obtain the Google Talk Android app from the Play Store anymore. It has been replaced by the Hangouts app.

You could probably download the Google Talk APK from some third party, but how long will that function on future Android versions when any OS hooks are being altered for Hangouts interoperability?

Sure, you can use a third party XMPP client on Android, but the writing is on the wall here.

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

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

masnick wrote: post #48
slg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?

It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model. I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ ), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.

> It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model.

I can pay for services I use with Google. If I decide that I would prefer to pay for services, why should I choose a non-Google provider?

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

#89

Post by eridius »

magicalist wrote: post #63
kenkinder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 activel…

Speaking as someone who uses Google Apps for personal email, it sucks. I hate having a google apps managed account under my personal email address (my primary google account is a gmail address), I hate the limited filtering options that Gmail provides, I hate the faux-IMAP layer that Gmail has, I hate the fact that every time I switch networks with my laptop I get a "too many simultaneous connections" error from the Gmail IMAP server, and I hate many more things about this.

So many thanks to Ken for finding what appears to be a good alternative. Time to convince my family to switch email providers.

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

#90

Post by latj »

I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.
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