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

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

#121

Post by username111 »

alfiejohn_ wrote: post #93
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.…

Undo send? In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

Gmail has it as an option (labs last I used gmail), that is the best way I think to do it.

I don't ever find a need to undo an email though.

I believe it was only for like 20-30 seconds as well that it offered undo.

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

#122

Post by unicornporn »

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 :(

https://www.newsblur.com/ or https://theoldreader.com/

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

#123

Post by mwfunk »

J_Darnley wrote: post #55
jmgrosen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.

Those things are all subjective, plenty of reasonable and clueful people will disagree as to whether any of those are good or bad things (or neither). When you say something like...

"the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative"

...that's saying a whole heck of a lot more than, they made some UI decisions that were personally disagreeable to you but not necessarily to other people.

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

#124

Post by unicornporn »

codereflection wrote: post #43

The biggest problem with Gmail alternatives is missing hotkeys. Outlook.com is the only one I've found that even comes close, but things are still different enough to be irritating.

Outlook.com has an option for using the Gmail keyboard shortcuts.

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

#125

Post by masnick »

slg wrote: post #85
masnick wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

> 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.

This only makes sense if you ignore switching cost. For example, what if it becomes difficult to get your email out of Gmail (e.g. they drop IMAP support or throttle it).

If there is a switching cost, then you do have a vested interest in choosing companies with (a) sustainable business models and (b) business models that align their incentives with users' interests.

Advertising may satisfy (a) but IMO it does not satisfy (b). My reasoning is that if users pay directly for a service, the company is more likely to listen to their comments/needs/suggestions than if advertisers are paying the bills and the users are only there to look at ads (cynically).

I'm sure this doesn't play out this way all the time, but I do think it is generally true. There also may be some selection bias: people running companies who have user-supported services may have different values than people running ad-supported services. Again, definitely not true 100% of the time.

I think the best example of this is Twitter. Because they need ad revenue, they had to change the API and developer rules. Theoretically, this will not happen with App.net because users pay for the service so they don't have to worry about ads.

I think worrying about ad revenue introduces a set of priorities that may be at odds with what's best for users. There are certainly cases where ads work fine (e.g. Google search), but for something like email I prefer to not have to worry about this.

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

#126

Post by jmillikin »

runjake wrote: post #87
jmillikin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

  > 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.
That's not the same as shutting down support. The Gmail app doesn't use IMAP, but you can still connect to Gmail with any IMAP client.

  > Sure, you can use a third party XMPP client on Android,
  > but the writing is on the wall here.
That's like saying that google.com is going to drop support for HTTP because Chrome has support for SPDY.

You're complaining about Google doing something bad before Google has announced any intention to do it. If Google actually does drop support for XMPP -- that is, if they announce one day that people will no longer be able to chat with federated servers from a standalone XMPP client -- then go wild.

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

#128

Post by Steko »

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've been working on removing myself from the Google silo ... Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now."

I must have missed something, did Google acquire Dropbox? Dropbox makes their money from the Dropbox product which is exactly why you should use a company like them instead of a borg offering. I prefer Sugarsync but there are no shortage of options.

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

Spearchucker wrote: post #102
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…

MS sucked This is not going to be a popular view, but here goes anyway... Depends. I've been using Outlook Web Access since it was first released. Granted, you need Exchange, but these days Outlook.com provides similar functionality (or so I'm told - I use Exchange Online now). That said, the most useful calendar I've found is Family Room on Windows Phone. I share it with my girlfriend, who has an iPhone, and it work…

[deleted]

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

#130

Post by tomkarlo »

ineedtosleep wrote: post #81
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.

Setting up email servers, especially ensuring that they don't get blacklisted by other servers, is a huge pain and definitely not worth the trouble for an individual or a small team. If you're concerned about Google, there are lots of other providers out there, and whatever they're charging is probably a bargain relative to rolling your own.
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