A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail • Hacker News Board

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#41

Post by chj » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:01 AM UTC

LeafStorm wrote: post #13

While I don't necessarily trust an external company with all my emails, I also don't trust myself to maintain the myriad daemons involved in this setup without doing something subtly wrong that results in my server not sending/receiving all the mail it should -- or, worse, being used for spam. What would be useful is a pre-assembled virtual machine image or other form of appliance that allows you to deploy and test a…

Agreed. Setting up the mail server is such a nightmare. I'll gladly pay for a for-dummy-solution.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#42

Post by 13throwaway » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:03 AM UTC

LeafStorm wrote: post #13

While I don't necessarily trust an external company with all my emails, I also don't trust myself to maintain the myriad daemons involved in this setup without doing something subtly wrong that results in my server not sending/receiving all the mail it should -- or, worse, being used for spam. What would be useful is a pre-assembled virtual machine image or other form of appliance that allows you to deploy and test a…

https://arkos.io/

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#43

Post by chj » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:04 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #29

LeafStorm wrote: post #13

While I don't necessarily trust an external company with all my emails, I also don't trust myself to maintain the myriad daemons involved in this setup without doing something subtly wrong that results in my server not sending/receiving all the mail it should -- or, worse, being used for spam. What would be useful is a pre-assembled virtual machine image or other form of appliance that allows you to deploy and test a…

I've been hosting my own mail since 1996. It's actually one of the easier services to self-host: 1) SMTP was developed for unreliable environments. If you have problems with uptime, your incoming email will bounce around for 5 days before it gets dropped. So assuming you can get your SMTP server running one day out of five, you shouldn't be in danger of losing anything. 2) Contemporary daemons like postfix and doveco…

What do you use for spam filtering?

Another problem is you will have to use a third party smtp server, otherwise your mail will be rejected by a lot of email providers.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#44

Post by jackbravo » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:08 AM UTC

sciurus wrote: post #31

LeafStorm wrote: post #13

While I don't necessarily trust an external company with all my emails, I also don't trust myself to maintain the myriad daemons involved in this setup without doing something subtly wrong that results in my server not sending/receiving all the mail it should -- or, worse, being used for spam. What would be useful is a pre-assembled virtual machine image or other form of appliance that allows you to deploy and test a…

Perhaps you'd like something more integrated? There are plenty of projects in this space that are entirely or mostly open source. http://www.kolab.org/ http://www.sogo.nu/english.html http://www.zarafa.com/ http://www.open-xchange.com/home.html https://www.zimbra.com/

Citadel is another integrated solution that is really easy to setup. Just one application, all written in C. The web interface is the only thing that I think could be better.

http://citadel.org/

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#45

Post by spudlyo » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:14 AM UTC

moxie wrote: post #29

LeafStorm wrote: post #13

While I don't necessarily trust an external company with all my emails, I also don't trust myself to maintain the myriad daemons involved in this setup without doing something subtly wrong that results in my server not sending/receiving all the mail it should -- or, worse, being used for spam. What would be useful is a pre-assembled virtual machine image or other form of appliance that allows you to deploy and test a…

I've been hosting my own mail since 1996. It's actually one of the easier services to self-host: 1) SMTP was developed for unreliable environments. If you have problems with uptime, your incoming email will bounce around for 5 days before it gets dropped. So assuming you can get your SMTP server running one day out of five, you shouldn't be in danger of losing anything. 2) Contemporary daemons like postfix and doveco…

Hats off to ya. I used to view setting up your own email services as a rite of passage for any UNIX admin worth their salt. SMTP was one of the first services I ever got working on my home Linux box, and I had to do it with Sendmail and the goddamn Bat book. Nowadays it's a bit easier.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#46

Post by mcrittenden » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:18 AM UTC

daurnimator wrote: post #38

Does anyone have a gmail exporter? i.e. something that imports email from gmail WITH labels.

I believe gmvault.org should be fine for that.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#47

Post by mjn » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:18 AM UTC

daurnimator wrote: post #38

Does anyone have a gmail exporter? i.e. something that imports email from gmail WITH labels.

This is a proof-of-concept someone wrote, but I have no idea how tested it is: http://git.zx2c4.com/gmail-notmuch/

It syncs Gmail labels to notmuch tags.

As I understand it: by default, Gmail treats labels as IMAP folders, which means a standard IMAP exporter will end up with multiple copies of messages with more than one label. The workaround is to only export the "All Mail" folder, and then add support for Gmail's custom attributes, namely retrieving the X-GM-LABELS [1] attribute for each message and then doing something with it (in this case, storing it as notmuch tags).

[1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap_extensions#access_t...

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#48

Post by spudlyo » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:21 AM UTC

chj wrote: post #43

moxie wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been hosting my own mail since 1996. It's actually one of the easier services to self-host: 1) SMTP was developed for unreliable environments. If you have problems with uptime, your incoming email will bounce around for 5 days before it gets dropped. So assuming you can get your SMTP server running one day out of five, you shouldn't be in danger of losing anything. 2) Contemporary daemons like postfix and doveco…

What do you use for spam filtering? Another problem is you will have to use a third party smtp server, otherwise your mail will be rejected by a lot of email providers.

SpamAssassin and friends still do a reasonable job for me, and have for years. I delete a handful every day, but like the parent I've had my email address since 1996, and I haven't been too careful about using it. If I had to do it over again today, I'd look at rspamd. Getting people to accept your mail can be a pain in the ass, yes, but it's not impossible.

* Get a "clean" statically allocated IP address.

* Control your forward and reverse DNS and make them match.

* Set up SPF/DKIM.

* Fill out the Yahoo Bulk Email sender form

That last one probably isn't really necessary, depending on how much email you send to Yahoo.com addresses.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#49

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:21 AM UTC

taeric wrote: post #32

tbrock wrote: post #16

It's definintely time for an open source alternative to GMail... but I think everyone knows this isn't it. These tools like exim, horde, dovecot, etc. have been around and worked for decades but wouldn't it be great to have fresh solutions that weren't so ancient and archaic?

You say ancient and archaic, I see ridiculously well tested and battle worn. Seriously, what would make a "fresh" solution better than a long standing one, in this case?

You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Presumably the "better" solution would be using most of the existing code under the hood. But wouldn't it be nice if setting up an email server consisted primarily of typing something like "apt-get install email-server" and then setting the domain name and adding a few accounts?

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#50

Post by etherael » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 4:23 AM UTC

jervisfm wrote: post #33

mbell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Setting up a server in any hosting environment at this point comes with the assumption that its contents can be read at any time by the operators and whoever they let in without you ever knowing about it. How exactly is that any different than it was 6 months ago?

The point about trusting hosting providers is an interesting one. Indeed, when renting a Virtual Private Server from a service provider, you have no choice but to trust them to keep your data safe. This made we wonder: would it be possible to actually secure the server in such a manner that the hosting party won't have access to your stuff without your say so ? I think you can (sort of) do this already with having so…

I have a dedicated server with encrypted partitions and admin backdoors turned off at ovh. So theoretically they shouldn't be able to access the running system, and if they take it down to access the partitions directly, they're encrypted so that won't work either.