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A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

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Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#111

I'm not sure why you can't do those things on FastMail. (disclaimer: I work for FastMail) Sure we have folders rather than tags, which means you can't add multiple of them to the same message. Probably the biggest lack is that you can't manage IMAP flags via the web interface. Otherwise, our search is now very powerful (since about March this year) and allows you to build filters that show messages from multiple fold…

I love FastMail. Thank you for your work!

Cheers :)

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#112
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another happy FastMail user here. I don't need tags/labels, so you have everything I need. I have an Enhanced account that is linked to my domain, and an Ad Free account where important mail gets forwarded to. The latter is accessible from my phone, but the former isn't, so if anyone steals my phone they can only see the last few messages I exchanged, and I can just disable an alternative login (similar to revok…

Jeremy Howard, the founder of FastMail, responded to a similar question on Slashdot in October 2009. http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1391605&cid=2963235... We've had a number of US-based law enforcement bodies over the year try to get hold of our data without going via the appropriate Australian bodies, and it doesn't work out for them. In the end, they have always ended up submitting a request for cooperati…

Fair enough. Hosting in Australia is something we consider occasionally, but the bandwidth pricing is just so much higher. It's always worth looking at demand of course - are there enough people who would be willing to pay a premium to have their email in Australia to justify running up a full instance here.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle reboots? If all of your partitions are encrypted I would guess you use a serial console to enter in the encryption password to decrypt and mount the actual OS drive?

small boot partition (basically enough to boot, get network, start ssh), all the actual data and /tmp on encrypted stores.

But do you validate that boot partition each time you reboot the system? How do you know that your computed hashsum (or similar) is actually the true one? ...

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#114
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

small boot partition (basically enough to boot, get network, start ssh), all the actual data and /tmp on encrypted stores.

But do you validate that boot partition each time you reboot the system? How do you know that your computed hashsum (or similar) is actually the true one? ...

got a hash of the boot partition, validate when it comes back up.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#115
When I saw the link's title, I immediately thought that it would be another webmail client hosted by someone, especially given the domain name. Because almost everytime I see a "hacker's X" or "X for hacker" title on HN I'm just afflicted by the content, so I got used to it.

But here, what a pleasant surprise. The post is actually describing a real hacker's replacement for Gmail (which coincidentally is almost my setting, except I use mu [1] instead of notmuch). I'll keep it as a reference to send people asking for alternative email hosting.

[1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#119
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Possibly some too-cynical questions… Do you think ovh is any less beholden to GCHQ than Google et al are to the NSA? Do you think your encrypted partitions and turned-off admin backdoors protect you much against people with physical access to the hardware?

As a former employee of OVH, I can guarantee that law enforcement compliance does happen, I don't know to what extent, but having been there for the better part of two years I have seen requests from local government be held up and data handed over to authorities. Though in those cases it was child pornography accusations.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#120
as for antispam..http://www.mxhero.com/ is auto and easy, and i think http://spamcheck.sourceforge.net/ is very nice. u don't get as many controls but it sends quarantine digests, and runs much lighter than mxhero. http://www.scrolloutf1.com/ looks nice too. at work we sell spamtitan, which i admit is really nice..tons of config with nice gui, good defaults, easy setup..but its non free...
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