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A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

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Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#121

Post by kijin »

volatile wrote: post #109
kijin wrote: 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…

That was before the Opera acquisition and the subsequent changes to their infrastructure. I wonder if their servers are still encrypted?

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#122

Post by chalst »

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/

I've been looking at Kolab. They have a nice page listing their dependencies:

http://www.kolab.org/community/upstream-communities

All of these look fine - I already deploy all the server items - except Round Cube: does anyone know anything about them?

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#123

Post by eliasmacpherson »

shrikant wrote: post #98
eru wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OTR plugin for Pidgin does a better job of userfriendliness and gives more useful privacy guarantees (like plausible deniability).

FYI, last I remember, Pidgin stored your passwords in plaintext in an ASCII file on disk, unless you jumped through some hoops to integrate it with your desktop environment's keyring. They even have a article up on their site explaining why it's necessary to do this.

https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords well that's just great.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#124

Post by rorrr2 »

csense wrote: post #94

I always thought a big part of the reason people used gmail was for the snazzy web-based UI that was one of the first popular AJAX-based web applications. I eagerly read the article to see what alternative to this feature the author was suggesting, so I was surprised to see he's reading the emails with a standalone client...in fact, it's an emacs plugin!

Exactly. It's hardly a solution. Viewing in-body images and attachments turns into a nightmare.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#125

Post by claudius »

shrikant wrote: post #98
eru wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OTR plugin for Pidgin does a better job of userfriendliness and gives more useful privacy guarantees (like plausible deniability).

FYI, last I remember, Pidgin stored your passwords in plaintext in an ASCII file on disk, unless you jumped through some hoops to integrate it with your desktop environment's keyring. They even have a article up on their site explaining why it's necessary to do this.

You can disable storing passwords. If you don’t want to have to enter a ‘master password’ when Pidgin starts up, there is no way they can store the passwords more securely than plaintext.

Get full disk encryption and be happy.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#126

Post by da_n »

brongondwana wrote: post #2

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 signed up for Fastmail enhanced, really like it so far, only things I don't like are the read only LDAP contacts and the security settings. Specifically on the security settings, I want to see support for a limited alternative login which can access IMAP desktop/mobile clients (such as K9) but not have full unrestricted web access. Tags, I can without those if they can't be implemented well. Thanks for a great product.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#127

Post by dumaspere »

db48x wrote: post #101
rst wrote: post #30

Was hoping to see more discussion of backups. There are a bunch of possible approaches (depending on level of desired security, what the VPS provider offers, and how much you trust them), but for a mail server, there ought to be something...

Use OfflineIMAP to sync to a local disk.

Sync is not backup.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#128

Post by andor »

jrn wrote: post #39
bstx wrote: post #6

Another relatively painless way to set up a mail server on your own box is http://www.iredmail.org . ( + http://z-push.sourceforge.net/soswp/ for ActiveSync push mail) So far I am fairly happy with it.

Does anyone know, if I used z-push for a product, would I be liable for not buying a license from Microsoft, for Exchange ActiveSync? It seems they are fairly litigious with activesync patents.

The protocol is patented [0]. If you want to offer your product in the US (and other places that care about software patents), you need a license.

Also note that Z-Push is AGPLv3 software. Unless you can get it under another license from Zarafa, you have to release your product with an AGPL-compatible license.

[0] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/IP...

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#129

Post by eitland »

chalst wrote: post #122
sciurus wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I've been looking at Kolab. They have a nice page listing their dependencies: http://www.kolab.org/community/upstream-communities All of these look fine - I already deploy all the server items - except Round Cube: does anyone know anything about them?

Have got it recommended from a consultant who seems to know what he is doing.

Also I think in kolab it is only used for optional webmail.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#130

Post by seanp2k2 »

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…

E-mail and the extensions and extras that make it go and make it nice /are/ duct-tape. I wouldn't advocate for /anyone/ running their own mailserver unless they're totally aware of what they're doing and on top of spam issues.

When considering if running your own mailserver is practical for you, consider the total cost of ownership; you'll most likely be paying for a dedicated server (or vps, VM, or whatever the cool kids are using these days) which will require staying on top of all the "normal" things; monitoring, backups (and you'll probably want to test them), updates, what blacklists to use, ensuring that /your/ server doesn't end up blacklisted, etc. Unless you've been a sysadmin before and know what this all entails, I wouldn't really recommend it. If you're not part of some bigger org (a hosting co or bigger company), it'll also be harder to get your one-off no-name server removed from blacklists, since this looks just like something Joe Linkfarm would do. I could show you this one really simple trick that a mother found to whiten your server reputation, but...

As far as creating a VM image that sets all this up for you, it's kinda the point that it doesn't exist; mailservers don't work well when run by people who don't really care about them. It's quite far away from a "set and forget" deal. This is why many hackers / sysadmins still use GMail; it's not the best at everything, but it's OK enough at most things that it's the least hassle to use.

That all said, I do agree that it'd be great to have a service which offers both more control for power users (I'd love a mailfilter-style config w/regex support for GMail), better privacy (easy PGP integration, etc), tag support, threading, and normal IMAP support, but I'm not quite holding my breath. This seems like a decent problem for some start-up to solve :) It's not a "sexy" problem, but it's a real one.

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