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A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

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Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#131

Post by volatile »

brongondwana wrote: post #112
volatile wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I currently do pay a premium and I'd prefer to be paying it to FastMail.

Recent revelations mean there may be a few more Australians willing to pay a premium to host mail in Australia.

Also, thanks for your work on Cyrus.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#132

Post by cbr »

spudlyo wrote: post #45
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…

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.

It's easier now, in that we have good well-documented software, but the external environment has changed. While other servers used to just accept the email you sent, spam countermeasures have gotten complex enough that if you just follow the postfix installation guide you're going to have a lot of your outbound smtp filtered.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#133

Post by cabalamat »

exratione wrote: post #8

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. That's still a lot better than Gmail. Setting up your own mail server is not a terrible woe-inducing undertaking if you have a working recipe to follow and are comfortable with the Unix command line (e.g. http://www…

> 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.

Indeed. If you want to be secure, you need to keep your email server at home, or in some other location you trust, and make sure all communication on the net is encrypted. That way, if an adversary wants your secrets, they will have to burgle your house.

> That's still a lot better than Gmail.

True, because it takes effort for GCHQ/NSA/whoever to look at your server, which they probably won't do.

> Going beyond that to something with a whole lot more encryption and less of an ability for hosting providers to read your data would really require a product dedicated to that end: that is hard to get right

That's what I'm working on.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#135

Post by cabalamat »

bigiain wrote: post #23
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 difference today is that not only should I assume that Google sysadmins could read my mail, but there's now pretty convincing arguments that Google are sending all my (as a non-US person) email to the NSA - who're storing it forever "just in case it turns out useful". I'm somewhat less concerned about rogue individual sysadmins curiously snooping on my mail, than I am about the NSA's comprehensive perpetual archi…

It's not just the NSA. All big countries have intelligence services and anyone with anything to hide should assume that they will try to get their hand on as much internet traffic as they can.

So e.g. if you're a US company that has a competitor in China, and you don't want the Chinese company to read your email, it's a sensible precaution to encrypt it.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#136

Post by cabalamat »

cwp wrote: post #57

I ran a set up similar to this for many years. It's not that hard, for those with a little unix experience. As moxie mentions, email is very forgiving—you have to break it badly and leave it broken for a long time before you start to lose messages. What eventually drove me to GMail was spam. I tried a bunch of different filters, and never found one with good-enough accuracy. Finally I decided that the independence an…

> As far as I can tell, Gmail is 100% accurate.

My experience is I've had a few false negatives and false positives. Gmail is still very good though, and any replacement, if it is to be widely used, needs to solve the spam problem.

If each message had to be separately encrypted for each receiver, would this add much to a spammer's costs? I'm guessing it would, but not by enough to make spam uneconomic. A better solution might be to require that the first email someone sends someone else, unless they've been OK'd by a third party, contains bitcoins to the value of $0.01.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#137

Post by brendoncrawford »

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…

Happy paying FastMail customer here. Would love to see CalDav support (public and private), so I can ditch Google once and for all.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#138

Post by tokenizerrr »

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?

I've used roundcube before, both on a shared hoster and on my own server later on. It's okay, I wasn't impressed with the user interface at the time though that seems to have changed judging from their website. The software is a bunch of php and shell scripts and uses a MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite database.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#140

Post by taeric »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #49
taeric wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can agree with that, but I don't see it so much as a "fresh" solution as it is an improved UX on top of the existing ones. Of course, the reality is likely that the actual complexities of the problem will make any good UX hard to do. That is, realize that for the vast majority of us, gmail and friends are this "fresh" program.
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