A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail • Hacker News Board

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#141

Post by RexRollman » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 1:48 PM UTC

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.

I was the same way, although I preferred NetBSD, but I eventually determined that it wasn't worth the effort to host my own email. That said, I still learned configure it for local only use. I grabbed incoming mail using Fetchmail and sorted it with Procmail.

By the way, I still feel that Sendmail has to have the worst configuration file I have ever seen.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#142

Post by dmix » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

richdougherty wrote: post #53

It would be incredibly useful if there was a mail service that received email over SMTP, encrypted it straight away with a public key, then just dumped the encrypted email into a general-purpose online storage solution (e.g. an S3 bucket). That would IMO provide a good base for encrypted client-side apps to build on top of. Open source would better be able address the problem of writing a client once the money needed…

Countermail does this: https://countermail.com/

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#143

Post by ams6110 » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #133

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 secr…

There is a very good chance that an email server running on a "home" IP address block of any of the major ISPs will be blacklisted.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#144

Post by fredsted » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

Why make it so hard? Why not just install virtualmin [0] on a Debian (or whatever Linux you prefer) server and get it over with. You also get web hosting, DB hosting, mailing lists, webmail and more as a bonus. And you don't have to worry about security updates. Just install and create your virtual host, and modify DNS for your domain. Couldn't be easier. Oh, and it's completely free.

[0] http://www.virtualmin.com

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#145

Post by alan_cx » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 2:19 PM UTC

lucaspiller wrote: post #107

jackbravo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

"Citadel offers versatile email services with very low administration needed. It provides its own implementations of these server protocols: IMAP, POP3, SMTP, ManageSieve, XMPP, Citadel." Wow, I'm impressed!

Call me behind the times, but I like the fact you can DL a virtual appliance, and have it working in 10 mins flat.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#146

Post by mjn » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 2:53 PM UTC

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #67

Normal people definitely don't want to manage a mail server though. Life is too short to waste figuring out why you're banned on Spamhaus for the 93th time. GMail sucks, but a home-made contraption is not the alternative.

To be fair to the author, I don't think an article that starts with "A Hacker's..." and/or involves Emacs has a pretension to being a solution for normal people.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#147

Post by sciurus » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 2:53 PM UTC

jackbravo wrote: post #44

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/

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/

I didn't mention Citadel because there hasn't been a release since November 2011; however on further investigation it looks like development is still active. http://code.citadel.org/?p=citadel.git;a=shortlog

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#148

Post by daned » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 2:53 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #17

peterlongnguyen wrote: post #9

Just a general fyi, there are $10 credits for Digital Ocean if you decide to sign up. The one I used this month was OMGSSD10, but it may only work for this month.

I've got (and am very happy with) a DO VM, but in the context of securing mail - I'm not sure using a US based server (or a server owned by a US based company). (And, though I'm in Australia and have an English passport, I'm not sure UK or Australian servers are any better…)

Know any hosting companies in the travel lounge of a Moscow airport?

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#149

Post by tubelite » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 3:00 PM UTC

magic_haze wrote: post #55

To play the devil's advocate, what exactly is the practical use of all this if most of your family and friends are on Gmail (and couldn't be arsed to figure out pgp)? From what I can see, your emails will now be sent in the clear over the internet, instead of staying within google's servers. Either way, the government's going to get your data, but at least you're protected against... /more/ unscrupulous people snoopi…

The shuttering of Reader and Gmail's new and awful Compose have convinced me - more than years of Stallman rants and NSA snooping - that relying on closed-source SaaS is a terrible idea. It is a question of if, not when, your SaaS provider does something you intensely dislike, and which you have no power to change.

With SaaS, you don't even have the power to say - Damn your improved version, blast your hip new design, I will stick with the old one, thankyouverymuch. You are always on Version Now.

The more intertwined your relationship and dependence on integration with related products, the messier the ensuing divorce.

This, to my mind, represents a far more inevitable reason to figure a way out of GMail.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#150

Post by urza » Sun, Jun 30, 2013, 3:19 PM UTC

1337Coder wrote: post #96

thex86 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great point. Reminds of the time I taught my friend to use PGP and sent him an encrypted email. Every single time, he would reply in plain-text, thus exposing my older conversation. When asked why, he told me it's too much of a pain to do it. So my being careful about my privacy doesn't help if other people don't play along.

This is the exact reason I created this: https://privatemsg.matthew-dove.com/

Where can I grab source code?