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A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

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Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#151

Post by shunter »

I've started defining 'hacker' as someone who's willing to 'eat their own dogfood' as it were. Someone that is willing to spend time working on the nuts and bolts that lead to some kind of productivity rather than just being productive with the tool / service to begin with.

I used to classify myself as a 'Hacker' and still do when it's something I want to learn more about. Most of the time, however, I'm more interested in just getting the benefits rather than tinkering with the internals. Sometimes, I'm a Hacker, sometimes I'm a consumer.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#152

Post by dobbsbob »

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…

Try OpenSMTPD its now ready for production use http://www.opensmtpd.org

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#153

Post by kroger »

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've been using FastMail for a while and I like it a lot. Actually I love the fact that it uses folders instead of tags.

The only problem I have with FastMail is that I've been receiving an increased amount of spam in my inbox.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#154

Post by dbpatterson »

brongondwana wrote: post #104
dbpatterson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. Fastmail had 4 out of my required 5 features. I used it for a while. I'm still a paying customer (I paid for a bunch of years). Tags were a deal breaker. It's just not sufficient for how I want to organize things.

I'm going to raise this in our next meeting (Tuesday) and see if there's a way we can have IMAP flags exposed somehow. Along with fast cross-folder searching on flags, we could quite easily implement virtual folders per flag - which I think fills your use-case perfectly. The difficult parts are: 1) UI 2) limits. We have a hard limit of 128 "user flags" because it's in 4 x 32 bit fields in a fixed-width data format. S…

I think if you'd had that before, I never would have left (and I think many other people would be happy with that).

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#155

Post by gtt »

thex86 wrote: post #58
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…

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.

Can such kind of reply put your secret key in the risk? For example, it gives attacker enough information to deduce the key within reasonable time?

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#156

Post by ishbits »

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...

I currently use mbsync to backup my all mail folder on gmail. There is a way to set it to never delete on your local side, turning it more into a backup than a sync.

I run that daily, and Crashplan takes care of the rest. Sure it doesn't save the folder structure and what not, but I'm ok with that.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#157

Post by old-gregg »

cbr wrote: post #132
spudlyo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Grab a free account at mailgun.com and configure it as your outgoing SMTP relay.

You'll get an IP address for your outbound traffic which is "clean", monitored and registered with a ton of ESPs. You can also use Mailgun as a proxy for your incoming mails as well, for spam filtering or custom routing purposes.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#158

Post by cdjk »

kryten wrote: post #100
cdjk wrote: post #24

I've thought about doing this, but email is important enough I don't trust myself to provide as much uptime as a commercial email provider. You probably should add SPF records too, if you don't want your outgoing mail marked as spam.

Reliability doesn't matter that much. SMTP is store and forward so if you Bork something, it'll still get to you eventually.

Reliability for incoming mail, sure. But there's making sure outgoing mail is delivered and not spam filtered, making sure your ip isn't on any blacklists, managing and testing backups, keeping up to date on security issues, etc. All of which are doable, but that's not really how I want to spend my time.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#160

Post by kansface »

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…

Sure, it takes 30 seconds to install postfix, but in practice, email is stupidly hard to admin because of spam. You may be able to send email easily, but a large percentage will be blocked as spam unless you use a well know relay even if you do everything right. Similarly, you will also be fighting a flood of spam in the other direction.
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