Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

dbpmail.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 218 posts

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#171

Post by mwcampbell »

I think more of us need to run mail servers. For ourselves, for our families, and possibly for others who are willing to pay. Email is far too centralized now, at a handful of companies, in a handful of data centers. So in that regard, running a mail server on a VPS at one of the popular providers is kind of missing the point.

My local cable ISP doesn't allow incoming or outgoing connections to port 25, nor incoming connections to port 80. So at least for now, I can't run a mail server in my home. I've thought about switching to DSL, but then I would take a major hit in speed, in both directions.

Luckily, I have another option. There's a hosting provider where I live (Wichita, Kansas) that offers KVM-based virtual machine hosting. So I'll get a VM there, and if the service is any good, I'll move there from Linode. The pricing isn't competitive with Linode, let alone DigitalOcean, and I doubt that the connectivity is as good, since the server will be in a building here in Wichita rather than a real data center. But I'm willing to try it, in order to support a local business and fight the centralization of the Internet.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#172

Post by etherael »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #169
etherael wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the pure hardware method for memory snapshots some ridiculously complex mechanism with freezing the memory and quickly transferring it to a reading device? If you're going to pull this, you need to know in advance that it's necessary, that's not some minor thing that everyone is going to just do automatically, it's an extra, complicated step it's easy to screw up. That said, I acknowledge the possibility of com…

"ridiculously complex mechanism" ... Not really. Anyone with the ability to stick a USB stick in a USB port and hit a power reset button can pull off this attack: http://www.mcgrewsecurity.com/tools/msramdmp/

Interesting stuff. TRESOR might not be overkill after all.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#173

Post by easy_rider »

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 was about to say, doesn't this scream for a container? i.e. docker.io

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#174

Post by bifrost »

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.

I can confirm that that is not correct. Google regularly flags internal ticket email as spam for one of my larger customers (mail that is sent within GApps). I also see about a 10-20% false positive rate on our various mailings (account setups, billing notices, etc).

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#175

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

mjn wrote: post #146
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.

Yeah, I know. I'm just pointing out that GMail alternatives should exist that don't involve a huge PITA.

I know how to configure mail servers just fine, but I still wouldn't do it for myself. That's what I mean by "normal".

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#176

Post by stass »

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?

That's essentially how it happens in most good package managers. You install a choice of MTA/imap/antispam, set up the domain name and unix accounts and SSL certs, and up and running at this point.

Most of the modern smtp and imap servers have very sane defaults.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#177

Post by Domenic_S »

kybernetikos wrote: post #97
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.

I've been experimenting with encrypting using bitcoin addresses, publishing keys with gravatar and sending encrypted messages as links as a way of trying to make all this stuff easier and more accessible. If you're interested in my proof of concept, it's http://kybernetikos.github.io/VisualSecrecy/

Linking bitcoin address to email address doesn't sound like a step forward in privacy...

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#178

Post by coffeecheque »

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'd pay extra for Australian located email hosting too. Or even a European option.

Also, since we're talking feature requests: 1) contacts syncing via CardDav and 2) Calendar.

Contact syncing is vital though. It's really a killer at this point.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#179

Post by gnosis »

just2n wrote: post #170

I did this for a long time, but it's really annoying: 1. If your provider goes down, you lose mail. 2. If you are conversing with people who are using an insecure mailer, such as gmail, Yahoo, etc (which is probably > 99.9% of all e-mail users), your e-mail is still accessible to the NSA, or to some Fortune 100 advertising company. 3. It's only a matter of time before the "big dogs" in email abuse the position and de…

"Like so much else that has been corrupted, we need to scratch the current architecture as too insecure, and build something truly secure for the future."

This is really the core technological issue that has enabled much of the recent mass spying: the Internet really was not designed with security, privacy, or anonymity in mind.

Remember that it started as a research network that was used primarily among academics. Academia is generally a very open and trusting environment. The last thing the inventors of the Internet though of was trying to protect their computers, data, or privacy. We are living with the consequences of that mistake.

The second major cause of this mess is the computer illiteracy and historical ignorance of much of the world's population. They don't understand how they are making themselves vulnerable by sharing so much information about themselves and trusting corporations that provide "free" web services to them. This is slowly changing for the better, as people become more technologically savvy and stories like the current spying scandals and various security breaches hit the news.

As for the technological and security minded among us, particularly those who are just now starting to think about running their own mail servers, what took you all so long? None of the recent revelations should have been unexpected.

The Internet needs a major privacy, security, and anonymity overhaul. If it's not rebuilt with those concerns at the core, they will all remain mostly illusory to the overwhelming majority of Internet users.

Re: A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail

#180

Post by eps »

kansface wrote: post #160
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…

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.

> but a large percentage will be blocked as spam unless you use a well know relay even if you do everything right

That's hardly a rule. You clearly will end up on a blacklist if you host from home or if your IP is already on a list due to previous spam activity, but of you run off a static IP in a decent colo and have a proper PTR record, it is more likely than not to be all OK.

The 90% of inbound spam is still very effectively trimmed off by greylisting, i.e. postgrey if you are in postfix. I've been running my own mail server for close to 10 years now and it's really not a big deal.

Post reply on HN