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

OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

perseosblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#12

Post by sergiosgc »

Hoping to support this with donations seems unstable. Mail will cost about two cents per 1GB account per month if you buy your servers at the right price and if you have a good ISP with nice electricy prices. At that price, you need 1% of your users to donate 20 bucks per year. This is awfully close to freemium conversion rates, I'd expect donations to be much less.

Add more storage and it gets hairy real fast. And don't forget to add fixed costs in the end (paid sysadmins and customer support).

Hmm, ever since GReader I'm a fan of "show me your money making plan" or I'll suspect dark monetization plans.

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#13

Post by chakalakasp »

dylangs1030 wrote: post #10

There are several security concerns here. First of all, I didn't see any mention of encryption. Is data encrypted at all, or are you able to read everything going on in the server? If encrypted, in what way? Why should I trust you with my data if it's not encrypted? How will I hold you accountable if I'm not paying you? Second, HTTPS is a nice start, but it's just public/private key encrypted connection. It's still s…

In addition, when it comes to encryption that is intended to defeat things like XKeyscore, this isn't it. It's nice that the tunnel to the server is TLS (which is probably not really safe from the NSA), but you still generally are going to have unencrypted inbound emails coming into the server and unencrypted outbound emails exiting the server, no?

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#15

Post by harrytuttle »

Some criticisms:

Firstly, this is basically a standard UNIXy virtual mail solution with RoundCube chucked on the top. Nothing special. Does not deserve the manifesto spew. You can get this solution canned by just installing this on your own kit: http://www.iredmail.org/ (or build it yourself). Or you can get it at WebFaction and many other hosters for a small fee. You can even stick it behind your firewall and IDS on your DMZ and rejoice!

I very much doubt anyone who throws this out in no time at all actually has the capacity or planning to operate a virtual mail system. I planned and ran an 80k-user (not many!) exim/cyrus outfit for an ISP and it was a full time job and it required some serious kit at the time. To give you an idea, we had 2 SMTP front ends, COTS NFS appliance for mailboxes, 2 IMAP servers, 2 web servers, tape library, 2 redundant LDAP servers, dedicated UPS etc. The lowest CPU at the time was a dual Xeon Pentium III. The whole thing was a full 42U rack and sucked up power. Even with the progress with virtualisation and storage etc, you're going to need big iron to shift email or run a free service like that.

I doubt the security of the solution. You don't know where it is hosted, there is no motivation (in the form of cash) to actually not puke your details everywhere, there is no SLA, the software may have been modified etc etc.

No thanks.

Edit: just to add that I really like the core idea and concepts but this cannot work in the real world of capitalism, the corporate-controlled Internet and the current global surveillance situation.

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#17

Post by [deleted] »

chakalakasp wrote: post #13
dylangs1030 wrote: post #10

There are several security concerns here. First of all, I didn't see any mention of encryption. Is data encrypted at all, or are you able to read everything going on in the server? If encrypted, in what way? Why should I trust you with my data if it's not encrypted? How will I hold you accountable if I'm not paying you? Second, HTTPS is a nice start, but it's just public/private key encrypted connection. It's still s…

In addition, when it comes to encryption that is intended to defeat things like XKeyscore, this isn't it. It's nice that the tunnel to the server is TLS (which is probably not really safe from the NSA), but you still generally are going to have unencrypted inbound emails coming into the server and unencrypted outbound emails exiting the server, no?

[deleted]

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#18

Post by hugoroy »

slg wrote: post #6

The obvious question that arises with companies like this is if I don't trust Google, why should I trust you? Using open source software isn't a signal that you are trustworthy. Especially considering none of your customers can verify the actual code you are using. What would prevent a similar company from starting with open source software and inserting all sorts of evil code before deploying it on their servers?

The terms of service are here: https://openmailbox.org/cgu.php

There are some typos there and they don't say much. Do I need to say more about the quality of this?

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#19

Post by vincentstorme »

hugoroy wrote: post #18
slg wrote: post #6

The obvious question that arises with companies like this is if I don't trust Google, why should I trust you? Using open source software isn't a signal that you are trustworthy. Especially considering none of your customers can verify the actual code you are using. What would prevent a similar company from starting with open source software and inserting all sorts of evil code before deploying it on their servers?

The terms of service are here: https://openmailbox.org/cgu.php There are some typos there and they don't say much. Do I need to say more about the quality of this?

It's based in France, can't expect the creator(s) to speak perfect English

Re: OpenMailBox: An alternative to Gmail based on free software

#20

Post by kin3tic »

Huh? I can set up this stack myself and I already have a custom RoundCube theme.

It doesn't matter how much OSS you use. Google uses a ton too. I can't tell what code you're running, so it's pointless.

Can't someone just release a set of docker configs for a mailserver, dovecot, etc so people can go run this on their own VPS of choice?

Post reply on HN