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Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

kkinder.com

131–140 of 324 posts

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#131

The biggest problem with Gmail alternatives is missing hotkeys. Outlook.com is the only one I've found that even comes close, but things are still different enough to be irritating.

Outlook.com has an option for using the Gmail keyboard shortcuts.

They put half of my important mail into Spam. The shortcuts is used to mark all spam as important as fast as possible.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#132
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not evil to make or ask for money to use your product; it's not evil to discontinue services, especially not with 6-24 month advanced warning; and it's not evil to literally want to be the omnipresent center of everyone's lives. How exactly is Google evil? Their resources have not stopped lesser alternatives from doing business, even with a core product (eg. search) of their's, so it's not that. DuckDuckGo i…

Google used to support openness, and now it is being less open, and therefore less "good". A step in a direction that is less "good" is a step towards "evil". It's not unreasonable to say that Google is being more evil. It's not a stretch to say that Google can't be trusted not to be evil if they've moved in a more evil (or less good) direction.

I think you're applying a a value judgement to a technical issue. "Open" pertains to the nature of certain software and standard. It's not inherently good or evil; you're just choosing to assign that value based on how it correlates with the world you'd like to see. I'd prefer things be more open too, but I don't agree that being less open is somehow inherently "more evil." You can have an entirely non-open company that's totally "good" - good/evil is about the actions of the company, not the wording of its license.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#133

Does anyone know of a secure (like lavabit) web mail service (that doesn't look like crap) that integrates chat (irc, google chat, etc)?

Lavabit. I use lavabit and either run a desktop IMAP client or I run a roundcube [1] instance for webmail. Lavabit also provides an XMPP server and address to its users, so you can use any XMPP client for chat. Since lavabit supports IMAP you can use any IMAP client, not just the minimal web client on their site.

[1] http://www.roundcube.net/

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.

Lookup, did they hide the "https://? And why NOT hide the "http://? Oh, I see, You are kidding right? :D

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that email is scary and downright complicated, but it is definitely not an unreasonable task. I've set up a few mailservers mostly through manual changes to the configurations and if you just need something simple and secured with SSL/TLS, it's not too bad. From my experiences, the only major headache is how intricate you want your user and password configurations to be.

Setting up email servers, especially ensuring that they don't get blacklisted by other servers, is a huge pain and definitely not worth the trouble for an individual or a small team. If you're concerned about Google, there are lots of other providers out there, and whatever they're charging is probably a bargain relative to rolling your own.

Can you elaborate on the blacklisting part? I've had my mailserver for a little over a year now and never had any issues with my mail going to spam, but my uses for that mailserver only revolve around 2-3 email accounts.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#137
When evaluating communication services you should give extra credit to hosts that are located in a different country than the one that you live in in order to get some privacy from government spying. It might not stop spy agencies like the NSA but it should at least stop the local police, and in some cases even the FBI, from casually snooping your email at their whim.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#138

It would be really great if somebody wrapped up all the open source material available and made an image available to AWS and other VPS users. Use the image, have email, an XMPP server, etc -- out of the box. On your own dime. I'd pay for it.

Me too. But it would need to be open source, super easy to install, and vetted by a 3rd party with experience in security related issues.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#139
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senseless self plug: I'm working on a saas piwik platform and looking for beta users. Email is in the profile.

Piwik seems to be exactly what I've been trying to find. I'm pretty excited at a glance. I do have two complaints (without having really looked into it yet). The first is that you have issues disabled on GitHub, and the second is that it took some effort to locate the Github link. I suggest linking to the source in a more prominent way— perhaps on the downloads page. If I'm going to be using this, I'm definitely goin…

I'm not directly associated with Piwik, but your complaints are valid. The Piwik project recently moved to Github, and some of that transition is lagging as most effort goes to the code itself.

Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

#140

How well would all of these tie in with android or some other mobile OS?

Unfortunately CalDAV and CarDAV are not supported natively by Android. In order to utilize a CalDAV or CarDAV server, an android user needs to purchase both a CalDAV adapter [1] and a CarDAV adapter [2]. Both of these products are in beta and last time I checked they were lacking support for much of the protocol. It's really a shame that Google doesn't support open standards for contacts and calendar in Android.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda... [2]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...

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