Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by nnutter » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:05 AM UTC

acabal wrote: post #59

I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal ( http://http://baikal-server.com/ ) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier…

One issue with self-hosted is that your ISP may block SMTP or worse they add their customer IP blocks to spam blacklists.

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

#192

Post by pyre » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:07 AM UTC

piyush_soni wrote: post #165

6d0debc071 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How exactly is Google evil? Well, there's an account out there with my real name tied to it that I never wanted to happen and to this day have no idea how it got there. I don't have a Google + account. Probably there was something that I clicked when I was tying my mobile phone to my Google account or something. I can't find any way to delete it either. My YouTube account keeps telling me I should use my real name…

And which one is going to be your next phone? An iPhone? or a Windows Phone? Just curious.

I'm personally curious about a FFOS phone. Especially since it doesn't require a Google account.

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

#193

Post by nsmartt » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:11 AM UTC

imperialWicket wrote: post #139

nsmartt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, I misunderstood. I'll try to get in touch with the team. Thanks for letting me know.

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

#194

Post by pyre » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:16 AM UTC

username111 wrote: post #121

alfiejohn_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Undo send? In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

Gmail has it as an option (labs last I used gmail), that is the best way I think to do it. I don't ever find a need to undo an email though. I believe it was only for like 20-30 seconds as well that it offered undo.

  | Gmail has it as an option

Supposedly Gmail added this as an option because their infrastructure was setup in such a way that the delay was already there. They just made hooks so that you could cancel it before it was sent.

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

#195

Post by terolacu » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:16 AM UTC

acabal wrote: post #59

I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal ( http://http://baikal-server.com/ ) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier…

Why replace Dropbox? I use it with encfs and works just fine. And it's free.

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

#196

Post by latj » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

mvgoogler wrote: post #183

latj wrote: post #90

I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.

> I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP He - and the rest of the leadership - have been asked about XMPP/CalDav/CarDav/RSS/Reader/ in person repeatedly. Every week there is a global meeting called TGIF. The format is almost always the same - some announcements, a presentation or two about things that various teams are working on - followed by Q&A. There is an internal Google Moderator i…

Thank you for the info. I am glad that you are passionate about your work and have faith in your company's executives. There are many groups of humans on earth who believe they hold special knowledge, are able to do things no one else can do, and are intent on making the world a better place. You can imagine from the outside that we might be skeptical. But I hope for the best.

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

#197

Post by micloud » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #188

acabal wrote: post #59

I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal ( http://http://baikal-server.com/ ) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier…

> Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now. Owncloud is buggy, Sparkleshare seems like a "when you've got a hammer, everything's a nail" kind of solution, and I haven't tried Seafile yet because the configuration is intimidating and I haven't really heard anything about it. git-annex-assistant provides a friendly Dropbox replacement, with a web-based GUI and a magically synced/shared folder. Supports Linux,…

Replacing dropbox is an easy task. Have u tried tonido (http://www.tonido.com)

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

#198

Post by lobster_johnson » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:25 AM UTC

eggbrain wrote: post #27

I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something? Also, the…

An additional data point to the other commenters:

I switched to Fastmail a few months ago, and I am extremely happy with it. IMAP is much faster (especially search). I love the Sieve support and the domain hosting, and beyond that, Fastmail has all the features I need.

The only downside so far is that the spam filtering is not quite as good as Gmail's. Even spam identical to stuff I have marked as spam keeps reappearing. But it's not bad enough to be annoying.

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

#199

Post by tteam » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:27 AM UTC

If you want to run your personal cloud please check us out at tonido.com. we have an awesome workspace that can take care of your tasks, calendar and contacts, dropbox like sync and really good mobile apps for ios and android. We don't have mail app though. But tonido is a platform and so something to consider in our roadmap.

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

#200

Post by pseut » Wed, May 22, 2013, 2:46 AM UTC

piyush_soni wrote: post #165

6d0debc071 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How exactly is Google evil? Well, there's an account out there with my real name tied to it that I never wanted to happen and to this day have no idea how it got there. I don't have a Google + account. Probably there was something that I clicked when I was tying my mobile phone to my Google account or something. I can't find any way to delete it either. My YouTube account keeps telling me I should use my real name…

And which one is going to be your next phone? An iPhone? or a Windows Phone? Just curious.

This isn't really a constructive observation. When MS was dominant, plenty of people still used Office. It didn't mean they didn't recognize that MS acted like a monopolist in a lot of ways. And it didn't mean that every aspect of MS was the same.