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

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

#201

Post by IgorPartola »

guelo wrote: post #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.

Not necessarily. If you are a US citizen and all your commu ovations are with US citizens, then mostly what you expect happens. But if you are a non-US citizen passing data through the US, different laws apply. AANAL, so I will not quote specifics, but I do believe that your advice might not be accurate and warrants more research.

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

#203

Post by fakeer »

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…

>>Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month.

No, it's $10/month minimum. Even if you are just ine user you have to buy 5 user plan. And even per user cost is $2 and not $1.

There's no such solution that replaces Gmail. You look those services - one here, one there, one compromise, one arrangement etc. I wish there was one.

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

#204

Post by pseut »

vertis wrote: post #13

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat. I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

I've been happy with newsblur.

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

#205

Post by wslh »

tomkarlo wrote: post #130
ineedtosleep wrote: post #81

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 make a recommendation? I want something in the middle of a cheap hosting like Dreamhost and Google/Yahoo/Rackspace.

It was difficult to find it. Dreamhost was great because I can create a lot of e-mail accounts for my company but in the last year there were a lot of outage that complicated my business. On the other spectrum Google/Yahoo/Rackspace could be great but they are expensive when there is a linear relationship between e-mail accounts and price, and we create new e-mail accounts all the time not only for employees but for testing specific pieces of software.

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

#206

Post by stanleydrew »

subway wrote: post #142

The biggest problem with moving back to XMPP now is that Google us cut us off from anyone now using Hangouts. Less than a year ago I drank the Google Kool-Aid and started using GApps instead of my personal server running Postfix/Dovecot/EJabberd. Since 87% of my XMPP contacts are on the GSuite, by going back I lose all IM connectivity with them. I almost feel like I'm being held hostage at this point. I've also inves…

I don't understand. I thought Google's Hangouts app didn't use XMPP but everyone with a Google account still has a gTalk account and you can still communicate with XMPP. Am I wrong? Would those chats not show up in gMail? And would they not possibly also show up in the Hangouts app?

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

#207

Post by fakeer »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #61
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…

I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. FastMail has archiving, great search, and a superior interface. The Gmail interface is pretty bad IMO. It's cluttered with a lot of stuff that have nothing to do with email like: 1) A black navigation bar across the top that doesn't help with email. 2) 300px wide box across the top right dedicated to a social network no one use…

Yes, I agree the new interface is a killer(as in bad).

But Gmail/Google's ease of use is its USP. You can have chat in browser, GTalk, Adium, Android , Pidgin and all then synced to mail box.

You can have calendar everywhere, taks..you name it.

So, until some business - like FastMail, PoBox, come up with such close integration I don't think there's much sense to move other than privacy and paranoia. Because once outside you end up setting up a workflow dependent on very different services and worry which one is gonna break when and then look for sth else.

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

#208

Post by rogerchucker »

pyre wrote: post #185
rogerchucker wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer these services free and have no problem being tracked for more personalized ads. I don't wanna pay with my wallet - I am OK with paying with my information.

Lots of people are OK with something until it bites them. Plenty of people are 'ok' with not backing up their information (e.g. family photos), until a storage failure takes it all away.

Yes it's called taking risk. I am aware of it - people like you seem to get offended that we actually take that risk in exchange of the convenience (free and more or less stable services).

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

#210

Post by gwern »

> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really.

If this is true, it makes fools out of everyone on HN who defended Google and poo-pooed the reaction to the XMPP spam move as being merely geek hysteria and paranoia and a massively overblown fit being thrown by prima donnas, saying that it was merely an anti-spam move and surely not a prelude to scrapping XMPP entirely.

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