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Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

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Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#211

Post by inopinatus »

Well, to answer the question head-on. I am a self-respecting hacker and I do run my own private mail server for my personal mail.

But I use Gmail for what I think of as "impersonal" mail. This includes mailing lists such as those operated by the OP, as well as general notifications from other sites and services. I gain free storage and bulk management tools for a body of data I perceive of low value and sensitivity.

Moreover, Gmail's spam filters are better than mine (spamassassin). That has particular utility for these low-value accounts that are more likely to have the associated email address disclosed beyond my control.

For things I care more for; personal communications and so forth, well, they still land on the private host.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#212

Post by the-come-ons »

I host my own mail server on a VPS. I made a clear cut from the big G about a year ago. I switched to duckduckgo.com as my main search engine, installed noscript, blocking all analytics requests, and set up my own mail server on Arch Linux using dovecot, postfix, and spam assassin. This setup has been wonderful and I feel proud to use it since I was once afraid of various issues which, in reality, have been minimal! I can access my mail from any computer or mobile device that allows SSH or has an IMAP mail client.

Once after a system upgrade mail was no longer being delivered to my inbox. I noticed after a day and thought it was strange. I forgot to reboot the mail server software after upgrading. Soon after my mail server rebooted I had many emails delivered from when my mail server was down. This excited and surprised me. I thought I would never get those emails but I assume the mail clients just held on to them and tried sending again intermittently.

Any self-respecting hacker should at least try to setup a mail server on a virtual machine. The hacker will find it interesting and useful. It really only takes a couple hours and it is fun! For those hackers who are brave enough, here is the guide that I used:

http://www.gelens.org/archlinux-mailserver/

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#214

Post by a3_nm »

jff wrote: post #162
a3_nm wrote: post #152

Setting the privacy and security issues aside, I wonder why do so many self-respecting hackers use the Gmail web interface (instead of, say, fetching their mail via IMAP and use another client). Dedicated mail clients like mutt can be much more efficient (keyboard-driven) and are a lot more customisable (run macros, pipe mail through external commands, etc.). I wonder why so many hackers aren't put off by Google's "o…

Gmail's keyboard shortcuts are really pretty nice. hjkl to move around, enter to view a message, y to archive, m to mute, r to reply. That's a pretty damn good start. off-topic, it's a little weird how it's expected that "true hackers" must become ill at the very sight of a mouse.

Yes, I know that Gmail has some keyboard shortcuts. I'm also aware that you can even customize them to some extent, but the flexibility has nothing to do with mutt's.

To give a concrete example, I am moderating some institution's mailing lists through a pretty exotic system, and I rely heavily on my mutt configuration to accept/reject mail and prepare rejection mail. In one keystroke, for instance, I prepare a reply to a certain MIME part of an incoming email notification and pipe it through a script to add boilerplate text and edit the message headers automatically. I wonder why so many hackers prefer Gmail's convenience to this sort of flexibility.

As for the mouse, like the keyboard, it is a tool which is appropriate for certain tasks and less appropriate for others. I think the keyboard is more appropriate to deal with email.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#215

Post by a3_nm »

gnosis wrote: post #200
antics wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, no. The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system. One example is when the Hotmail team first enabled keyword filtering. When the spammers found out experimentally, they began injecting HTML comment tags into high-weighted words like "free", breaking the model. When the Hotmail team took steps to comb…

"The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system." Finding holes on sites like gmail and hotmail is actually much easier than on private sites, because the spammers no doubt have accounts on gmail and hotmail and can test what gets through and what fails and tweak their algorithms until their spam gets through. Spamm…

> So in this respect private servers have an advantage over gmail and hotmail.

Besides, spammers care more about being able to circumvent Gmail's spam filtering than they care about circumventing your own system.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#217

Post by beza1e1 »

blumentopf wrote: post #74

To add to this article: Why do people not use PGP or S/MIME? I've submitted my resume to a couple of people who posted in the Who's Hiring thread and checked for each of them if they have a PGP key submitted to the usual key servers (e.g. pgp.mit.edu). None of them had done that. Beats me.

When I did use PGP and just signed my mail, people regularly asked about my garbled message (pgp/inline) or broken attachments (pgp/mime). So, fix everybodys email client first, please.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#219

Post by Sapient »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #202
ohgodthecat wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the minimum cost is $10/mo for Rackspace email. I personally have switched between payed google apps for domains and fastmail (those are both $50/yr and under).

This is why I would never start a business in this space. You're saying $10/month is too much to protect the privacy of your email.

I think for most people, $10 IS too much. Although we all talk tough about privacy, most people (even here) don't have much to hide from anyone, and when the difference between definitely secure, and probably secure (in terms of privacy and ownership of data) is $10, it suddenly feels a lot more expensive.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#220

Post by bwarp »

tennineten wrote: post #181
bwarp wrote: post #83

I took "the pragmatic UNIX way" about 15 years ago with email. It works. I've not had to change it and don't feel compelled to bother changing it. I host my own mail server. It's not hard regardless of the platform you use. I use debian+postfix+mutt as it pretty much works out of the box. I've changed perhaps two lines of postfix configuration (to set up maildir) and added a couple of lines to my muttrc to pick up ma…

"Self respecting hackers don't use Gmail and Co." Are you not self-respecting? Just a few days ago, you said: "I've got offline gmail if i want." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533625

If I want i.e. I can download offline gmail if I want to. If you see my follow up reply, I did trial Google Apps but it didn't cut it. Part of that trial was to use the MIDP version of Google Mail. I don't use it now but it's there if I wanted to.

It would be unfair of me to blindly criticise Google Mail without trialling it, which I did.

Hope this clears things up.

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