I am especially looking at alternative after Google started charging for the use of GMail for small businesses (in spite of their promise to support up to 50 users free). I am sure the alternative will not be as much polished, but I can roll my own postfix+roundcube and run it for 100+ users at < 100$ a year vs Google's $5000 a year! I don't need all the social shit Google throws in with an account, just mail and chat will do.
Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
221–230 of 324 posts
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one has enough interest to simply leave a pretty compelling ecosystem, so you have to couch it in a way to makes it sound like an ethical imperative. You know, for blog views.
That's probably partially true, but that's not really true on HN. Every thread on "Google shutters product X" has at least one person asking for alternatives to gmail et al. I almost wish we could pin a story like this just to cut some of those comments. There are days when there will be multiple stories on the front page at the same time with comments asking, "what are the alternatives to gmail?" with the inevitable…
I ran my own mail server for 5 years, and it wasn't that hard - but then I didn't do much with it. A system with 3 users and not corresponding with anyone outside a few systems it easy.
Running fastmail's servers is some orders of magnitude harder.
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Fastmail.FM have the equivalent of the "Archive" action in Gmail? Mail.app on OS X and on iPhone seem to play well with Archive and it's not something that I really want to give up.
No, and it's really annoying. I have an "Archive" mailbox in my Fastmail account, and Mail on both OS X and iOS recognize it as special (they give it the same "archive" icon as a GMail account), but don't override the 'delete' function. I haven't found a Radar for it, but I imagine that many of same have been closed as "works as designed".
Surely "Delete" is more "Move to Trash"?
In our web interface, there are two buttons - one moves to Trash, the other to the Archive folder.
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#224I'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…
The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free trial. https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc... In terms of additional features: - Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language) - Way faster loading time, snapper interface - Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.…
Under the hood it's all Cyrus IMAPd server with a ton of customisations (seriously, it's a lot - it's kind of getting out of hand - I need to tidy some up and push them back upstream)
The code we run in production is all available to anyone who wants to play with it, though the usual caveats about "it's not particularly well tested for any configurations other than exactly the one we run" apply.
https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/branches/fastmail
brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git log --oneline cmu/master..HEAD | wc -l 632
brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git diff cmu/master HEAD | diffstat | tail -n 1 149 files changed, 39060 insertions(+), 4314 deletions(-)
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#225There is always yandex, if you aren't afraid of a Russian company. https://mail.yandex.com You can also set up a personal domain there for free, if you can read/translate Russian instructions at http://pdd.yandex.ru Their web client for mail is localized into English. Pros: * Not google; yandex have rather good reputation here, and like google, they are tech company, with good engineering team * A nice web-interface…
I am from Yandex Mail team.
We've been having an influx of users for our mail for domains product because it is free compared to what Google provides now. We also have an importer from Gmail that works via IMAP.
BTW, there's an XMPP service too but I don't think we have English docs for that.
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#226I'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've been using Fastmail for about 2 months now. I much prefer it overall, but it is incorrect to say it has all the features of Gmail. It has just about enough of the right features that I want though, so no real issues there. The interface is superior in my opinion, of course the lack of adverts is wonderful, about the only thing which really gets me scratching my head is the way they handle multiple credentials, i…
I've created a ticket in our bug tracker to fix that ommission if it's not available, or document how if it is! I wrote the initial one-time support many years ago, but I haven't worked on the authentication subsystem for a while now. Thanks for the suggestion.
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
"and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?
It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model. I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ ), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.
We could certainly operate more cheaply if we didn't have every email replicated to another server (and a third in a second datacentre) as well as backed up daily to yet another machine with a different operating system and different security model.
You're right, doing it properly costs money, and I'm really glad there are enough people willing to pay for good email that FastMail has a viable business model. We've never made stupid-money like the tumblrs or instagrams of the world, but we're growing reliably and at a pace where our infrastructure can be improved gradually.
And we didn't sell for heaps of money either, but then we've been able to keep on operating much the same as before (apart from me getting a 2 year stint in Oslo to do skills and knowledge exchange with related teams inside Opera)
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 re…
Honestly, I use Google Apps for Domains myself, behind a domain I own (so I can leave down the road if I want.) I don't think folks moving off Gmail to leave Google want to do that but it's worked well for me. It's been long enough that I can't remember what I used before that for my email.
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#229ZohoMail seems to be a decent replacement for Gmail/Docs. I've set up one of my domains there now (free for up to 5 users). Looks pretty nice. Has email/docs/wiki/chat/calendar. It's very much designed to be a gmail alternative. I like.
Re: Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
For an OSS self-hosted e-mail appliance, I've been using iRedMail. It's built on dovecot/postfix with a decent management interface for free. I run it on Ramnode for 2 bucks a month with no other costs. Works fine.
128mb RAM is enough?
Theres a coupon so that its around ~$2.79 a month for the 256MB OpenVZ one. That should probably be enough.