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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

#231

Post by amirmc »

rdl wrote: post #16

I'd never heard of Lavabit before; it looks like they're still operational, although their website hasn't been updated much since around 2007. Looks interesting. I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.

Can you break down what "high-quality" means for you? eg Web UI, specific features, hosted/self-hosted etc. Are you rolling your own at the moment or on gApps?

I've started looking into this with a view of building something so understanding what's important to folks is v useful.

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

#232

Post by malnourish »

ekianjo wrote: post #190
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…

For folder synchronization Bittorrent Sync is a pretty good alternative to Dropbox. Of course, you don't get the web interface and all, but you get the same functionality for folders, for free, with your own server.

This is what I was thinking. I am strongly considering setting this up. I don't have a use for the web interface.

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

#233

Post by naa42 »

majelix wrote: post #175
frio wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the work for the "hacker alternative" is already done, in the form of [iRedmail]. [iRedMail]: http://www.iredmail.org/

As others have mentioned, it's not really the technical aspects of SMTP that make hosting your own email difficult. It's the entire deliverability ecosystem that's developed (ostensibly to protect from spam), such as most residential providers blocking outgoing port 25, or most mailservers filtering incoming mail from dynamic IPs.

I used iRedMail to setup department mail server and it just worked. I had no problems with configuration: IMAP, SSL, SMTP - everything works out of the box. Spam protection is also adequate, at least for a relatively low-volume usage.

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

#234

Post by hobbes »

npsimons wrote: post #156
tomkarlo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was a little unclear - the setup is easy, it's the maintenance that's annoying. (I've run mail servers in one way or another for ~15 years. I use Google Apps for my personal email now but still maintain some servers that do about 10,000 emails a day.) Even if you have DKM/SPF setup, someone can decide to start spoofing email from your domain to send spam, especially if your domain has been around a while and…

AOL, as far as I'm concerned, is a lost cause. They will block on rDNS alone , and no amount of calling or emailing will convince them otherwise. Recently, Verizon has gotten pissy about domain names matching the sending server, without even checking SPF.

Since rDNS is one of the simplest things to fix, and absent or inconsistent rDNS one of the most obvious signs of spam, I'm with AOL on that one.

If fact, every email server setup I've seen explicitly rejects emails simply due to absent or inconsistent rDNS records.

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

#235

Post by imonkey »

I don't like that Google killing some great technologies, like Reader or push-email for iPhone (especially last one). I was Gmail user for a long time, but switch on iCloud recently, because i'm looking something fresh and easy-to-use and still want to have push in my iPhone.

iCloud mail interface not just "pretty", but simpler and especially settings. So, after iCloud Gmail looks very cheap, if you don't use iCloud, you should to try.

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

#236

Post by antihero »

thezilch wrote: post #65
indubitably wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's charitable but Google really has been behaving as an evil actor lately. Just because they have essentially unlimited resources doesn't mean that they should be immune to critique.

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…

Honestly my greatest fear is that my account would be shut down for some obscure infraction and their support would be so terrible I'd never get it back. What would be the recourse then? Storming into their offices and demanding an answer?

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

#237

Post by Intermernet »

pyre wrote: post #194
username111 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any chance you could hunt down a reference for this? I regularly test email servers from my Gmail account (amongst others) and I've found that their outgoing messages hit my mail servers almost instantly.

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

#238

Post by Spearchucker »

thezilch wrote: post #154
Spearchucker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS sucked This is not going to be a popular view, but here goes anyway... Depends. I've been using Outlook Web Access since it was first released. Granted, you need Exchange, but these days Outlook.com provides similar functionality (or so I'm told - I use Exchange Online now). That said, the most useful calendar I've found is Family Room on Windows Phone. I share it with my girlfriend, who has an iPhone, and it work…

Buy and run a server, Windows Server, Exchange, IIS, in 2003? Did you just tell me to go fuck myself? [0] I think MS has made up a lot of ground and is comparable to Google, for online services, in a lot of ways, but they're not better and would probably be on the same end of the stick, if they commanded the same lead Google does for these services. [0] http://browsertoolkit.com/fault-tolerance.png

I had MSDN and TechNet subscriptions, and because I was doing a lot of work from home had an old desktop set up as a server anyway, so the cost was low. DynDNS made it easy to host out of my house.

Microsoft's online services are better than Google's. I could list a million and one reasons ranging from being ad-free, document fidelity in Office and the fact that I can't sort my Gmail inbox by sender. And while it has its faults, I have not found a better email client (UX and functional breadth) than Outlook. Here.com is better than Google Maps (true offline being a big deal for me), and Here.com's Transit app is the best public transport app I've found[1]. I don't know how SkyDrive stacks up against competitors, because SkyDrive is good enough for me.

Why exactly do you think Google is better?

[1] It amused me to see Google's transit implementation in Google Maps - it's a horizontal version of the vertically oriented Windows Phone app from Nokia, which's excellent and has been around for ages.

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

#239

Post by PaulFreund »

I left Google in favour of self hosted applications:

    * Horde Webmail (http://www.horde.org/) which brings
        * Webmail, 
        * Calendar, 
        * Addressbook
        * Tasks
        * Notes 
        * Sync via Exchange ActiveSync or SyncML
          (most mobiles incl. iOS and Android support it)
    * XMPP server (http://prosody.im/) 
    * Multi IM transports (http://spectrum.im)
    * XMPP webclient, Jappix (http://jappix.org/)
    * Owncloud for files (http://owncloud.org/)
    * SelfOSS for RSS (http://selfoss.aditu.de/)
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