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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?

#251

Post by gst »

the-come-ons wrote: post #212

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!…

Sending mailservers typically try to redeliver mails for several days if something goes wrong (and if your mailserver does not respond with a permanent error).

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

#252

Post by tluyben2 »

Unfortunately I cannot live without the Gmail web client. There is no comparison (even with the, worse for me, new layout). It's fast everywhere, even via my bad phone internet connection, it indicates properly when it can and cannot send stuff etc. It's just better than anything I know and have.

I have tried to use other things, but for my, quite insanely big mailbox, nothing else works. Not only did I import into Gmail all my mail I received since the late 80s, I also get immense amounts of email through the system as I use mail for creating alerts and emergency lists on servers I monitor and such. Wether or not this is proper use of mail (I think it is; I am very productive with ONLY the mail client open; everything I need comes to me in there, neatly filtered, including news, server health, error logs, bug tracking etc; everything has it's own email address I can mail and receive mail from), it works very well, but it's not supported by normal clients; Mail.app just stands there getting mail with high CPU load and Thunderbird is unusable as in stuck all the time (I haven't tried that for a while, but it used to be anyway). Gmail webclient is just nice and fast since the last infrastructure update Google did (the engineers mailed me nicely that I wouldn't be able to use my mail for about 1-2 days while migrating and this proved to be true).

I know what I need instead of mail (but including mail functionality); I just don't think it has been built yet :) Or has it?

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

#253

Post by joejohnson »

tonyarkles wrote: post #73
joejohnson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would gladly switch to a different webmail provider (and pay a decent amount for this service) if they could replicate all of the benefits of gmail.

As a curiosity, what is "a decent amount"? $5/mo? $10/mo? More?

I would probably pay $200-$300/year, so maybe $15-25/month if this hypothetical service could completely match gmail in features.

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

#254

Post by tennineten »

bwarp wrote: post #222
tennineten wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My contacts list is a text file called contacts.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped. My calendar is a text file called cal.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped." I really like the sound of that. Can you elaborate a bit on the format, or provide a couple of sample lines from each?

Yes - it's very simple: contacts.txt - in order of surname, firstname Surname, FirstName, Primary telephone number with code, Email address so: Joe, Bloggs, 02033345545, joe@bloggs.com I only keep a single number for people, but you could extend it to two numbers if you want. cal.txt - latest dates at top of file: 2012/02/02 16:00+ What to do # time specific event 2012/03/03 --:-- Someone's birthday # all day event W…

Thanks for the information. Do you enter birthdays every year? Or just use sed or something to update the year? If you delete everything after the date, I guess you never need to refer to old appointments?

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

#255

Post by lukev »

nupark2 wrote: post #193
lukev wrote: post #17

1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point. 2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is. 3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't…

> 1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point. That's what IMAP is for. If these are computers you don't directly control, then I'd say any downsides of using gmail pale in comparison to the security implications inherent in your usage model. [edit] Can't say I understand the negative downvotes.…

Secure webmail access over HTTPS is in theory just as strong as IMAP access can be made to be.

Of course, by using untrusted hardware you are exposing yourself to various circumventions of the security protocols, but that's just as true of IMAP as it is of HTTPS.

In fact, IMAP is probably slightly worse since it does actually download messages to the local machine by default, where they must be explicitly cleaned up.

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

#256

Post by rgrieselhuber »

Sapient wrote: post #219
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which takes me back to my original point. :-)

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

#257

Post by smd80 »

fluidcruft wrote: post #209
pyre wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when Google suspends your account and you loose all your email, docs, etc? Your online identity (you no longer have your main email address) gone?

Own your MX record and use forwarding and/or Google Apps for Your Domain?

That's what I do, and it gives you a portable email address, but doesn't address the other concerns. Ultimately, email is a communication medium, not a filesystem. Using IMAP folders for long-term storage is tempting, but it's off-label.

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

#258

Post by apetresc »

alextingle wrote: post #157
hammock wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why pay when you can get it from Gmail? :)

Aren't you a little bit uncomfortable giving Google all that data? Do you keep a back-up??

Not even a little bit.

Total number of times Google has lost my data: 0

Total number of times I have accidentally lost my own data: Way more than 0

Total number of times Google has in any way caused me harm by having "access" to my e-mails: 0

Total number of times I've been glad Google used intelligence gathered from my e-mails: Many (pre-populating Google+ circles, training a great spam filter, Priority Inbox, great search, decently appropriate and well-targeted ads)

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

#259

Post by xiaomai »

gnosis wrote: post #210
zobzu wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually most SMTP now talk SSL to each others, so while the hops (generally, just 2: sender and receiver) could also be compromised, the attack surface is smaller than one would think.

"most SMTP now talk SSL to each others" Not to dispute your claim, but how do you know this? Is there some sort of global, internet-wide survey of SMTP servers somewhere that supports what you say?

It's easy to tell which mail servers are using SSL by looking at your mail server logs. He probably only cares that most of the mail servers talking to him use SSL (which is also true for every mail server I have administered).

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

#260

Post by dshep »

Drbble wrote: post #115
dshep wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.

Gmail POP does not deleted mail as you read it. I have a POP client on my Mac that output pulls Gmail as a backup of my webmail. Nothing gets deleted.

Ok you're right about it not deleting by default. But there is an option to delete mail after its been accessed with POP. And in any case Gmail hides the message after you've read it, but you could still have an error writing the message to disk and thus miss backing that message up.
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