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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

#261

Post by rogerchucker »

white_devil wrote: post #250
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.

> I am OK with paying with my information. To be more accurate, you're paying with your privacy . Of course, "information" does sound more pleasant.

That's where you (and by some extension most computer science people) are completely off-base. You don't get to define what is private for me or what privacy means for me. It is a social construct. I have a select set of information that I do not want in the hands of a select group of people - THAT constitutes MY privacy.

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

#262

Post by PaulFreund »

aw3c2 wrote: post #256
PaulFreund wrote: post #239

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/) * Se…

Jappix looks really nice. Is there a lightweight Android client that polls every few minutes for new messages? I would need to be notified about new messages when the phone is inactive (screen off). A browser is too big for that.

There are many ways to accomplish that. As Jappix requires an XMPP account you can also use a native android client like Xabber (http://www.xabber.com/).

For my part I wrote a node.js server application that acts as a notification central: myhub (https://github.com/PaulFreund/myhub).

It captures events from different sources (xmpp, irc, mail, rss) and makes them accessible via Email summarys, RSS feeds or a webinterface which is only implemented for a Kindle interface right now.

That way I get a mail every five minutes if I got messages and my phone will notify me about that.

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

#263

Post by gphilip »

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.

Looks like it is $2/inbox/month now: http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

arindone wrote: post #95

I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat. Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on…

[deleted]

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

#265

Post by fanda »

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.

Take a look at RMails: https://github.com/fanda/rmails

It is Ruby on Rails application with Ruby scripts to autamate installation and configuration of E-mail server. Post-install configuration is done througth web application.

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

#266

Post by fanda »

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…

Take a look at RMails: https://github.com/fanda/rmails

It is Ruby on Rails application with Ruby scripts to autamate installation and configuration of E-mail server. Post-install configuration is done throught web application.

Still in development but already usable. I opensourced it and I hope that somebody could contribute.

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

#267

Post by da_n »

brongondwana wrote: post #226
da_n wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's great to hear, thank you!

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

#268

Post by jfb »

brongondwana wrote: post #223
jfb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't use webmail; I was referring to the way that iOS recoginizes GMail's "All Mail" and overrides the delete function.

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

#269

Post by mh- »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #80

It would be really great if somebody wrapped up all the open source material available and made an image available to AWS and other VPS users. Use the image, have email, an XMPP server, etc -- out of the box. On your own dime. I'd pay for it.

there are at least a couple companies doing variations on this, if you look around on https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace you can browse through some.

..

TurnKey Linux: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/tour/cloud/ | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/?id=a05a35...

BitNami: http://bitnami.com/stacks | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/?id=dbe648...

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

#270

Post by nkorth »

BoyWizard wrote: post #112
jph wrote: post #6

Zoho provides good email, calendar, and many of additional apps for business such as CRM, invoices, etc. My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.

I used Zoho for a while in the place of Google Apps, and migrated back to Google Apps after about 9 months as I absolutely hated Zoho Mail. Webmail interface was awful, and it didn't play nicely with the POP client on Android.

Yeah, I also noticed that POP doesn't work with Zoho on my Nexus. I switched to IMAP and it works fine.
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