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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

#291

Post by rdl »

amirmc wrote: post #231
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.

I roll my own now.

What I want: 0) User selectable/delegable domains (it's ok IMO to use yahoo/gmail/aol/etc. today, if you know and accept the limitations. It's moronic or at best short-sighted to depend on an @yahoo.com, @gmail.com or @aol.com address, though.) 1) IMAP/activesync (push; imap-idle is nice but not sufficient) 2) Good anti-spam 3) Sane and/or configurable account-recovery procedures. Since email is essentially the master-key to your other accounts which use email-from auth for password recovery, it's a big target. This is a hard technical and policy problem. I'd like it to be something users can configure at account creation time in various ways, ranging from SMS/call from to "can't recover password". A good medium might be "takes 3-7 days to recover password with notification given in advance to all other means of contact, must use postal mail to confirm" or something like that.

It would also be nice to have: 1) Great search 2) Ideally, a webmail client. Ideally, as nice a webmail client as possible 3) Encryption wherever possible. The low hanging fruit is start-tls for SMTP and IMAP, and https for the webmail. Storage encryption would be nice; could be "encrypt mail to a public key as it arrives". 4) Support of S/MIME (and PGP, ideally) keys would be really nice; do some signature checking on the server side in the webmail ui? Run a keyserver? Issue s/mime identities to people who use accounts on your domain? Partner with a CA? 5) Configurable retention policies 6) Group/team/business features (address books) 7) Maybe calendaring 8) Maybe voice/sms too

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

#292

Post by bad_user »

mseebach wrote: post #283
bad_user wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By principle I prefer software that's free as in freedom of speech and services that are managed by non-profits. However, you're not talking about "free as in freedom of speech", but rather about being a cheap bastard. Nothing wrong with that, I am and will always be a cheap bastard myself. BUT sometimes being cheap is different from being frugal and can have a negative effect on your bottom line. My Dropbox subscrip…

Huh? Google is happy to give me a very good free e-mail account if I let them process my e-mail and serve me ads. I'm perfectly fine with that, so I'm taking the deal. Similar deals exist for calendar and talk (for which, admittedly, I have limited use for - my work Outlook calendar is canon and I have maybe two persons I IM with on Google Talk). How does that make me a 'cheap bastard'? In fact, I've been looking aro…

As I said in another comment I'm also a free Google Apps user and have made no attempt or thought about escaping Google's "silo".

Please read my reply in the context it was given. Using Google's services when they are the best makes sense. Using Ad-sponsored services, especially in cases where something valuable like access to your data is involved, when better alternatives exist for the price of coffee, well that does not make sense.

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

#293

Post by bad_user »

amirmc wrote: post #284
jpadkins wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is inherently better about non-profit running a service? Functionally, the only difference is they can't pay dividends to shareholders. Non-profit's can (and do!) turn profits into executives bonus's or perks, or bloated organizations, etc. Why do you feel a non-profit would run a service better?

Non-profits may not run a service better but it does mean they can't be bought (or it's just more complicated to do so). It can be a clear way to signal the intent behind the organisation and restrict what can be done by the company. In the UK, it's easy to set up a non-profit as a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shares. Such companies can still make profits, but they can't necessarily be distributed to Di…

You also forgot one thing - non-profits also do not have the contractual obligation to have profits or growth, like public companies do. Big difference.

Of course, non-profits are not created equal. There's IKEA and then there's Mozilla or EFF.

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

#294

Post by jrabone »

nnutter wrote: post #191
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…

One issue with self-hosted is that your ISP may block SMTP or worse they add their customer IP blocks to spam blacklists.

I think ISPs should firewall SMTP by default, and if they don't provide you with static IP they absolutely should add their dynamic IP blocks to the DUL / PBL etc. Almost all of the spam rejects from my mail server are from dynamic IPs. Them's the breaks. FWIW my ISP were perfectly happy to relax the firewall rules when I asked.

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

#295

Post by claudius »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #288
claudius wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what’s the point of XMPP if you drop federation?

Well, you can continue using third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin. Federation has the inherent problem of spamming. I think whitelisting domains could have been a way out.

I’ve been using XMPP for quite a while, first on jabber.ccc.de, then on my own server (and on a Google account in parallel), but have so far not received a single spam message.

Is XMPP spamming really a thing?

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

#296

Post by lucian1900 »

rogerchucker wrote: post #287
lucian1900 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But by volunteering all the information you are privy to, you are almost certainly violating the idea of privacy of one of the people you know.

That's not how it works. My privacy perception has nothing to do with another person's trust in me. And no I did not say I am volunteering ALL the information I am privy to - I did say that I have my boundaries. How I define those boundaries will obviously take into consideration what I think is a mutually understood contract between me and another person. But those boundaries vary from person to person and so it is…

You are implicitly volunteering most of the information you are privy to by using such services, in particular Facebook.

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

#297

Post by driverdan »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #98
dragonwriter wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. I'm 100% certain Google lets you get Gmail for your domain. You have to pay for it (but you have to pay for FastMail), and you get other services alongside Gmail, but it certainly exists .

Looks like you have to get a business account. Which is reasonably priced. So yeah, I was wrong, it's still possible to get it. Kind of a hack, but you can get it.

Using Google Apps (which is cheaper than FM) is not a hack, it's designed to be used with your own domain.

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

#299

Post by gwern »

aniket_ray wrote: post #213
gwern wrote: post #210

> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really. If this is true, it makes fools out of everyone on HN who defended Google and poo-pooed the reaction to the XMPP spam move as being merely geek hyst…

Umm ... XMPP is not being dropped only support for XMPP federation.

The quote is 'XMPP entirely'; what do you base your claim on?

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

#300

Post by amirmc »

bad_user wrote: post #293
amirmc wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-profits may not run a service better but it does mean they can't be bought (or it's just more complicated to do so). It can be a clear way to signal the intent behind the organisation and restrict what can be done by the company. In the UK, it's easy to set up a non-profit as a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shares. Such companies can still make profits, but they can't necessarily be distributed to Di…

You also forgot one thing - non-profits also do not have the contractual obligation to have profits or growth, like public companies do. Big difference. Of course, non-profits are not created equal. There's IKEA and then there's Mozilla or EFF.

Ah, yes of course. That would actually be the biggest difference (and I completely forgot it). In my example, there are no shareholders so the obligation to maximise value for them doesn't exist.

The IKEA example is interesting as I think the aim of the convoluted legal structures (inc a non-profit somewhere) was to allow one person to have almost total control over the company.

Edit: For anyone interested in the IKEA web of companies, you read the following article: http://www.economist.com/node/6919139?story_id=6919139

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