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

kkinder.com

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

#311

Post by magicalist »

kenkinder wrote: post #279
magicalist wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. What's the software? Google CalDAV support isn't actually going away, it's just switching to a whitelist, so depending on your client, it should be fine. I don't know how that's going to work exactly (is it just an API key? how will that work with open source calendaring software like Lightning?), but if it's even moderately activel…

The software is KDE (Akonadi), Thunderbird (Lightning), and a few small utilities. It seems probable, though not guaranteed that Lightning will keep working. But I don't want to bed the farm on that, I doubt KDE will be supported, and I'd really rather just use a calendar that faithfully implements the standard instead of whitelisting the standard for certain clients. In terms of XMPP, I checked yesterday. After upda…

I have to disagree on the whitelisting as breaking an implementation of a standard; nothing in a standard like that requires it be universally accessible...you're already authenticating to get the CalDAV data in the first place, for instance. Whitelisting clients is not really different and is quite common, though I'm not sure if Google ever gave an explanation other than "our API is totally awesome", which is not much of one. I definitely do understand reluctance to depend on future support because of reasoning like that, however.

For XMPP, it's the Hangouts app that I was referring to as the "new chat system". Federation for regular google talk was turned back on[1], but you'll need a third party XMPP client now, I guess. Fortunately they're quite common.

[1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-reinstates-federate...

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

#312

Post by etruong42 »

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…

I'm fine with robots looking at my email too. I'm worried about the stories of people getting randomly locked out of their gmail though. My gmail powers nearly everything. It is responsible for pretty much all communications with all of my other accounts, and that includes accounts with automated payments. If I get locked out of my email, it would be a huge burden to regain my digital life. That said, I still use gmail, but that will be only temporary if these stories continue.

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

#313

Post by eridius »

leephillips wrote: post #278
eridius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who uses Google Apps for personal email, it sucks . I hate having a google apps managed account under my personal email address (my primary google account is a gmail address), I hate the limited filtering options that Gmail provides, I hate the faux-IMAP layer that Gmail has, I hate the fact that every time I switch networks with my laptop I get a "too many simultaneous connections" error from the…

Here's something else you can hate: http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/

Wow, that's terrible. Thanks for the link. It's one thing to see Google ditching open standards, but silently violating them instead of ditching them seems possibly even worse.

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

#314

Post by subsection1h »

driverdan wrote: post #297
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

    Using Google Apps (which is cheaper than FM)
I pay $15 per year for a FastMail family account,[1] which allows me to use my own domain. The account includes only 200MB of space, but that works for me because I delete email from the server so that the US government can't access it, which they can do without a warrant.[2]

[1] https://www.fastmail.fm/signup/family.html

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/when-will-our-email-be...

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

#315

Post by nileshtrivedi »

claudius wrote: post #295
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's what Google claims:

Chee Chew said that "we haven't seen significant uptake" in federation with Google Talk via server-to-server connections. The majority of the uptake Google did see was from organizations or individuals looking to bombard Google Talk users with chat spam, Chew said.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-...

This is the original email thread with more details when Google disabled XMPP federation for a while in GTalk: http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...

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

#316

Post by npsimons »

hobbes wrote: post #234
npsimons wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my 10+ years of running an SMTP server for SOHO use off of first business DSL (where Verizon refused to change rDNS), then cable modem, AOL was the sole server I encountered rejecting on mismatching rDNS alone.

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

#317

Post by stock_toaster »

thezach wrote: post #214
JoshTriplett wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now. Owncloud is buggy, Sparkleshare seems like a "when you've got a hammer, everything's a nail" kind of solution, and I haven't tried Seafile yet because the configuration is intimidating and I haven't really heard anything about it. git-annex-assistant provides a friendly Dropbox replacement, with a web-based GUI and a magically synced/shared folder. Supports Linux,…

Rackspace is one of two providers I will never use... the second is Linode

Why?

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

#318

Post by white_devil »

rogerchucker wrote: post #261
white_devil wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> You don't get to define what is private for me or what privacy means for me

No, but I'm sure most people see privacy in a roughly similar way. You want control over what people know about you and your life, and control over who know it. This control is being taken away from us at every turn, no matter what we do online. Most people have no idea it's happening, but most of those who do, would prefer it.

You may be perfectly fine with losing your privacy, regardless of how you might personally want to define it, but most people aren't.

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

#319

Post by tomkarlo »

leephillips wrote: post #277
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…

"someone can decide to start spoofing" What kind of spoofing are you talking about? Attempting to spoof the headers is common, but no blackhole list looks at that - they blacklist based on the IP of the machine the spam is coming from.

You may be right on this ... spoofing is still an aggravation because of the bouncing. Most of the time I haven't been able to find out exactly _why_ a particular provider has an issue (not blacklists), only ask for them to change their mind.

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

#320

Post by ansgri »

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…

As for dropbox, its only upside is great mobile apps, for other tasks SpiderOak works for me. Actually, I have both and have SpiderOak put everything I often need on mobile into Dropbox.
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