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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?

#71

Post by rdtsc »

mrschwabe wrote: post #57
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business model isn't there. I have yet to see a large group of consumers willing to pay for secure email and the only other alternative, advertising, leads to the exact same problem that you face with GMail.

+1 for willing to pay for secure email.

Ok that's 2 customers who are also HNers. I think you'd need to do better than that. We are hardly a representative of the general consumer.

There is another problem, US govt' need to get access all these messages. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail, people seemed to have signed up, but Hushmail was forced to provide plaintext messages to US govt upon request. So they sort of compromised their main selling point.

That is probably the largest problem, you'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either please your security conscious customers or please Uncle Sam. You can't please both.

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

#72

Post by klodolph »

mrschwabe wrote: post #57
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business model isn't there. I have yet to see a large group of consumers willing to pay for secure email and the only other alternative, advertising, leads to the exact same problem that you face with GMail.

+1 for willing to pay for secure email.

So... why don't you buy something like Rackspace email, which costs $2/mo?

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

#73

Post by tonyarkles »

joejohnson wrote: post #54
pavel_lishin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.

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?

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

#74

Post by blumentopf »

To add to this article: Why do people not use PGP or S/MIME?

I've submitted my resume to a couple of people who posted in the Who's Hiring thread and checked for each of them if they have a PGP key submitted to the usual key servers (e.g. pgp.mit.edu). None of them had done that. Beats me.

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

#75

Post by Quequau »

mrschwabe wrote: post #57
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business model isn't there. I have yet to see a large group of consumers willing to pay for secure email and the only other alternative, advertising, leads to the exact same problem that you face with GMail.

+1 for willing to pay for secure email.

I am just about to migrate from Gmail to NeoMailbox. I'm choosing the Swiss hosting option. I'd prefer something in Iceland but the closest service I could find was OrangeWebsite and for them mail was pretty much an afterthought.

https://neomailbox.com/services/secure-email http://www.orangewebsite.com/web_hosting.php

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

#76

Post by mike-cardwell »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #33
pavel_lishin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.

The business model isn't there. I have yet to see a large group of consumers willing to pay for secure email and the only other alternative, advertising, leads to the exact same problem that you face with GMail.

Hushmail would disagree - https://www.hushmail.com/

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

#77

Post by Zirro »

rdtsc wrote: post #71
mrschwabe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 for willing to pay for secure email.

Ok that's 2 customers who are also HNers. I think you'd need to do better than that. We are hardly a representative of the general consumer. There is another problem, US govt' need to get access all these messages. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hushmail , people seemed to have signed up, but Hushmail was forced to provide plaintext messages to US govt upon request. So they sort of compromised their main se…

"There is another problem, US govt' need to get access all these messages."

You're assuming the service has to be located within the US. Why?

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

#78

Post by evilduck »

nirvdrum wrote: post #45
emu wrote: post #6

This article is link-bait, but I'll bite. Simply put, Gmail provides a compelling user experience: * fast and accurate search. This is key, and I don't know of a single desktop email client that even comes close to providing a decent search feature. Decent here means "answer full-text queries accurately within a second or so". I didn't realize how useful this was until switching to Gmail; now I have it, I can't switc…

My experience is the polar opposite. I have to rely on a native client to search because GMail search is so bad. It hasn't been that fast for a while -- waiting 30+s for a search is pretty routine nowadays. But worse, it's never really handled stemming well -- it has to be an exact word match, even for singular vs plural. And the number of false positives I get usually doesn't even make it worthwhile. I had resorted…

30s searches....I've gotta ask, how many gigabytes of email do you have? I've got about 3 and mine come back in less than a second.

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

#79

Post by UK-Al05 »

Because a hackers time is valuable, and google has solved my email requirements. I dont want to set up and maintain a email server. It can be annoying as hell I've done it before. It's 'fiddly'. So many config files(If you set it up properly so it uses encryption) and a lot of email services will block you if your not on a whitelist or sometimes blacklist you for silly reasons. I used to run my businesses email on ec2, you will be going through blacklists and whitelists for a long long time.

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

#80

Post by acavailhez »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #76
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The business model isn't there. I have yet to see a large group of consumers willing to pay for secure email and the only other alternative, advertising, leads to the exact same problem that you face with GMail.

Hushmail would disagree - https://www.hushmail.com/

Nice to know, thanks for the tip

Did you try it and can compare it to gmail?

Especially on:

- linking other accounts (POP and IMAPS)

- spam detection

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