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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

#91

Post by eridius »

zrail wrote: post #56
masnick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free trial. https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc... In terms of additional features: - Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language) - Way faster loading time, snapper interface - Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.…

Does Fastmail.FM have the equivalent of the "Archive" action in Gmail? Mail.app on OS X and on iPhone seem to play well with Archive and it's not something that I really want to give up.

Mail.app's "Archive" isn't the same as Gmail's. In Gmail, it just removes it from the current mailbox but leaves it in All Mail. Mail.app actually moves it to a specially-named IMAP folder.

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

#92

Post by 6d0debc071 »

thezilch wrote: post #20

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…

> Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome.

Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.

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

#93

Post by alfiejohn_ »

masnick wrote: post #33
eggbrain wrote: post #27

I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something? Also, the…

The article is incorrect: there is no free tier but there is a 2 month free trial. https://www.fastmail.fm/action/signup/?type=personal&acc... In terms of additional features: - Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language) - Way faster loading time, snapper interface - Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.…

Undo send?

In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.

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

#95

Post by arindone »

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 their chat client.

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

#96

Post by nsmartt »

imperialWicket wrote: post #60
tbirdz wrote: post #42

Also another suggestion, for a Google Analytics replacement you could try using Piwik, an open source web analytics platform. Of course I think you'll have to provide your own hosting for it.

Senseless self plug: I'm working on a saas piwik platform and looking for beta users. Email is in the profile.

Piwik seems to be exactly what I've been trying to find. I'm pretty excited at a glance.

I do have two complaints (without having really looked into it yet). The first is that you have issues disabled on GitHub, and the second is that it took some effort to locate the Github link.

I suggest linking to the source in a more prominent way— perhaps on the downloads page. If I'm going to be using this, I'm definitely going to be interested in contributing.

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

#98

Post by MatthewPhillips »

dragonwriter wrote: post #78
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. FastMail has archiving, great search, and a superior interface. The Gmail interface is pretty bad IMO. It's cluttered with a lot of stuff that have nothing to do with email like: 1) A black navigation bar across the top that doesn't help with email. 2) 300px wide box across the top right dedicated to a social network no one use…

> 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.

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

#99

Post by hrktb »

slg wrote: post #29
masnick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.

"and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?

Google apps with a custom domain is 52$ a year, so it's not cheaper.

Btw I don't use fastmail (yet) but after checking my town's tap water analysis, I switched to bottled water. This analogy made me think again about what I'd want as a mail provider.

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

#100

Post by mark_l_watson »

I went through this process a few months ago but I chose to still use some silos. I moved my blog (blog.markwatson.com) from Blogger to a cheap Wordpress host, maintaining article URLs. I asked people to start using my email at my own domain; I still forward it through GMail but I back it up frequently. I can flip my domain email to my VPS email hosting service very quickly. I could live with loosing my calendar so I left it on Google.

There are a lot of siloed web properties that I use without depending on them: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. I enjoy them but if they dissapear I can live with that.

Two we properties that I do depend on are Dropbox and Evernote, but I am a paying customer of each.

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