I think I might switch over my email accounts, but there is also an issue of how long will these services be around for.
I had an Altavista account until they closed their email service. So, I need a reliable provider that wont be swallowed up by a bigger company and change my email address.
I'm not sure about the "more professional" comment - gordon@shephard.org looks fine to my eyes. Regardless, lots more useful shorter domains than that are available - for example, mohene.{com,net,org} all appear to be available.
The username part matters a lot more than the domain. ladykilla69@gmail.com isn't a particularly professional email, even if it does have a well known domain.
It obviously boils down to "good enough" and "free enough" but I've planned on moving back to Postfix/Dovecot at home for the reasons outlined, just a time thing.
I've been thinking of doing this myself as I've heard great things about Dovecot. An ideal setup for me would be a VM hosted somewhere in the cloud (presumably my hosted VM can't be warrently searched in the same way as email), running a barebones Arch+Postfix/Dovecot. The only inhibitors are cost of hosting and time of setup, if anyone has information on either good hosting solutions or setup information I think it would be a useful addition to this thread.
Running out of the home may be seem a bit asinine but the home is still somewhat sacred with respect to search warrants in the US and moving email around is insanely fast if you work out of the home.
Of course you'll likely need a business class connection with static IP and configurable rDNS and no port 25 block so not everyone will be lucky enough to be able to do it. But something like a plug computer will keep the cost pretty reasonable if you don't currently have a home server and for me it's cheaper than a VPS + consumer cable connection.
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 switch back. I don't even bother organizing my email more than a minimal amount any more, I just search for things when I need them.
* remote access is also key. I regularly access the internet from at least 4 different devices, on at least 3 different operating systems. Sometimes I do so while traveling. Gmail makes this convenient --- all I need is a web browser. IMAP need not apply --- I found IMAP appallingly slow last time I tried it.
I use Rackspace Email, over IMAP on the desktop, IMAP on my phone, and webmail when on someone else's computer. It's never slow in any way. When I sign up for things, I hear the ding of the confirmation e-mail within 2-3 seconds of submitting the form -- fast as push mail.
You should probably check out who Harald Welte is and what he does before making such accusations. I don't agree with him here, but "link bait" this is not.
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 to deleting mail rather than archiving it, but that only helped marginally.
Having said that, I rely on too many marketplace apps now to make switching a reasonable alternative. So, I make do with native clients.
One account has 2.5 GB, another has 700 MB. I'm on a lot of mailing lists and get a lot of transactional email. I just timed switching a label and that took 4s on the smaller account. This is in Chrome with SPDY enabled, too, so I doubt it's client transport.
I should probably note that it tends to be variable with the time of day. That's not unexpected, but still kinda sucks.
Maybe it's number of messages vs size of store. Or perhaps because a large percentage are similar in structure (google groups, monit alerts, etc.), they cause indexing to perform poorly. Dunno. But I wish I had < 1s searches.
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups?
Because we're lazy.
you give away control over your personal data
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.
Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too.
You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
Something like that happened to me - my account (everything, not only Gmail) was suddenly inaccessible. However, a quick email to support and within 12 hours they sent me a link where I entered three emails I wrote to recently... that's it, password reset, account reactivated... I think they're getting better at handling these situations.
Agreed. Another compelling reason is data deletion -- accidental or malicious. While catastrophic loss due to hardware seems to have declined over the past few years, malicious deletion has gone up markedly.
I've pimped them out before, but this is why I set up backupify (handle more than just gmail, since your Google password is for all your Google accounts) and periodically export my data. I just wish they did more, like backup my Dropbox and Atlassian accounts.
Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.
Ok you're right about it not deleting by default. But there is an option to delete mail after its been accessed with POP. And in any case Gmail hides the message after you've read it, but you could still have an error writing the message to disk and thus miss backing that message up.
gmail's POP server doesn't delete mail. What it does do is disappear them from the POP listing (ignoring any client "leave messages on server" config), although even this is resettable through the web interface.
Actually do. Since he's using getmail, its making a copy to his local system. It just happens to be able to do that over IMAP. You are better off doing this than doing the same with POP because Gmail's POP deletes mails as you read them, which is non-standard. You could lose emails if there are network, disk, or other errors.
IMAP is just a protocol. You're talking about syncing over IMAP. You can just fetch over IMAP too.
Also, POP3 is not folder-aware. You can only access your inbox over POP3. If you want to backup anything (e.g. drafts, sent mail, etc), then you need more than POP3.
If there isn't much that you are worried about losing, you can just save a local copy from your browser. I only do that with a few per month, but it works fine with no extra fiddling.
I still believe the chance of Google losing or preventing access to my data is much lower than the chance of me accidentally screwing up my own server and finding out my backups don't work. It's a huge amount of work to get anywhere close to the reliability of GMail. You have to maintain the server, secure it, test backups, verify backups and deal with every security or maintenance issue that comes up.
It's a trade-off, and one I've come down on the side of GMail for.
As long as it's in Google's interest to provide such an outstanding service to their users, yes, that particular billion-dollar Top Coder champion-filled company will do a better job of managing a mail server than you and I combined.
> You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
"more than a few" is probably still in the ten-thousandths of percentage points if that. Some can't, but I can live with those odds.
And as Gmail gets more users, I'm guessing the odds get even better, particularly with so many of these new users being tied to Android. Google has a lot tied up with making sure things don't go south.
I wouldn't even call it lazy, I call it efficient. Google makes email management easy so I can focus on something more interesting and hopefully more beneficial to my peers.
I don't doubt you; this may eventually happen, but for the meantime, I'm trusting them (over my ISP, anyway), with my email and backing up/saving the stuff that warrants it.
> There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too.
Right, I'd personally be more concerned about random mailing list administrators "looking through their logs" and drawing conclusions about me than by Google scanning my email for the purpose of targeting better ads to me... hmm...
Honestly at the end of the day it comes down to spam control for me. I'm done trying to configure adaptive spam filters or finding the latest spam list to scan against. Its not worth my time to deal with that anymore.
Lot's of space
Great spam filter that catches 100,04% of spam ( 0.04% non-spam)
Easy and fast search options
Integration with calander, docs
View and save PDF, DOC, XLS, from within browser
Great interface
Good apps for Iphone, Android, Ipad
Some nice integration options with Chrome browser
Sign in at lost of places with your gmail account (stack overflow much?)
I don't have to spell out the provider g.m.a.i.l. when I say my address to somebody.
Because email sucks. Hosting email sucks. Email clients suck. (Bonus: email spam sucks). On Gmail it sucks a bit less.
I'm sorry for myself in the first place, but until I can code my dream of an email killer (or email client fwiw) that does not suck, avoid making my eyes bleed (and make it a success...) I can't avoid gmail.
- share the administrative and financial effort with friends
- use hosting form NGOs or non-profits
- use small companies and ISPs
The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?
Lastly, what do you think of a home appliance (basically a server the size of a router with a web interface) that people could install in their home to host some of their important data. Obviously it wouldn't be reliable enough for Email, but might be good enough for docs, password hosting, bookmarks, contact list, etc...
Well I should have clarified. I want an always on low power appliance with an easy web interface to host important data for people that are not capable or too lazy to set up a server.
I purchased a SheevaPlug[1] a couple years ago. It's a plug sized ARM server consuming 5W max. It's been great for a low-power, always-on debian server. For the lazy or not capable user, there is the Pogo Plug[2], which was prototyped using the Sheeva. You plug in ethernet and a usb hard drive, and it gives you access from the PogoPlug site.
Plug servers. Google it. Marvell ARM chips mostly. I have been thinking about trying to build a little turnkey linux OS to run on those things that can provide similar functionality to what you are talking about.
Alas the technology does not seem to be quite there yet and the work required to get basically a full personally hosted webapp suite is not trivial. That said, I think in the future we will see a lot more 'appliances' that run as VMs or on low cost low power all ways on hardware. Backed by a business model something like wordpress. Meaning that there is a dot com where you can get it remotely hosted for you, and there is a dot org where you can download and host the app yourself.
Plus stuff like the personal router project http://pr.lcs.mit.edu/ would make a pretty interesting paradigm change.
Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year ago, to relax my attachment size limit.) Between the FreeBSD handbook and the official Postfix documentation, all the info one could possibly need is provided.
A combination of Postgrey and SpamAssassin keeps my inbox spam free. You can also use mutt rather than Dovecot IMAP if you prefer to read your mail on the command line. Likewise, Debian will work just as well as FreeBSD in this role, if you're more comfortable on Linux. (Debconf even gives you a menu-driven Postfix configuration builder, it doesn't get any easier.)
Backups are handled by nightly rsync cron job on a local machine. I don't really have to think about them, aside from checking once in a while to make sure they're still running.
I have to laugh at all the self-proclaimed hackers in this thread claiming that setting up a personal email server is too difficult, takes too much time – or that they have "better things to do". No, I'm not one of those who would argue that a "real hacker" always has to do things the hardest way possible, quite the opposite. But at some point you have to ask yourself: if setting up a small mail server on a *nix system – a task extremely well documented and understood, a task that yields real technical and privacy benefits, a task that the operating system itself will hold your hand through if you're using Debian or Ubuntu – is too much of a challenge for you, then in what sense can you possibly call yourself a hacker?
Getting the email server set up is easy, almost trivially so.
It's dealing with all the other issues that's an immense pain. SpamAssassin is not always a magic bullet, deliverability to third-party mail servers can be a major problem even if you follow all the rules, and Gmail's UI has a number of advantages that many mail programs can't compete with.
If you compare the hours of time a month that takes with the up-front elimination of hassle that Google Apps provides, it's not hard to see why a hacker might prefer to just outsource it and focus on tasks more pleasing to them.
Exactly, setting up a mail server is not hard. What's hard is that you have to keep your server secure; have to make backups, and make sure that backups work; have to troubleshoot problems when mails are not delivered, god knows how much time does it take; have to train your spam filter to get to the level as half efficient as Gmail is.
1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.
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.
3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.
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.
That seems to imply you don't already. There are lots of paid email services that don't monetize user's emails. And many that are hosted outside the United States.
For the extremely vigilant, there is always CounterMail
The threat of email interruption and snooping can't be completely avoided. Undersea cables get cut, governments change, servers crash, data centers get raided, and companies disappear. At some point the data gets decrypted and everything is retrievable unless you are any extremely hard core PGP user. Even HushMail has to bend to the feds when it's all said and done. Even savvy people realize paranoia only gets you so far with email.
I think for most people, $10 IS too much. Although we all talk tough about privacy, most people (even here) don't have much to hide from anyone, and when the difference between definitely secure, and probably secure (in terms of privacy and ownership of data) is $10, it suddenly feels a lot more expensive.
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.
It doesn't have to, but unless it is located in Iran, NK or other US-unfriendly place, US govt can always pressure the local govt to pressure the local business to turn things over. I wouldn't, for example, count on countries like Switzerland, US is already getting to its banks to turn over US accounts, and is supposed to be one of the most independent and un-influenced countries.
With the current legislation trend, eventually un-cooperative or "terrorist friendly" sites would just be filtered out and blocked, so you might have a hard time accessing your email. Some messages might never make it to you.
I was actually talking about writing a front-end that you could host on your own server, not a gmail clone. (I wish I could update my original comment.)
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.
I actually host my own email. I developed an open source application for automatically encrypting all email with my public key as soon as it arrives, and I can't do this if somebody else hosts my email. You can read why and how here: https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...
Brilliant! Thank you for sharing the post and code. I'd be interested in hearing thoughts on how to make it searchable. If you don't index, searching will take quite some time. I guess the best thing to do would be to index each e-mail (keywords?) before it is encrypted and then encrypt the index itself as well. There is a problem with the keyword approach though - if the index encrypts the words but the "link" between message id and encrypted keywords is not encrypted, then an attacker who is in posession of one or several other message bodies in plain text can see correlations between the content of known and unknown message bodies.
> advertising, leads to the exact same problem
> that you face with GMail.
Not necessarily. For some people that largest factor is that Gmail brings all of your email under US jurisdiction. It may be enough to just do advertising-funded Gmail clone that is solely based out of another jurisdiction.
You may even be able to convince non-US businesses that this is a better alternative.
We use Zimbra at work. I'd have a hard time recommending it unless you really, really want 80% of Exchange and 40% of the usability.
(Outlook Web Access is still the only webmail client I've found that is in GMail's ballpark. Since running an Exchange server is beyond my skillset, my interest, and my budget, and trusting a managed Exchange host feels odd--at that point I might as well just stick with GMail. So I do.
Google isn't going to find anything particularly interesting about me by my mail, anyway.)
A mischaracterization (and, given your tone, probably intentionally so).
A useful mail system has value to me. It outweighs the (in my mind vastly overhyped) dangers of Google doing something nefarious with my data. If you disagree, you're welcome to run your own mail server. Nobody's stopping you.
"[Gmail/Facebook/USGov/etc] isn't going to find anything particularly interesting about me by my mail, anyway."
There are two problems here:
1. We look at our data from our point of view. Other people and orgs have their own points of view, and it's their actions driven by their points of view that we need to worry and think about. For example, you think your mail is uninteresting, yet Google enhances the value of their ads by correlating your interests with the interests in your communication network.
Government surveillance can also learn a lot just by recording and analyzing who you talk to. When a law enforcement agency cannot get a full wiretap warrant, they will sometimes settle for a pen register, which just records the telephone numbers of your calls. This allows them to find out who you know, and who you talk to the most. This lets them form more detailed opinions about you and your known associates, which may or may not be accurate. You know, like Google does for ads.
Oh, you're just not that interesting to the government?
2. Innocent behavior being observed by the government is enough to disrupt your life in minor and major ways. Consider the British couple that was recently denied entry to the United States, merely because their tweets contained boisterous comments about destroying the US (i.e. partying really hard), and digging up Marilyn Monroe's grave. Imagine if they had used the British slang term "crack."
It takes nothing more than mere notice to disrupt your life. If you innocently have communication with someone who in turn has communication with a "person of interest," you could find your car carrying a GPS. Just from noting communication networks, never mind the communication content.
I'm not trying to go all tinfoil hat, I'm just suggesting that your view of your data is completely different from corporate and government's view of your data. You could be served an ad (horror!), or you could be served a warrant (horror), based on accurate or mistaken interpretation of any facet of your communication.
Yeah, but it's also email. You could delete every email you've ever created and everyone who's ever saved their copy still has their copy.
Even if you were trying to be all sneaky about your email by having your own service set up somewhere, you're still making copies of everything you send by virtue of sending it. It's more vectors for the government/Evil Google/whoever to need to scan to get a picture of the data you're creating, but it's not impossible.
I know you're just making a point, but to the people who actually are all tinfoil hat, this whole conversation to shift to whether or not you should even use email as a method of communicating.
> 1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.
That's what IMAP is for. If these are computers you don't directly control, then I'd say any downsides of using gmail pale in comparison to the security implications inherent in your usage model.
[edit] Can't say I understand the negative downvotes. Maybe I inadvertently denigrated people's preference for webmail over mutt/mail.app/etc?
Regardless, the fact is that if you're utilizing webmail for remote e-mail access on shared computers, then there are much more significant risk scenarios at play than those of gmail.
Secure webmail access over HTTPS is in theory just as strong as IMAP access can be made to be.
Of course, by using untrusted hardware you are exposing yourself to various circumventions of the security protocols, but that's just as true of IMAP as it is of HTTPS.
In fact, IMAP is probably slightly worse since it does actually download messages to the local machine by default, where they must be explicitly cleaned up.
Until recently the GMail web interface was simply unmatched. When GMail first shipped, their conversation view was so far ahead of what anyone was doing on the web or in a fat client. I don't try out as many email platforms as I used to, but from what I have seen, it's still the best implementation of conversation view available.
Additionally, you hinted at the other main reason I use GMail in your first bullet point: "Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium."
Sure, this means Google has access. But it also means I don't have to find a way to make that data accessible to me everywhere I want it to be. I don't have to pay for the storage. It's a solved problem... and available at a great price point ($FREE).
I trust google slightly further than I can throw them, so for now this is an okay deal.
Because we care about efficiency, not least with regards to our time, and running one's own mail server is not an efficient use of such a scarce resource.
I would LOVE for someone at Google to violate their TOS and read my mail. That would be far more profitable than any business idea I will execute this year.
It's easy, safe, secure and fast - but I also have an Yahoo Mail account as backup.
And you can't beat the price, unless everybody decides to go French and fine Google for providing a great service for free when there are other companies that do it for a fee :-)...
1. Because Google solved the spam problem better than anyone else has
2. Because maintaining your own email server (which many on HN are perfectly capable of) is a giant pain, especially when you have to deal with SpamAssassin, DKIM, and all of the other things that you need to do correctly to have your email work
3. Because I still have my data even if Google loses it — I have a backup from downloaded email through Sparrow as well as an entire backup directly from my Gmail through Backupify (https://www.backupify.com/)
4. Because I like to outsource the tools and services that I need to people that are experts at it. It's the same reason that I use Beanstalk for Subversion instead of hosting my own server, use FreshBooks for invoicing clients instead of doing it myself, and send transactional email through Postmark.
It's easier. Much easier. And they are all very good at what they do.
Bottom line: So that I don't have to worry about email. It just works, which allows me to do exactly the same thing.
None of his alternatives — team up with family and friends to maintain a mail server, join a nonprofit to use their email (WTF?), use email from a small ISP — seem remotely practical for most people, so no wonder they use Gmail. Even worse, aside from the first alternative, all of his objections seem to apply to the alternatives as well (only with the name of the new email host in place of "Google").
This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.
Which is why it baffles me that so few people use S/MIME--other than the trending preference for webmail which isn't well suited for encryption. S/MIME is simple to setup on most email clients, and offers encryption of the body of the mail if the recipient is uses S/MIME as well. There are several of us at work that send encrypted emails all the time.
1) Black listing - if someone in your IP neighborhood sends spam you can be silently blacklisted by Comcast, AOL, some random crazy zealots running a blacklist that other random people choose to use… et.al. and people stop getting your mail. Good luck getting unlisted. Wasted hours. Sometimes it's futile.
2) Spam filtering - If you are the sort of hacker that publishes their email address in order to interact with the community, and you become popular with spammers, then it is difficult to beat Google's spam filtering on the hundreds of spam you will receive each day.
Until a few years ago I used to run my own servers and corporate servers. Nicely trained bogospam filters (this is work and involves the brain killing activity of reading borderline emails to categorize) got most of it with little risk of resource consumption failures. SpamAssassin got some of the remainder, albeit with some risk of exploding, but spam still got through.
Those same addresses now let about 4 spam per year through the Google filters. You can't beat them. Your sample size is too small.
I hosted my own e-mail on a VPS for a few months before going back to Google Hosted e-mail, mainly for the two reasons you list here. I do want to go back to hosting it myself though.
I'm sure there are many other reasons, but also, at the time it rolled out (and/or when they integrated Postini), Gmail was sort of a miracle cure for spam. Just sign up, and spam-be-gone. A lot of people wanted such a "fire and forget" solution.
I used to always set up and run my own mail servers. I no longer do so, not because I'm lazy, but because I have better things to do with my time than be a sys-admin, and worry about downtime, logs, security, and backups.
Sure, Google has your mail. So use multiple accounts and keep your really private communications somewhere else, or use S/MIME or PGP Mail.
But who the hell cares about them having data for an account that is mostly subscribed to public mailing lists?
Just to give you an idea of how popular Gmail is, about 67% of the 7000+ subscribers for Hacker Newsletter (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) use gmail and I'm sure a good bit more are Google app accounts.
Most farmers don't produce most of their own food.
The modern world is built on specialization: most farmers have specialized in some direction or another, and the ones who haven't usually make less money. At best, a farmer with livestock will occasionally take a pig or cow off to be butchered (since butchering is another specialty entirely, needing specialized equipment to do well), or a farmer growing corn will plant a few rows of sweet corn in a field near his house, or a farmer growing produce -- usually just a half dozen varieties -- will keep back a little for himself.
But the calories a farmer will produce for himself are generally a small part of his intake. In the end, it's a better use of his time to focus on producing as much of a handful of crops as possible and buy what he needs from a grocery like the rest of us.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadI had an Altavista account until they closed their email service. So, I need a reliable provider that wont be swallowed up by a bigger company and change my email address.
Nobody considers johnsmith@odek.com a better applicant than johnsmith@lumberjackservices.com.
Even if the job is for a hacker and not a lumberjack.
Note: These instructions look fairly straightforward. http://www.howtoforge.com/arch-linux-mailserver-with-postfix...
Of course you'll likely need a business class connection with static IP and configurable rDNS and no port 25 block so not everyone will be lucky enough to be able to do it. But something like a plug computer will keep the cost pretty reasonable if you don't currently have a home server and for me it's cheaper than a VPS + consumer cable connection.
I'm hoping once the Raspberry Pi is released, I can get a good personal mail server going again.
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 switch back. I don't even bother organizing my email more than a minimal amount any more, I just search for things when I need them.
* remote access is also key. I regularly access the internet from at least 4 different devices, on at least 3 different operating systems. Sometimes I do so while traveling. Gmail makes this convenient --- all I need is a web browser. IMAP need not apply --- I found IMAP appallingly slow last time I tried it.
I used to use Opera M2 built-in client and think it's even faster than Gmail web UI and very accurate.
You should probably check out who Harald Welte is and what he does before making such accusations. I don't agree with him here, but "link bait" this is not.
Having said that, I rely on too many marketplace apps now to make switching a reasonable alternative. So, I make do with native clients.
I should probably note that it tends to be variable with the time of day. That's not unexpected, but still kinda sucks.
Because we're lazy.
you give away control over your personal data
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.
Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.
You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
I just run getmail which retrieves mail via Gmail's IMAP interface every now and then. If Gmail went away tomorrow, I wouldn't be _that_ sad.
I've pimped them out before, but this is why I set up backupify (handle more than just gmail, since your Google password is for all your Google accounts) and periodically export my data. I just wish they did more, like backup my Dropbox and Atlassian accounts.
Vice-versa too. I learnt this the hard way :(
Also, POP3 is not folder-aware. You can only access your inbox over POP3. If you want to backup anything (e.g. drafts, sent mail, etc), then you need more than POP3.
It's a trade-off, and one I've come down on the side of GMail for.
"more than a few" is probably still in the ten-thousandths of percentage points if that. Some can't, but I can live with those odds.
And as Gmail gets more users, I'm guessing the odds get even better, particularly with so many of these new users being tied to Android. Google has a lot tied up with making sure things don't go south.
And then there's services like backupify.
Eventually, as it happens in all public companies, the "do no evil" people are going to be out, and the "maximize the buck" people are going to be in.
Right now it's "harmless"... But people get a lot more personal in email or google searches than they do on, say, facebook.
There's some gold to be mined in there.
I don't doubt you; this may eventually happen, but for the meantime, I'm trusting them (over my ISP, anyway), with my email and backing up/saving the stuff that warrants it.
Right, I'd personally be more concerned about random mailing list administrators "looking through their logs" and drawing conclusions about me than by Google scanning my email for the purpose of targeting better ads to me... hmm...
I'm sorry for myself in the first place, but until I can code my dream of an email killer (or email client fwiw) that does not suck, avoid making my eyes bleed (and make it a success...) I can't avoid gmail.
Harald's suggestions boil down to
The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?Lastly, what do you think of a home appliance (basically a server the size of a router with a web interface) that people could install in their home to host some of their important data. Obviously it wouldn't be reliable enough for Email, but might be good enough for docs, password hosting, bookmarks, contact list, etc...
[1]: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-k... [2]: https://pogoplug.com/devices
Alas the technology does not seem to be quite there yet and the work required to get basically a full personally hosted webapp suite is not trivial. That said, I think in the future we will see a lot more 'appliances' that run as VMs or on low cost low power all ways on hardware. Backed by a business model something like wordpress. Meaning that there is a dot com where you can get it remotely hosted for you, and there is a dot org where you can download and host the app yourself.
Plus stuff like the personal router project http://pr.lcs.mit.edu/ would make a pretty interesting paradigm change.
Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year ago, to relax my attachment size limit.) Between the FreeBSD handbook and the official Postfix documentation, all the info one could possibly need is provided.
A combination of Postgrey and SpamAssassin keeps my inbox spam free. You can also use mutt rather than Dovecot IMAP if you prefer to read your mail on the command line. Likewise, Debian will work just as well as FreeBSD in this role, if you're more comfortable on Linux. (Debconf even gives you a menu-driven Postfix configuration builder, it doesn't get any easier.)
Backups are handled by nightly rsync cron job on a local machine. I don't really have to think about them, aside from checking once in a while to make sure they're still running.
I have to laugh at all the self-proclaimed hackers in this thread claiming that setting up a personal email server is too difficult, takes too much time – or that they have "better things to do". No, I'm not one of those who would argue that a "real hacker" always has to do things the hardest way possible, quite the opposite. But at some point you have to ask yourself: if setting up a small mail server on a *nix system – a task extremely well documented and understood, a task that yields real technical and privacy benefits, a task that the operating system itself will hold your hand through if you're using Debian or Ubuntu – is too much of a challenge for you, then in what sense can you possibly call yourself a hacker?
It's dealing with all the other issues that's an immense pain. SpamAssassin is not always a magic bullet, deliverability to third-party mail servers can be a major problem even if you follow all the rules, and Gmail's UI has a number of advantages that many mail programs can't compete with.
If you compare the hours of time a month that takes with the up-front elimination of hassle that Google Apps provides, it's not hard to see why a hacker might prefer to just outsource it and focus on tasks more pleasing to them.
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.
3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.
Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.
For the extremely vigilant, there is always CounterMail
https://countermail.com/
The threat of email interruption and snooping can't be completely avoided. Undersea cables get cut, governments change, servers crash, data centers get raided, and companies disappear. At some point the data gets decrypted and everything is retrievable unless you are any extremely hard core PGP user. Even HushMail has to bend to the feds when it's all said and done. Even savvy people realize paranoia only gets you so far with email.
I personally have switched between payed google apps for domains and fastmail (those are both $50/yr and under).
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.
You're assuming the service has to be located within the US. Why?
With the current legislation trend, eventually un-cooperative or "terrorist friendly" sites would just be filtered out and blocked, so you might have a hard time accessing your email. Some messages might never make it to you.
That's nice, you still believe that the laws on file actually govern how the country is run.
Bug if you follow e.g. how the spanish SOPA-like was passed, you realize it's all a facade.
https://neomailbox.com/services/secure-email http://www.orangewebsite.com/web_hosting.php
Did you try it and can compare it to gmail?
Especially on:
- linking other accounts (POP and IMAPS)
- spam detection
You may even be able to convince non-US businesses that this is a better alternative.
(Outlook Web Access is still the only webmail client I've found that is in GMail's ballpark. Since running an Exchange server is beyond my skillset, my interest, and my budget, and trusting a managed Exchange host feels odd--at that point I might as well just stick with GMail. So I do.
Google isn't going to find anything particularly interesting about me by my mail, anyway.)
A useful mail system has value to me. It outweighs the (in my mind vastly overhyped) dangers of Google doing something nefarious with my data. If you disagree, you're welcome to run your own mail server. Nobody's stopping you.
There are two problems here:
1. We look at our data from our point of view. Other people and orgs have their own points of view, and it's their actions driven by their points of view that we need to worry and think about. For example, you think your mail is uninteresting, yet Google enhances the value of their ads by correlating your interests with the interests in your communication network.
Government surveillance can also learn a lot just by recording and analyzing who you talk to. When a law enforcement agency cannot get a full wiretap warrant, they will sometimes settle for a pen register, which just records the telephone numbers of your calls. This allows them to find out who you know, and who you talk to the most. This lets them form more detailed opinions about you and your known associates, which may or may not be accurate. You know, like Google does for ads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register
Oh, you're just not that interesting to the government?
2. Innocent behavior being observed by the government is enough to disrupt your life in minor and major ways. Consider the British couple that was recently denied entry to the United States, merely because their tweets contained boisterous comments about destroying the US (i.e. partying really hard), and digging up Marilyn Monroe's grave. Imagine if they had used the British slang term "crack."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champers#C
It takes nothing more than mere notice to disrupt your life. If you innocently have communication with someone who in turn has communication with a "person of interest," you could find your car carrying a GPS. Just from noting communication networks, never mind the communication content.
I'm not trying to go all tinfoil hat, I'm just suggesting that your view of your data is completely different from corporate and government's view of your data. You could be served an ad (horror!), or you could be served a warrant (horror), based on accurate or mistaken interpretation of any facet of your communication.
Even if you were trying to be all sneaky about your email by having your own service set up somewhere, you're still making copies of everything you send by virtue of sending it. It's more vectors for the government/Evil Google/whoever to need to scan to get a picture of the data you're creating, but it's not impossible.
I know you're just making a point, but to the people who actually are all tinfoil hat, this whole conversation to shift to whether or not you should even use email as a method of communicating.
That's what IMAP is for. If these are computers you don't directly control, then I'd say any downsides of using gmail pale in comparison to the security implications inherent in your usage model.
[edit] Can't say I understand the negative downvotes. Maybe I inadvertently denigrated people's preference for webmail over mutt/mail.app/etc?
Regardless, the fact is that if you're utilizing webmail for remote e-mail access on shared computers, then there are much more significant risk scenarios at play than those of gmail.
Of course, by using untrusted hardware you are exposing yourself to various circumventions of the security protocols, but that's just as true of IMAP as it is of HTTPS.
In fact, IMAP is probably slightly worse since it does actually download messages to the local machine by default, where they must be explicitly cleaned up.
Additionally, you hinted at the other main reason I use GMail in your first bullet point: "Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium."
Sure, this means Google has access. But it also means I don't have to find a way to make that data accessible to me everywhere I want it to be. I don't have to pay for the storage. It's a solved problem... and available at a great price point ($FREE).
I trust google slightly further than I can throw them, so for now this is an okay deal.
Why do you assume that you would ever learn about it?
And you can't beat the price, unless everybody decides to go French and fine Google for providing a great service for free when there are other companies that do it for a fee :-)...
2. Because maintaining your own email server (which many on HN are perfectly capable of) is a giant pain, especially when you have to deal with SpamAssassin, DKIM, and all of the other things that you need to do correctly to have your email work
3. Because I still have my data even if Google loses it — I have a backup from downloaded email through Sparrow as well as an entire backup directly from my Gmail through Backupify (https://www.backupify.com/)
4. Because I like to outsource the tools and services that I need to people that are experts at it. It's the same reason that I use Beanstalk for Subversion instead of hosting my own server, use FreshBooks for invoicing clients instead of doing it myself, and send transactional email through Postmark.
It's easier. Much easier. And they are all very good at what they do.
Bottom line: So that I don't have to worry about email. It just works, which allows me to do exactly the same thing.
Assume that any government, be it your own, US or other will read your email if they so please, and encrypt anything you don't want them to read.
Sometimes I need to take off my "all software sucks and I hate everything" hat before posting :-/
2) Spam filtering - If you are the sort of hacker that publishes their email address in order to interact with the community, and you become popular with spammers, then it is difficult to beat Google's spam filtering on the hundreds of spam you will receive each day.
Until a few years ago I used to run my own servers and corporate servers. Nicely trained bogospam filters (this is work and involves the brain killing activity of reading borderline emails to categorize) got most of it with little risk of resource consumption failures. SpamAssassin got some of the remainder, albeit with some risk of exploding, but spam still got through.
Those same addresses now let about 4 spam per year through the Google filters. You can't beat them. Your sample size is too small.
Sure, Google has your mail. So use multiple accounts and keep your really private communications somewhere else, or use S/MIME or PGP Mail.
But who the hell cares about them having data for an account that is mostly subscribed to public mailing lists?
I prefer to not risk missing emails (from switching addresses to non-Gmail) me over the "hacker way".
It is not about keeping some strange 60ies style counter culture/down with the man going.
To add to this, yahoo.com is second with 3%.
The same argument applies to almost any category of product, with varying ramifications unique to each.
If I made my own soda, I'd leave out high fructose corn syrup. Why do I let Coca Cola poison me? And so on and so forth.
I do not think that this is a valid comparison.
It would be more like, why don't farmers produce their own food (and rely on packaged food instead).
The modern world is built on specialization: most farmers have specialized in some direction or another, and the ones who haven't usually make less money. At best, a farmer with livestock will occasionally take a pig or cow off to be butchered (since butchering is another specialty entirely, needing specialized equipment to do well), or a farmer growing corn will plant a few rows of sweet corn in a field near his house, or a farmer growing produce -- usually just a half dozen varieties -- will keep back a little for himself.
But the calories a farmer will produce for himself are generally a small part of his intake. In the end, it's a better use of his time to focus on producing as much of a handful of crops as possible and buy what he needs from a grocery like the rest of us.