It's interesting to see several posts about people leaving Gmail in the recent months pop up on HN.
What I don't get about this one is that the author, Christopher, put the email server on a Digital Ocean VPS. If I'm not mistaken, DO is a US company and the gov can probably get access to the server's contents as easily as to a Gmail account.
Of course, if Christopher uses PGP for everything, then the gov would still have to find a way to decrypt stuff. But PGP doesn't seem to be commonly used (yet).
I used to have a Gmail account too but switched to Fastmail about 16 months ago and recently renewed my account for 3 more years. It's reliable and the web client is crazy fast.
1 - Gmail is a much bigger and jucier target than any VPS provider. Though the bigger and more popular the VPS provider is, the jucier a target it becomes.
2 - Siphoning data from Gmail is much easier for three-letter-agencies than breaking in to coercing every VPS provider out there. Though the bigger and more popular the VPS provider is, the more likely it becomes that these agencies will go to the trouble of spying on them.
1- I'm not talking about anything being a target. I'm saying the US gov can get access if they want. And Gmail or DO won't be allowed to talk about it.
2- Not "every VPS provider", but the big ones, like AWS and DO. The NSA apparently had access to the fiber cable used by Google a few months back. They can probably easily get access to any other cable.
3- Yes, so? Did I say anything about me moving to Fastmail to get away from the US gov? The US gov will get to your data wherever you are if they actually need to. It's hopeless to try and hide your data. The only solution I see is encrypting it with something like PGP. They can easily find and save everything. But they can't decrypt everything. My move to Fastmail is about not having my email screened by robots to serve targeted ads. And making me less dependent on Google (which I think is the main topic of this thread).
They already have a datacenter there, it's fairly well connected (on top of multiple transatlantic cables), a sensible government and sensible, transparent judicial processes.
> it's fairly well connected (on top of multiple transatlantic cables)
Not as well as you'd think. We see substantial packet loss to Iceland for long periods at least once a week, and very occasionally the entire country disappears from the internet (maybe every couple of months).
Also so far we haven't found a datacentre that we feel we can trust to care about reliability as much as we do. I've just spent the last four hours dealing with our entire Iceland presence being taken off the internet because someone at the datacentre misinterpreted our normal replication load as a denial of service and blocked the entire thing.
We're trying, but so far we do not have the confidence that we could reliably provide user-facing services from Iceland, or at least not to the standard that we do from New York.
I used to have a Gmail account too but switched to Fastmail about 16 months ago and recently renewed my account for 3 more years. It's reliable and the web client is crazy fast.
Yep, me too. My primary reasons:
* I am moving back from Mail.app (+ Google Mail interface) to mutt. Google's non-standard IMAP drives my totally crazy. Now I use mutt-kz + isync + notmuch + msmtp. Thanks to mutt-kz/notmuch, I have full threads, even when they are cross folder and fast search.
* On the occasions I do need Webmail, Fastmail's web interface is indeed insanely fast.
* More control over filters, etc., down to writing Sieve scripts. (I don't use tagging in notmuch, since it is not portable to mobile, so I use virtual folders in mutt-kz with 'folder:' queries.)
* Google is becoming too large and intrusive, and I don't want all my data to live with them.
* I would rather support a smaller company that contributes back their improvements to an opensource IMAP server (here Cyrus).
I'm a notmuch user, too. It's really awesome, but there's a couple things I haven't figured out yet that would really improve my setup. The most important issue is being able to sync tags across many computers. I'll remove the inbox tag from mail on one computer, and then I'll have to do it again on each additional computer that I use notmuch on. Do you have this issue, too? Have you solved it?
I basically decided to give up on notmuch tags. I index using notmuch and create virtual mailboxes using folder: search queries. In that way I get the best of both worlds:
- notmuch + mutt-kz shows me complete threads (including mails that I sent or mails that are in other folders).
- I can use Maildir folders as normal, meaning that changes are synced back and I see them on my phone and other computers.
Of course, this has the downside that an e-mail cannot have multiple tags, but I don't run into that issue much. I primarily use search when I look for something that is older than a few days.
My messy (and outdated) muttrc, if you are interested:
The only thing I want to change soon is to switch from the OS X address book (using the 'contacts' command) to the new 'notmuch address' command for contact completion.
I left gmail and ran my own mail server too. It's harder and more stressful than you think.
After a year I decided I'd had enough and moved to runbox[1]. It's not that expensive and the peace of mind know I don't have to worry about my mail server is excellent.
I'm trying to imagine an article written in 1996 about someone switching their email providers. It would be a complete non-event, there were so many to choose from back then and besides, your own workstation was likely running sendmail. So here we are in the data silo era, where running your own mailserver is seen as something as archaic as soldering your own CPU board.
Fortunately I never made the switch. I do have a gmail account (actually, I have a google account which translates into having a gmail account as well). The only times I've used it is as a fallback for not being able to send mail from my own server because the ssh tunnel was unavailable. This happened maybe twice over the last decade, in both cases I could have avoided the issue if I had thought about it a bit longer.
So gmail was a way out of the bind, but as soon as that was resolved I used my trusty old mailserver again. Setting one up and maintaining it over the years is probably less work than moving out of gmail once you've decided enough is enough. Cost of switching is the way customer lock in is achieved in almost any situation, fortunately google make it relatively easy to get your data out.
Future product: family box. A simple rack mounted appliance a-la synology that takes care of the data, email, address books and so on of an extended family, administered by the family computer whiz. With an backup in the cloud via tarsnap to guard against mishap. A bit like a workgroup server but then applied to a family or some kind of loosely knit group of individuals.
With the option to migrate from one box to another if you want (and with forwarding in case you do).
In 1996 I'd say most people got their email address through a large institution and had to change email addresses every time they changed institutions.
For many that was their work or school email address. For the average folks that was their ISP. It's one of the huge reasons there are STILL people using AOL.
Running your own mailserver has always been difficult (depending on your skill level). Gmail came out and provided people an option for an email address that was highly portable and accessible.
The family box is a nice idea, but relying on the goodwill of the family computer whiz is unlikely to provide people with a stable email server.
Ah, yes, very good point. I didn't mean to insinuate that Gmail was the first. Hotmail rocked when it came out and made me a happy customer when I could have a personal email address that wouldn't change.
Gmail entered later in the game and "bought" new users with massive free storage and a more modern web interface.
It's true that Hotmail & Yahoo were available well before Gmail, but pre-AJAX webmail wasn't fit for serious use - it was more of a backup for people traveling, or for ad-hoc use, and most email use was from desktop software (Eudora, Outlook Express, etc).
Gmail was really the first webmail usable as a person's only email address, lot least because of the 1G storage on offer.
Not sure I agree. Webmail has always been usable for normal people, while power users could and do use a dedicated program. Gmail did bring innovations, of course, but competitors copied them.
I've noticed Gmail users tend to be unaware of alternatives and always wondered why that is.
I was a user of Yahoo mail from 1996 or so, and it fit my bill just fine. I preferred it to POP and IMAP clients as I could use it from anywhere without worries. The pure HTML interface was much leaner and faster than the bloated Ajax versions that came later, and I kept using the old HTML version and disabling new versions until they definitely phased it out. I did switch most of my use to Gmail when it came out, but it was due to superior search and more space, not due to Ajax.
I signed up for hotmail in 1998 and didn't use a desktop client for it until maybe 2008. It was perfectly fine for me as a student, though I did wish I could attach larger PowerPoint presentations.
I also run my own email server, but it's not something I would easily recommend.
In 1996, the anti-spam measures were totally different. Notice I'm saying anti-spam, not spam (even though of course there's no one without the other).
Getting a "clean" IP today on providers like DigitalOcean, is far from trivial. Several big players (from my personal experience, yahoo) will likely blacklist the entire net range with little or no options to get it unlisted. So sending out emails is a gamble. Setting up DKIM / SPF is also a minor hurdle and won't necessarily help that much. And that's just outbound emails, not to mention fighting incoming spam...
If we're talking about family (which is what my own mail server is used for) - they too are used to things like Google, so it's hard to compete in terms of integration and ease of use there. Explaining to my sister how to set her iPhone, or to my brother and his wife who want to access the same email account on two computers... things get tricky very fast...
Explaining to my sister how to set her iPhone, or to my brother and his wife who want to access the same email account on two computers...
iPhone supports IMAP just fine, so that is not much effort :).
But your point is true, operating a mailserver with reliable delivery is difficult, given the importance IP reputation. Badly maintained family boxes would just be a spam-nest.
Also, for the $40 per year I spend on Fastmail, it is not really profitable for me. Though I had a mail server for a while, when it was still fun ;).
>So here we are in the data silo era, where running your own mailserver is seen as something as archaic as soldering your own CPU board.
That might have happened even if gmail and hotmail had never been created. The deluge of spam is the main force behind the difficulty of running a mail server, particularly an outgoing-mail server.
That's because spammers are doing every combination of first-initial last-name, vice versa, and many other patterns, @gmail.com. The problem I have with a personal domain is when I set up a wildcard address. I'll now get 5000 copies of the same spam message to random_names@mydomain.com.
Every time I read one of these articles, I go from optimistic of being able to switch over to frustrated by the end, both because of the complexity of setting it up and the end result not looking like something I could give my parents to run even if I got it set up completely. Why is it that nearly every other service that runs on the 'net can be stood up in one or two packages and maybe as many config files?
It really is not; my dovecot, opensmtpd and dkimproxy (needed almost exclusively to ensure delivery to Gmail) config is 45 lines total (with comments).
What's with these endless bouts of Google-hate on HN? seemingly if there isn't anything going on at the moment someone would readily whip something out from the archives just to keep the Google-bashing going and they will be generously rewarded with karma.
I don't dislike Google, but I think it's a problem that the vast majority of its users couldn't precisely articulate exactly how Google uses all the personal data they collect, from documents, searches, e-mails, phone usage, etc.
And I think it's improper to rely on the "people use Google voluntarily" canard. It's a classic case of information asymmetry: Google has all the information about how it uses personal data, and consumers don't. While I imagine most consumers understand that if they search for "laundry detergent" Google might show them ads for "Tide," what Google does goes far beyond that and I think very few people really understand what they are bargaining away in return for using their services.
Is it a Google specific issue though? I mean there is a policy users could read, they have the dashboard, transparency reports, bug trackers, forums, blog posts, the works, probably more than anyone else offers.
Also there are the many articles the keep popping up about Google with various motivations behind them, I think "people" are more "aware" than you give them credit for.
Also don't you think that data is/are a major part of the functionality of these products? they operate on data, data collection isn't a side effect but it's built into the utility of such services almost by definition.
At the end of the day, people don't read privacy policies.[1] They depend on intuition: if I watch a lot of cat videos on Youtube, I might get ads for cat products. When your data analysis goes outside the boundaries of what users would intuitively expect based on their knowing,[2] and voluntary interactions with your service, then I think you're on shaky ground.
And no, it's not a Google-specific problem. Google is just the face of this new industry based on privacy-monetization, and the criticism it gets is to be expected based on its leadership position.
[1] And I think it's wrong-headed to infer consent from inaction.
[2] When you're talking about, e.g., Android, many users don't even realize they're interacting with Google services.
That doesn't surprise me. Google and the hacker/startup community have vastly different and often opposing interests.
In the end Google is the biggest advertising agency in the world. Advertising makes money by pushing people to make irrational choices - buy products and services that they don't need; buy from the vendor with bigger marketing budget, rather than superior engineering; overspend on stuff they need - e.g. cars, etc.
Google is not an "advertising agency", that is a specific thing. What they are is a mainly ad supported medium which is what most internet services are, same as TV/Radio/Newspapers/Mags etc.
Airing out philosophical and theoretical disagreements with the ad model is merely a rationalization after the fact in this situation.
No data mining (you pay for your service with money and not with your privacy). It's located in place where privacy laws are taken seriously. It also offers all the common features like IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV and etc. And also has a very good Web interface as an option. And, it's using free software, not some proprietary closed source platform which you have no clue about. So by using it you support free software projects. A win win situation for everyone.
Running your own server is great until something goes wrong and nothing works. It is just too much hassle to run your own mail server these days IMHO. Being blacklisted for spam is a nightmare to sort out and can happen so easily when you stick you server on something like DO. The control and privacy is nice but is there really much difference between running your own server on DO and using Outlook.com or Gmail in terms of privacy?
Actually getting any mail system to work is a nightmare. Certain large legacy providers (I am looking at you Microsoft) have a habit of classifying totally legit mail as spam. I find around 2% of any mail message going into a hotmail account will be falsely classified as junk.
There's always that feeling in the back of your head...
"Why haven't I got a reply yet? Are they busy? ... Or maybe I've misconfigured something... Maybe it got marked as spam... Maybe my SMTP server is fucked..."
I always found myself using my gmail account for critical stuff...
Anybody know how much revenue gmail makes per user? I'm pretty sure I'd be happy to pay that to not have them scrape through my email. I think they have great services but am turned off by the idea of them owning all of my data as they are pretty up front about looking through it to sell advertisements against me. They are also getting really good at sifting through it with all the latest deep learning neural networks. I'd like to see google open the business model to include selling me a service up front rather than incrementally selling my data. Of course, I've been saying this since 1996 and always have had people look at me odd, shrug and say "but it's free and it works great".
I've just setup a box especially for some mail accounts on DO by using https://mailinabox.email
Looks like a pretty complete package for the job, let's see how it holds up.
I run my own email server on my VPS that also hosts my site. Works pretty well.
Got it setup with Virtualmin which auto sets-up ClamAV and SpamAssasin + email accounts and also installed Roundcube for webmail. Works a charm with any IMAP/POP3 email client I've tried it with too.
Don't bother running a mail server. It's hell. I did from 1998 until about last week. I started running it on a cable modem with an old Compaq desktop, migrated to a dedicated server (which hosted a load of other stuff) and finally onto VMs.
I have spent hours getting myself of blacklists after entire IP ranges were reported. I've spent hours working out why the hell Postfix won't talk to dovecot on a local socket, upgrading Linux distributions, postfix and dovecot and being fucked over by config format changes and periodically losing entire mailboxes to IMAP bugs. Oh and SELinux - hours of it.
The thing that finally killed it for me was Yahoo. My landlord uses Yahoo mail for comms and Yahoo just decided to stop accepting delivery from my server. It took a phone call from me asking him why he hadn't sorted something for me and for him to tell me that he didn't get the email to discover this. So I dredged through the logs, found an error from yahoo's mail servers saying I need to hit a web form to prove I was a legitimate sender. So I did that, and nothing, not a sausage happened. Googling around says I need to wait 6 months before submitting the request again.
I have no power in this situation. I can't email my landlord. I need to do business, not piss around with politics.
So in a fit of anger, I blasted my VM on Linode, went to my local supermarket, bought a Moto G2 in cash to replace my Lumia 630 (which was doing IMAP) that I just smashed the screen on, signed up for Google Apps free trial and just moved the domain over to that.
Just can't be fucked with it any more. I run "inbox zero" (i.e. I delete religiously) so there is no cost for me to migrate.
I don't care if they read my email or shop me to the feds; I'm tired of herding servers and software these days. A decade ago I could quite happily spend all day doing it but I have better things to do now.
I moved to runbox a few months ago and I'm pretty happy. I'll echo your "don't even bother running your own mail server". Been there. Done that. No thanks. Horrible.
There is a hybrid approach -- run a local mail server for receiving mail, and configure your Gmail account set the "From:" address to your domain, and forward any mail to Gmail to your domain. This way you are still mostly in control of your mail, but with the sending reliability of a major service.
For myself, I'm not too worried about privacy (if I want that I'll use PGP). I'm more concerned about vendor lock in. Because as long as people are sending you mail to a domain you own, you can change the sending email provider to any other one that allows a custom From: address. Now from a practical side, I currently let Google Apps completely handle my domain's email, but I can yank it off there at a moments notice if I had to (i.e., if Google decided that I'm not allowed to host my domain there anymore).
right - for individuals who are trying to run a server on a shared server/network (VM), you're going to have a bad time... a real bad time.
however, it's not this bad if you have a 'real' infrastructure i.e. a colocated environment with your own IP space. it sounds like you were mainly dealing with the fallout from bad behavior from your neighbors on the shared network.
having said all that, it still might be worth a switch if you use google apps a lot (we do) because of the integration with gmail. we switched and now use IMAP to access our company google apps gmail. i really dislike the web interface.
Actually I had a nice dedicated box until 2013 at a reputable host in the UK. Unfortunately I no longer wished to fish out for £95/month for it. Still had problems even though the thing was well maintained and there were no bad neighbours. It was less noisy than a VM at Linode however, so you're right there.
yeah, i meant if you actually have ARIN IP space or get allocated at least a routed /24 from a tier 1 ISP... not a cheap dedicated box in some datacenter that suffers from the same problems as shared VM networks.
I have a compromise: run my own server but pass outbound messages through mandrill. Most of my mail is inbound anyway.
It took a few hours to configure exim + dovecot + sieve plugin, but it has been running unattended for over a year (upgrades are automatically installed using unattended-upgrades[1]).
Spam is not a problem, I just use a different address for each service, and ban it if it starts getting spam. As an additional benefit, I know who failed to keep it private.
YMMV. I've also ran my own since 1998. It's worked almost flawlessly from the start. A stock Debian system that I've kept up to date just keeps on ticking.
The only trouble I've had has been sporadically with Hotmail. Still don't know why, I get the bounce and contact the recipient from somewhere else. Even Gmail has these problems from time to time.
I just wanted to stick in another datapoint in the discussion, so not every post is about how awful email is. Sometimes it just works.
Funny enough my own server ONLY had problems with .. GMail so far.
From two days ago: "Let's try this GPG setup, write a mail to my coworker's private GMail account and get a verification that everything checks out on his side".
GMail refuses the PGP/MIME mail, bounces after end of DATA, as 'Spam'. What?
Send the same mail to my GMail account. Works.
Send the same mail to my brother's GMail account. Works.
Send to coworker again: Bounces after DATA, refers to a useless website that offers Google's policies for bulk mails again.
Send a plain text mail to coworker, complaining about Google's mess: Accepted.
So.. Takeaway:
- Google randomly rejects mails from my server, without anything I can do and without providing any information WHY it would do that. Not filing as spam, rejecting outright.
- Google only did that with a mail that is unreadable (PGP/MIME). Coincidence? Make of that what you will..
I will keep my server though. And loudly complain to people that run broken setups. In this case I complained to this coworker of mine and wrote lots of expletives directed at Google - and the issue is resolved for me now. People with GMail addresses that don't get my mail are frankly not my problem and for friends and family I might be able to exert enough pressure to fix the problem.
The ONLY single software package that installs on any computer and includes every component you need to run your own, private and secure email, communication and cloud storage service is Starkit (https://www.starkitsystems.com).
All is setup automatically and your emails never go to spam and it can filter incoming email too. It makes the complicated easy even for people with no technical skills.
The ONLY single software package that installs on any computer and includes every component you need to run your own, private and secure email, communication and cloud storage service is Starkit (https://www.starkitsystems.com).
All is setup automatically and your emails never go to spam and it can filter incoming email too. It makes the complicated easy even for people with no technical skills.
I have an IMAP mailbox at an ISP, and all my web sites forward to it. The desktop and laptop machines use Thunderbird, and Android phones speak IMAP just fine. IMAP has pretty much solved the problem of multiple client devices accessing the same mailbox, and everybody has good spam filters and lots of disk space now.
So what do you need GMail for, anyway? Or any webmail system?
I use Mandrill for domains I don't use much for email. It's great for sending and you can setup incoming mail. Mandrill has a web hook which can send each incoming email wherever you like with the info in JSON format. So, I just setup a simple Ruby app which receives the email info and then writes that info to maildir format. I have this setup on a VPS and then I read the email directly from there using Mutt.
Right now I don't have sending setup for anything but through my apps. If I get something I really need to reply to (rare) I just email with my main address (setup with Gmail) and mention that this address should be used for further messages.
With a bit more work and getting outgoing email setup, then I'm sure it would work fine for my main address as well.
I used to run my own mailserver. It was alright, but occasionally I'd screw up the config and not notice for days, or my auto-update of spamassassin would fail and I'd get heaps of spam.
I moved to Google Apps when it was in beta, and I was quite happy for a while, but GMail kept getting worse. I also host my family's email, so when GMail changed I'd get calls from my mum. I use IMAP clients, so I'd also be as stuck as her! Replacing all the nice text buttons with icons really doesn't help, and their spam filtering was getting too many false positives due to others marking mailing lists as spam instead of unsubscribing.
Finally the new compose view was the last straw. I signed up for Fastmail and migrated all my email accounts over, and I haven't looked back. Their web interface is simple and really fast. Search isn't as great as Google, but IMAP to my mail client sorts that for me. Spam filtering isn't as fancy as GMail, but I get fewer false positives - I'd much rather have spam hit my inbox than genuine mail get filtered out.
Plus Fastmail lets you write sieve filters if you're a power user, it's far better than the half-baked filters Gmail offers.
The only alternatives I will consider to Gmail are other web providers that take a few clicks to set up and can hold all my email forever.
I know that's not very 'hacker-ish', but, everything this article describes sounds so utterly unpleasant to suffer. Gmail obsoleted hosting your own mail, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm in the process of setting up my own email system but my biggest worry is incoming spam.
One of the reasons (thee reason?) Gmail is so good at blocking spam is because they have so many users using them that it becomes very easy to spot spam campaigns. But I also think it's true that the longer an email address is in use, the more targeted the spam becomes. Not because some evil script-kiddie turns his spambot up to 11, but because you'll start to get emails from legitimate people about things you're not interested in which aren't as easy to catch in a spam filter.
Another reason Gmail is good at blocking spam is because the answer to "what is spam" is influenced by every single user who tags a message as spam, or doesn't tag a message as spam. This is another critical-mass benefit that a small scale provider can't currently provide.
Given reputation systems and cryptography though, I also wonder if the only reason some kind of distributed email reputation database / system doesn't already exist (or isn't more widely known?) is because everyone assumes it isn't possible.
<pipedream>What if it wasn't you and your email server trying to catch spam, but you and every other independent server admin who runs their own email server. When a new email comes in you could check the reputation of the sender, you could check the reputation on the domain of any links, et al. Reputations would be signed and you wouldn't immediately trust the reputation report from new users, and wouldn't even need to trust reputation reports from email servers controlled by admins you don't know.</pipedream>
Couldn't you use your small size to an advantage, though? For example, when I ran a mail server over a decade ago for a small business, there were a couple dozen accounts. I would get email attacks that looked like they were being sent to "a@example.com", "b@example.com", "c@example.com", etc. Anything that went to these obviously bogus addresses, was spam and could be removed from the legitimate accounts (and blacklisted, of course). I wonder if there are other ways you could use the small number of accounts as an advantage?
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadWhat I don't get about this one is that the author, Christopher, put the email server on a Digital Ocean VPS. If I'm not mistaken, DO is a US company and the gov can probably get access to the server's contents as easily as to a Gmail account.
Of course, if Christopher uses PGP for everything, then the gov would still have to find a way to decrypt stuff. But PGP doesn't seem to be commonly used (yet).
I used to have a Gmail account too but switched to Fastmail about 16 months ago and recently renewed my account for 3 more years. It's reliable and the web client is crazy fast.
2 - Siphoning data from Gmail is much easier for three-letter-agencies than breaking in to coercing every VPS provider out there. Though the bigger and more popular the VPS provider is, the more likely it becomes that these agencies will go to the trouble of spying on them.
3 - Fastmail's servers are in the US.[1]
[1] - http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...
2- Not "every VPS provider", but the big ones, like AWS and DO. The NSA apparently had access to the fiber cable used by Google a few months back. They can probably easily get access to any other cable.
3- Yes, so? Did I say anything about me moving to Fastmail to get away from the US gov? The US gov will get to your data wherever you are if they actually need to. It's hopeless to try and hide your data. The only solution I see is encrypting it with something like PGP. They can easily find and save everything. But they can't decrypt everything. My move to Fastmail is about not having my email screened by robots to serve targeted ads. And making me less dependent on Google (which I think is the main topic of this thread).
They already have a datacenter there, it's fairly well connected (on top of multiple transatlantic cables), a sensible government and sensible, transparent judicial processes.
Not as well as you'd think. We see substantial packet loss to Iceland for long periods at least once a week, and very occasionally the entire country disappears from the internet (maybe every couple of months).
Also so far we haven't found a datacentre that we feel we can trust to care about reliability as much as we do. I've just spent the last four hours dealing with our entire Iceland presence being taken off the internet because someone at the datacentre misinterpreted our normal replication load as a denial of service and blocked the entire thing.
We're trying, but so far we do not have the confidence that we could reliably provide user-facing services from Iceland, or at least not to the standard that we do from New York.
Yep, me too. My primary reasons:
* I am moving back from Mail.app (+ Google Mail interface) to mutt. Google's non-standard IMAP drives my totally crazy. Now I use mutt-kz + isync + notmuch + msmtp. Thanks to mutt-kz/notmuch, I have full threads, even when they are cross folder and fast search.
* On the occasions I do need Webmail, Fastmail's web interface is indeed insanely fast.
* More control over filters, etc., down to writing Sieve scripts. (I don't use tagging in notmuch, since it is not portable to mobile, so I use virtual folders in mutt-kz with 'folder:' queries.)
* Google is becoming too large and intrusive, and I don't want all my data to live with them.
* I would rather support a smaller company that contributes back their improvements to an opensource IMAP server (here Cyrus).
At any rate, notmuch is absolutely brilliant!
- notmuch + mutt-kz shows me complete threads (including mails that I sent or mails that are in other folders).
- I can use Maildir folders as normal, meaning that changes are synced back and I see them on my phone and other computers.
Of course, this has the downside that an e-mail cannot have multiple tags, but I don't run into that issue much. I primarily use search when I look for something that is older than a few days.
My messy (and outdated) muttrc, if you are interested:
https://github.com/danieldk/dotfiles/blob/master/.muttrc
The only thing I want to change soon is to switch from the OS X address book (using the 'contacts' command) to the new 'notmuch address' command for contact completion.
After a year I decided I'd had enough and moved to runbox[1]. It's not that expensive and the peace of mind know I don't have to worry about my mail server is excellent.
1: https://runbox.com/
I'm also happier with the location. Runbox is in Norway and FastMail is in the USA. I'm based in the UK.
"FastMail is an Australian company and as such is subject to Australian law."[1]
[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/legal/privacy.html?domain=fast...
Fortunately I never made the switch. I do have a gmail account (actually, I have a google account which translates into having a gmail account as well). The only times I've used it is as a fallback for not being able to send mail from my own server because the ssh tunnel was unavailable. This happened maybe twice over the last decade, in both cases I could have avoided the issue if I had thought about it a bit longer.
So gmail was a way out of the bind, but as soon as that was resolved I used my trusty old mailserver again. Setting one up and maintaining it over the years is probably less work than moving out of gmail once you've decided enough is enough. Cost of switching is the way customer lock in is achieved in almost any situation, fortunately google make it relatively easy to get your data out.
Future product: family box. A simple rack mounted appliance a-la synology that takes care of the data, email, address books and so on of an extended family, administered by the family computer whiz. With an backup in the cloud via tarsnap to guard against mishap. A bit like a workgroup server but then applied to a family or some kind of loosely knit group of individuals.
With the option to migrate from one box to another if you want (and with forwarding in case you do).
https://arkos.io/
For many that was their work or school email address. For the average folks that was their ISP. It's one of the huge reasons there are STILL people using AOL.
Running your own mailserver has always been difficult (depending on your skill level). Gmail came out and provided people an option for an email address that was highly portable and accessible.
The family box is a nice idea, but relying on the goodwill of the family computer whiz is unlikely to provide people with a stable email server.
The opportunity regarding the family appliance, if there is one, is to make it self-managing.
Gmail entered later in the game and "bought" new users with massive free storage and a more modern web interface.
Gmail was really the first webmail usable as a person's only email address, lot least because of the 1G storage on offer.
I've noticed Gmail users tend to be unaware of alternatives and always wondered why that is.
In 1996, the anti-spam measures were totally different. Notice I'm saying anti-spam, not spam (even though of course there's no one without the other).
Getting a "clean" IP today on providers like DigitalOcean, is far from trivial. Several big players (from my personal experience, yahoo) will likely blacklist the entire net range with little or no options to get it unlisted. So sending out emails is a gamble. Setting up DKIM / SPF is also a minor hurdle and won't necessarily help that much. And that's just outbound emails, not to mention fighting incoming spam...
If we're talking about family (which is what my own mail server is used for) - they too are used to things like Google, so it's hard to compete in terms of integration and ease of use there. Explaining to my sister how to set her iPhone, or to my brother and his wife who want to access the same email account on two computers... things get tricky very fast...
iPhone supports IMAP just fine, so that is not much effort :).
But your point is true, operating a mailserver with reliable delivery is difficult, given the importance IP reputation. Badly maintained family boxes would just be a spam-nest.
Also, for the $40 per year I spend on Fastmail, it is not really profitable for me. Though I had a mail server for a while, when it was still fun ;).
What about password resets? Two factor auth? It's not just the email that's hard!
That might have happened even if gmail and hotmail had never been created. The deluge of spam is the main force behind the difficulty of running a mail server, particularly an outgoing-mail server.
What's with these endless bouts of Google-hate on HN? seemingly if there isn't anything going on at the moment someone would readily whip something out from the archives just to keep the Google-bashing going and they will be generously rewarded with karma.
What have they ever done to you?!
I don't dislike Google, but I think it's a problem that the vast majority of its users couldn't precisely articulate exactly how Google uses all the personal data they collect, from documents, searches, e-mails, phone usage, etc.
And I think it's improper to rely on the "people use Google voluntarily" canard. It's a classic case of information asymmetry: Google has all the information about how it uses personal data, and consumers don't. While I imagine most consumers understand that if they search for "laundry detergent" Google might show them ads for "Tide," what Google does goes far beyond that and I think very few people really understand what they are bargaining away in return for using their services.
Also there are the many articles the keep popping up about Google with various motivations behind them, I think "people" are more "aware" than you give them credit for.
Also don't you think that data is/are a major part of the functionality of these products? they operate on data, data collection isn't a side effect but it's built into the utility of such services almost by definition.
And no, it's not a Google-specific problem. Google is just the face of this new industry based on privacy-monetization, and the criticism it gets is to be expected based on its leadership position.
[1] And I think it's wrong-headed to infer consent from inaction.
[2] When you're talking about, e.g., Android, many users don't even realize they're interacting with Google services.
I understand writing such articles for general interest, but not sure, like the parent said about serial re-hashing of the same for the audience here.
In the end Google is the biggest advertising agency in the world. Advertising makes money by pushing people to make irrational choices - buy products and services that they don't need; buy from the vendor with bigger marketing budget, rather than superior engineering; overspend on stuff they need - e.g. cars, etc.
Airing out philosophical and theoretical disagreements with the ad model is merely a rationalization after the fact in this situation.
For more details, see:
https://mykolab.com/faq
https://mykolab.com/features
"Why haven't I got a reply yet? Are they busy? ... Or maybe I've misconfigured something... Maybe it got marked as spam... Maybe my SMTP server is fucked..."
I always found myself using my gmail account for critical stuff...
Got it setup with Virtualmin which auto sets-up ClamAV and SpamAssasin + email accounts and also installed Roundcube for webmail. Works a charm with any IMAP/POP3 email client I've tried it with too.
I have spent hours getting myself of blacklists after entire IP ranges were reported. I've spent hours working out why the hell Postfix won't talk to dovecot on a local socket, upgrading Linux distributions, postfix and dovecot and being fucked over by config format changes and periodically losing entire mailboxes to IMAP bugs. Oh and SELinux - hours of it.
The thing that finally killed it for me was Yahoo. My landlord uses Yahoo mail for comms and Yahoo just decided to stop accepting delivery from my server. It took a phone call from me asking him why he hadn't sorted something for me and for him to tell me that he didn't get the email to discover this. So I dredged through the logs, found an error from yahoo's mail servers saying I need to hit a web form to prove I was a legitimate sender. So I did that, and nothing, not a sausage happened. Googling around says I need to wait 6 months before submitting the request again.
I have no power in this situation. I can't email my landlord. I need to do business, not piss around with politics.
So in a fit of anger, I blasted my VM on Linode, went to my local supermarket, bought a Moto G2 in cash to replace my Lumia 630 (which was doing IMAP) that I just smashed the screen on, signed up for Google Apps free trial and just moved the domain over to that.
Just can't be fucked with it any more. I run "inbox zero" (i.e. I delete religiously) so there is no cost for me to migrate.
I don't care if they read my email or shop me to the feds; I'm tired of herding servers and software these days. A decade ago I could quite happily spend all day doing it but I have better things to do now.
however, it's not this bad if you have a 'real' infrastructure i.e. a colocated environment with your own IP space. it sounds like you were mainly dealing with the fallout from bad behavior from your neighbors on the shared network.
having said all that, it still might be worth a switch if you use google apps a lot (we do) because of the integration with gmail. we switched and now use IMAP to access our company google apps gmail. i really dislike the web interface.
It took a few hours to configure exim + dovecot + sieve plugin, but it has been running unattended for over a year (upgrades are automatically installed using unattended-upgrades[1]).
Spam is not a problem, I just use a different address for each service, and ban it if it starts getting spam. As an additional benefit, I know who failed to keep it private.
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
The only trouble I've had has been sporadically with Hotmail. Still don't know why, I get the bounce and contact the recipient from somewhere else. Even Gmail has these problems from time to time.
I just wanted to stick in another datapoint in the discussion, so not every post is about how awful email is. Sometimes it just works.
From two days ago: "Let's try this GPG setup, write a mail to my coworker's private GMail account and get a verification that everything checks out on his side".
GMail refuses the PGP/MIME mail, bounces after end of DATA, as 'Spam'. What?
Send the same mail to my GMail account. Works.
Send the same mail to my brother's GMail account. Works.
Send to coworker again: Bounces after DATA, refers to a useless website that offers Google's policies for bulk mails again.
Send a plain text mail to coworker, complaining about Google's mess: Accepted.
So.. Takeaway:
- Google randomly rejects mails from my server, without anything I can do and without providing any information WHY it would do that. Not filing as spam, rejecting outright.
- Google only did that with a mail that is unreadable (PGP/MIME). Coincidence? Make of that what you will..
I will keep my server though. And loudly complain to people that run broken setups. In this case I complained to this coworker of mine and wrote lots of expletives directed at Google - and the issue is resolved for me now. People with GMail addresses that don't get my mail are frankly not my problem and for friends and family I might be able to exert enough pressure to fix the problem.
All is setup automatically and your emails never go to spam and it can filter incoming email too. It makes the complicated easy even for people with no technical skills.
All is setup automatically and your emails never go to spam and it can filter incoming email too. It makes the complicated easy even for people with no technical skills.
I have an IMAP mailbox at an ISP, and all my web sites forward to it. The desktop and laptop machines use Thunderbird, and Android phones speak IMAP just fine. IMAP has pretty much solved the problem of multiple client devices accessing the same mailbox, and everybody has good spam filters and lots of disk space now.
So what do you need GMail for, anyway? Or any webmail system?
Right now I don't have sending setup for anything but through my apps. If I get something I really need to reply to (rare) I just email with my main address (setup with Gmail) and mention that this address should be used for further messages.
With a bit more work and getting outgoing email setup, then I'm sure it would work fine for my main address as well.
I moved to Google Apps when it was in beta, and I was quite happy for a while, but GMail kept getting worse. I also host my family's email, so when GMail changed I'd get calls from my mum. I use IMAP clients, so I'd also be as stuck as her! Replacing all the nice text buttons with icons really doesn't help, and their spam filtering was getting too many false positives due to others marking mailing lists as spam instead of unsubscribing.
Finally the new compose view was the last straw. I signed up for Fastmail and migrated all my email accounts over, and I haven't looked back. Their web interface is simple and really fast. Search isn't as great as Google, but IMAP to my mail client sorts that for me. Spam filtering isn't as fancy as GMail, but I get fewer false positives - I'd much rather have spam hit my inbox than genuine mail get filtered out.
Plus Fastmail lets you write sieve filters if you're a power user, it's far better than the half-baked filters Gmail offers.
I know that's not very 'hacker-ish', but, everything this article describes sounds so utterly unpleasant to suffer. Gmail obsoleted hosting your own mail, as far as I'm concerned.
One of the reasons (thee reason?) Gmail is so good at blocking spam is because they have so many users using them that it becomes very easy to spot spam campaigns. But I also think it's true that the longer an email address is in use, the more targeted the spam becomes. Not because some evil script-kiddie turns his spambot up to 11, but because you'll start to get emails from legitimate people about things you're not interested in which aren't as easy to catch in a spam filter.
Another reason Gmail is good at blocking spam is because the answer to "what is spam" is influenced by every single user who tags a message as spam, or doesn't tag a message as spam. This is another critical-mass benefit that a small scale provider can't currently provide.
Given reputation systems and cryptography though, I also wonder if the only reason some kind of distributed email reputation database / system doesn't already exist (or isn't more widely known?) is because everyone assumes it isn't possible.
<pipedream>What if it wasn't you and your email server trying to catch spam, but you and every other independent server admin who runs their own email server. When a new email comes in you could check the reputation of the sender, you could check the reputation on the domain of any links, et al. Reputations would be signed and you wouldn't immediately trust the reputation report from new users, and wouldn't even need to trust reputation reports from email servers controlled by admins you don't know.</pipedream>
Edit: Typo, clarification