I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal (http://http://baikal-server.com/) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier to set up and it's been working great so far. There's no web interface unfortunately, and the Thunderbird addon that connects to CardDAV (SOGO connector) is buggy at times too.
Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now. Owncloud is buggy, Sparkleshare seems like a "when you've got a hammer, everything's a nail" kind of solution, and I haven't tried Seafile yet because the configuration is intimidating and I haven't really heard anything about it.
Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Eventually I want to bite the bullet and host my own mail server (I still have nightmares from when I self-hosted email a few years ago) but in the meantime I've really liked Rackspace.
Hacker idea: Create an OSS self-hosted email appliance. Simple setup for a one-inbox self-hosted email server, including DNS, DKIM, spam filter, etc. No matter what anyone says Dovecot/Postfix is not for mere mortals and self-hosted email in general is so full of pitfalls it could be an Indiana Jones temple.
I must have missed something, did Google acquire Dropbox? Dropbox makes their money from the Dropbox product which is exactly why you should use a company like them instead of a borg offering. I prefer Sugarsync but there are no shortage of options.
git-annex-assistant provides a friendly Dropbox replacement, with a web-based GUI and a magically synced/shared folder. Supports Linux, Android, and (very early stages) Windows and OS X.
> Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Eventually I want to bite the bullet and host my own mail server (I still have nightmares from when I self-hosted email a few years ago) but in the meantime I've really liked Rackspace.
I currently use Gandi's mail servers, which you get free when you have a domain through them. I run my own IMAP server and move the mail to it with getmail, but I let Gandi handle SMTP receipt and delivery.
I have found their email to be very reliable. The webmail aspect is not perfect, and some of my clients have run into occasional issues with it. I almost always use an IMAP client app and never have an issue. You can get an upgrade and enable full mobile sync using (I think) MS ActiveSync.
I've set up a few mailservers mostly through manual changes to the configurations and if you just need something simple and secured with SSL/TLS, it's not too bad. From my experiences, the only major headache is how intricate you want your user and password configurations to be.
Looks like it is $2/inbox/month now: http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/
[iRedMail]: http://www.iredmail.org/
It is Ruby on Rails application with Ruby scripts to autamate installation and configuration of E-mail server. Post-install configuration is done throught web application.
Still in development but already usable. I opensourced it and I hope that somebody could contribute.
I used their service when it was Mailtrust, and continued on after Rackspace bought them without complaint, but that was when I could buy a single mailbox.
No, it's $10/month minimum. Even if you are just ine user you have to buy 5 user plan. And even per user cost is $2 and not $1.
There's no such solution that replaces Gmail. You look those services - one here, one there, one compromise, one arrangement etc. I wish there was one.
The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something?
Also, the article mentions that it "exceeds" the features of Gmail, but where the hell are all the features listed? I see nothing on any of the pages except for features like "Reliability" and "Easy migration" which tell me nothing about how it compares to GMail in features.
If this is an example of the best "alternative" to a Google product then the competition has a LONG way to go.
In terms of additional features:
- Support for Sieve scripts - LOVE this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language)
- Way faster loading time, snapper interface
- Lots more customizability (look at the display settings for an individual folder: https://files.app.net/1/79748/aXTHb4q16UPxgBvF2RCedd9jMSV2u4...)
- Some different interface features that I really like (your mileage may vary), like always showing starred messages on top for specific folders
There's lots more in terms of customizability and different weird configurations they allow you to do. They've done a pretty good job of hiding the complexity for non-power users, but it's still really accessible if you're willing to read through lots of preference screens.
There are some features FastMail does not have that Gmail does. The two big ones for me are undo send and composing in a new window (although you can just open the whole FastMail interface in a new tab and it only takes a second to load; opening Gmail in a new tab could take 10+ seconds in my experience). I use the FastMail web interface full time and am just as efficient, if not more, than I am with Gmail. The keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same, so there wasn't even a learning curve.
The code we run in production is all available to anyone who wants to play with it, though the usual caveats about "it's not particularly well tested for any configurations other than exactly the one we run" apply.
https://github.com/brong/cyrus-imapd/branches/fastmail
brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git log --oneline cmu/master..HEAD | wc -l 632
brong@prin:~/src/cyrus-imapd$ git diff cmu/master HEAD | diffstat | tail -n 1 149 files changed, 39060 insertions(+), 4314 deletions(-)
[1] http://blog.fastmail.fm/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-servi...
In order to do that, we would have to hold all outbound emails until a delay threshold was reached... I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
1) A black navigation bar across the top that doesn't help with email.
2) 300px wide box across the top right dedicated to a social network no one uses (not email related).
3) A loading screen when the page first loads.
4) New mail compose window (no need for an explanation here).
5) Ads
I'm 100% certain Google lets you get Gmail for your domain. You have to pay for it (but you have to pay for FastMail), and you get other services alongside Gmail, but it certainly exists.
You're still able to get a free one-user Google Apps for Domains account by going through Google App Engine. [1] I've used it to get catchall email addresses for any new domains I've recently registered.
[1] http://lifehacker.com/5967336/use-google-app-engine-to-get-g...
But Gmail/Google's ease of use is its USP. You can have chat in browser, GTalk, Adium, Android , Pidgin and all then synced to mail box.
You can have calendar everywhere, taks..you name it.
So, until some business - like FastMail, PoBox, come up with such close integration I don't think there's much sense to move other than privacy and paranoia. Because once outside you end up setting up a workflow dependent on very different services and worry which one is gonna break when and then look for sth else.
In terms of features, Fastmail does not do a good job of advertising its features. Just sign up for an account and check out the settings page. Its filtering is quite powerful, there's a SOAP API, and you can do stuff like automatically sort mail into folders. Eg, you could do me@bestbuy.kkinder.com and have it go into a "bestbuy" folder.
Any previous users of the free tier will still have their account for free, possibly until further notice, but there is no obvious indication that they'll just drop your free account (unless you're inactive for their specified time period).
I have two email accounts with Fastmail mostly because they were the only free email service that supported Yubikey, but aside from that feature, I would call them "just another email service."
I switched to Fastmail a few months ago, and I am extremely happy with it. IMAP is much faster (especially search). I love the Sieve support and the domain hosting, and beyond that, Fastmail has all the features I need.
The only downside so far is that the spam filtering is not quite as good as Gmail's. Even spam identical to stuff I have marked as spam keeps reappearing. But it's not bad enough to be annoying.
Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome.
These are not the alternatives you're looking for. People should definitely care about their privacy, and they should definitely live on platforms that encourage interop. However, these articles focus far too much on trying to frame Google as some evil actor, when we could be championing everything Google has done well and how their competitors -- alternatives -- should be doing better.
I'm not suggesting that Google is evil. What I am saying is, these products don't work for me and the reason they don't work is that they aren't interoperable with my own desktop software, or the rest of the Internet. I actually do use desktop calendaring software which will stop working this summer. I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk. I used to use Listen and Reader. I'm only looking to migrate off Voice because it's not going to be available. I was pretty perturbed when all of a sudden, anyone I ever emailed appeared as a pre-approved contact on Talk.
So, it isn't about Google being evil or not. Google has a responsibility to its shareholders to make money, and I trust that they're trying to fulfill that mandate as well as possible. In doing so, they've shifted their portfolio of properties into a closed ecosystem that does not appeal to me as a consumer.
At this point, I imagine most alternatives suck because there's really no point in going up against free and awesome. Case in point: Reader. Reader really was awesome, and it had no competitors because no one would bother competing with it.
I imagine that as Google does offend more of its users, some competition might heat up, but I'm well aware that for most people, none of this matters in the slightest. It's a narrow cross section of geeks who notice or understand any of this.
What's the software? Google CalDAV support isn't actually going away, it's just switching to a whitelist, so depending on your client, it should be fine. I don't know how that's going to work exactly (is it just an API key? how will that work with open source calendaring software like Lightning?), but if it's even moderately actively maintained software, it's likely that they've already applied for access.
> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection (from the article)
Just FYI, they turned federation back on shortly afterwards. Of course, it's being dropped for the new chat system, but it's worth getting that right.
> Fastmail is owned by Opera Software and operates both free and paid tiers of service
As others have pointed out, there is no free tier, just a free trial. And if you're going to pay for it, I don't really see the difference between that and going full Google Apps, but that's just me. (edit: ah, apparently there used to be a free tier, but no longer)
Regardless, paying for the services you use is a good thing, both for getting better guarantees for service, and for teaching the market that ad-supported services aren't the end-all be-all, that we can have other business models, and maybe even a diverse market of them to support different uses and different requirements.
> I actually do use desktop calendaring software which
> will stop working this summer.
> I communicate with people via XMPP who are not on Talk.
If Google actually does shut down support for either of these open protocols, feel free to object as much as possible. I'll be right there beside you. But right now you're jumping from "Google might possibly drop support at some indeterminate point in the future" to "Google will definitely drop support in a month", which is not supported by evidence.
That's pretty harsh. Firefox has always been for me the most awesome browser available.
It's true that Chrome delivered some niceties for user experience and performance, forcing Firefox to follow suit in some areas.
However, Chrome stands on the shoulders of giants, like Firefox and it wouldn't be a good browser without such shoulders. Google should be really thankful to Firefox and I'm sure they are.
Also, Firefox is improving by leaps and bounds lately and after several months of Chrome, I realized that I cannot live without Firefox.
(yes, I'm typing this from Firefox)
This is not going to be a popular view, but here goes anyway...
Depends. I've been using Outlook Web Access since it was first released. Granted, you need Exchange, but these days Outlook.com provides similar functionality (or so I'm told - I use Exchange Online now).
That said, the most useful calendar I've found is Family Room on Windows Phone. I share it with my girlfriend, who has an iPhone, and it works insanely well for us.
I have to use Gmail at work, and find it to be the most obtuse email UX I've ever encountered.
I almost wish we could pin a story like this just to cut some of those comments.
There are days when there will be multiple stories on the front page at the same time with comments asking, "what are the alternatives to gmail?" with the inevitable, "well, fastmail is a good choice" and then someone will bring up running your own server, and then someone else will respond about spam and blacklisting and downtime, and someone else will say something about they've been doing it for 5 years and it's not that hard, etc etc etc
Their resources have not stopped lesser alternatives from doing business, even with a core product (eg. search) of their's, so it's not that. DuckDuckGo is doing quite well with search; those conversations usually talk about quality and speed of results, not on how Google is the new Altavista and how you should switch before Google deprecates HTTP for GTTP.
Sorry but the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative perhaps with the exception of performance.
Opera was pretty awesome before Google turned up and release Chrome.
I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(
So far I've loved Fastmail. It's great having a real human respond to a support ticket, usually within a few hours!
Has few bells and whistles (which is a plus in a way - not infected with social disease) but does the basic read and sync quite well.
I've been using Feedly since the Google Reader announcement, and am quite happy with it.
I'd pay for it.
..
TurnKey Linux: https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/tour/cloud/ | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/?id=a05a35...
BitNami: http://bitnami.com/stacks | https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/?id=dbe648...
I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.
I've started looking into this with a view of building something so understanding what's important to folks is v useful.
What I want: 0) User selectable/delegable domains (it's ok IMO to use yahoo/gmail/aol/etc. today, if you know and accept the limitations. It's moronic or at best short-sighted to depend on an @yahoo.com, @gmail.com or @aol.com address, though.) 1) IMAP/activesync (push; imap-idle is nice but not sufficient) 2) Good anti-spam 3) Sane and/or configurable account-recovery procedures. Since email is essentially the master-key to your other accounts which use email-from auth for password recovery, it's a big target. This is a hard technical and policy problem. I'd like it to be something users can configure at account creation time in various ways, ranging from SMS/call from to "can't recover password". A good medium might be "takes 3-7 days to recover password with notification given in advance to all other means of contact, must use postal mail to confirm" or something like that.
It would also be nice to have: 1) Great search 2) Ideally, a webmail client. Ideally, as nice a webmail client as possible 3) Encryption wherever possible. The low hanging fruit is start-tls for SMTP and IMAP, and https for the webmail. Storage encryption would be nice; could be "encrypt mail to a public key as it arrives". 4) Support of S/MIME (and PGP, ideally) keys would be really nice; do some signature checking on the server side in the webmail ui? Run a keyserver? Issue s/mime identities to people who use accounts on your domain? Partner with a CA? 5) Configurable retention policies 6) Group/team/business features (address books) 7) Maybe calendaring 8) Maybe voice/sms too
My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.
For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.
This is directed more at the linked post than you, but it fits here: Sometimes I get half-way behind one of these screeds, because after all I do believe in open standards (and was pretty peeved about Reader). But then I look more closely and find stuff like this, which frankly sounds like yet another Apple nut trying to stick it to Android via proxy.
[1] Which, of course, maps are not.
However, I suspect it's the free aspect that everyone's bemoaning. :-)
My concern isn't really about the money, though the free calls through voice are nice. It's that Google voice has my number now (as a gizmo refugee), and that + a voip provider + cell provider could be condensed down to twilio on the desktop and wifi, and maybe cell data on a tablet, or prepaid cell as a backup.
The $1/month for a number isn't bad, international sms is awesome for my use case.
100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage
Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)
It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?
A $40/year e-mail-only service is comparable with the $50/year Google Apps?
If this is true, it makes fools out of everyone on HN who defended Google and poo-pooed the reaction to the XMPP spam move as being merely geek hysteria and paranoia and a massively overblown fit being thrown by prima donnas, saying that it was merely an anti-spam move and surely not a prelude to scrapping XMPP entirely.
He - and the rest of the leadership - have been asked about XMPP/CalDav/CarDav/RSS/Reader/<any topic related that has ever been discussed on HN> in person repeatedly.
Every week there is a global meeting called TGIF. The format is almost always the same - some announcements, a presentation or two about things that various teams are working on - followed by Q&A. There is an internal Google Moderator instance set up each week where questions can be submitted and voted on, and there are live microphones in the meeting room.
Generally at least one of Larry or Sergey are there (usually both) as well as the other senior leadership. They take the questions and they - for the most part - give pretty straight answers.
I can promise you that nothing that gets brought up here on HN doesn't also get brought up internally and debated intensely. The fact that this is possible and normal (even encouraged) is one of the things I love about working at Google.
Whether or not we like the answers that are given we at least get to hear the reasoning behind the decisions and get more insight into the thought processes of the people that are making the decisions.
We get to see, first-hand, Larry and Sergey talking about the larger plans. We get to see what they are passionate about. We get to see and feel their sincerity.
I truly wish I could share more of what we are told. I wish I could get across why I believe in the company and in the larger vision that Larry and Sergey have shared about where the company is going.
There is a reason that so many Google employees are so passionate about the work we do and about the company. It's not because we've "drank the Gool-aid" or because we get great food and other perks. It's because we get to see and experience first-hand what the leadership talks about and cares about - and we believe in what they are trying to do.
It's about making the world a better place. It's about doing things that nobody else can do. It's about doing things that most other people don't even imagine is possible.
Host: kkinder.com
Common name: .webfaction.com
Alternative subject names: regex([^.]
\.webfaction\.com), regex(webfaction\.com)It's not my certificate, it's your browser, which I assume is Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP? You're using a browser that does not support TLS, a cutting edge new technology that's over 10 years old. Get Firefox or Chromium.
Anyone know if its getting better/actively developed?
In summary: Bah.
Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on their chat client.
The author explains why he didn't consider them in his second paragraph: "Moving, for example, from Google Calendar to Yahoo Calendar solves very little in the long run, because Yahoo’s business interests are exactly the same as Google’s: advertising and consumer lock-in."
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda... [2]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...
Not saying that anything has changed -- I really have no idea -- but I'm not sure how prudent it is to base high-tech decisions off anecdotal data that is 4 years old.
* Horde Webmail (http://www.horde.org/) which brings
* Webmail,
* Calendar,
* Addressbook
* Tasks
* Notes
* Sync via Exchange ActiveSync or SyncML
(most mobiles incl. iOS and Android support it)
* XMPP server (http://prosody.im/)
* Multi IM transports (http://spectrum.im)
* XMPP webclient, Jappix (http://jappix.org/)
* Owncloud for files (http://owncloud.org/)
* SelfOSS for RSS (http://selfoss.aditu.de/)For my part I wrote a node.js server application that acts as a notification central: myhub (https://github.com/PaulFreund/myhub).
It captures events from different sources (xmpp, irc, mail, rss) and makes them accessible via Email summarys, RSS feeds or a webinterface which is only implemented for a Kindle interface right now.
That way I get a mail every five minutes if I got messages and my phone will notify me about that.
I do have two complaints (without having really looked into it yet). The first is that you have issues disabled on GitHub, and the second is that it took some effort to locate the Github link.
I suggest linking to the source in a more prominent way— perhaps on the downloads page. If I'm going to be using this, I'm definitely going to be interested in contributing.
I'm planning to switch to that one too. Moved away from mail / calendars etc a while ago. Talk has been keeping me attached. If I switch my domain to another XMPP provider using the same email address as in my google apps account, will the migration be seamless for my contacts (who are still using Google talk)?
I doubt your contacts will migrate unless you do it on the client side.
Since I didn't have Talk set up on my own domain, I'm SOL on that front. I just have to get everyone to re-authorize me.
From http://owncloud.org/support/calendars/
> The calendar needs your current position for detecting your timezone. Without the correct timezone there will be a time offset between the events in owncloud and your desktop calendar you synchronise with owncloud. You can also set the timezone manually in the personal settings.
After reading the article, it seems like the author hasn't looked too hard into self-hosted solutions.
https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html
It appears to depend on a physical key that I'll have to carry around with me. Gmail's MFA relies on an app on my iPhone which is far more convenient and they have a backup way of getting into the account with a hand-typed key that is very long.
Why is good web-based email MFA so hard to implement and why has Google been the only one to perfect it?
You can also set up a personal domain there for free, if you can read/translate Russian instructions at http://pdd.yandex.ru
Their web client for mail is localized into English.
Pros:
* Not google; yandex have rather good reputation here, and like google, they are tech company, with good engineering team
* A nice web-interface for mail (for my use case it's comparable to google's)
* Supports RSS feeds via mail interface
* Like google, there are interesting services: calendar, maps, search, translations, etc.
Cons:
* Basically, yandex is Russian google in terms of business (89% of their revenue is ads); however, they don't do hardware and don't have a facebook/plus-like social network
* Russian-based, so potentially a kgbfsb threat (never heard of any kgbfsb incidents, though)
* Some/most services are not localized for English speakers
We've been having an influx of users for our mail for domains product because it is free compared to what Google provides now. We also have an importer from Gmail that works via IMAP.
BTW, there's an XMPP service too but I don't think we have English docs for that.
The only FOSS organization which is capable of doing and promoting it on a large scale looks like Mozilla. They already have a few of those, and a Firefox OS phone is coming as well. Mozilla guys, are you listening?
It's by no means a complete Google Voice replacement (though one could presumably build one with some work using Plivo, the SIP provider I used).
Still use Google for search, though.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compar...
There are a lot of siloed web properties that I use without depending on them: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. I enjoy them but if they dissapear I can live with that.
Two we properties that I do depend on are Dropbox and Evernote, but I am a paying customer of each.
Does anyone have experience with both that and fastmail and can compare?
From a cursory exploration, you can get quite a bit (including quite a bit of storage) from zohomail at the free tier, compared to what you get from the $5/year (might as well be free) tier at fastmail. But fastmail may have lots of cool features if you do want to pay?
(Definitely interested in getting away from gmail. I've always had my own domain name for email, but it's currently hosted at gmail, using the no-longer-existing free google apps tier).
iCloud mail interface not just "pretty", but simpler and especially settings. So, after iCloud Gmail looks very cheap, if you don't use iCloud, you should to try.
It would seem that many server apps support open standards (SMTP, CalDav, XMPP etc.)
Your address book is the new friendlist instead of facebook's. Why not do the same with your email and calendar, etc. ? And dropbox is cool but you can easily have mercurial + watch files with node.js ... I think there's DVCS-autosync and OwnCloud is coming along
For example, would it free from the 13 years old limitation on account ownership?
They have the resources, the browser and the community to make it work.
I always say I'd like to have a myname@firefox.com account from where to manage all my web presence.
Imagine a hundred million people registering just to grab their vanity plate.
From there... profit!
Mozilla guys, if you are interested just reply to this thread, I'll contact you right away to get the ball rolling.
Netvibes has AJAX widgets for all one's needs. http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us