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Open-source alternatives to GMail
- werber 11y agoI've tried roundcube & squirrel mail, and wasn't able to maintain the switch. I support open source anything, but I need gmail level service for my e-mail.
- x5n1 11y agoThe problem is never the mail client and always delivering the actual mail.
- astazangasta 11y agoI used nmh + sendmail on a Dell sitting in my upstairs bar for years and never had much issue with delivery or receipt.
- x5n1 11y agoWell you must have a magical IP because I ran my own mail for 10 years and always have had delivery problems. Especially with Microsoft domains.
- stevekemp 11y agoThings like DKIM, SPF, and sensible reverse DNS make a difference. I've been running my own mailserver for ~10 years and pretty much never have problems with deliverability.
- jdhawk 11y agoNo mention of iRedMail (Roundcube included)?
- jlgaddis 11y agoTFA was simply a look at webmail clients. Since, as you pointed out, the webmail client installed as part of iRedMail is Roundcube, there wasn't any point in explicitly highlighting iRedMail.
- thehooker 11y agoWhy almost all of them look like they were made in the 90's?
- fortytw2 11y agoStrangely enough, email is a outdated protocol left over from the 90s, with its lack of seamless encryption, no real API standard (JMAP tries), etc... Seems fitting that clients look appropriately outdated.
- SwellJoe 11y agoSome of them were. And, UI is a hard problem that rarely gets a lot of attention in Open Source. For many reasons, designers very rarely donate time and effort to helping out OSS projects, while coders much more often do...so, even if the technical side of an OSS project is solid and reasonably modern, the UI may trail many years behind. It takes a few years to build a solid mail client with volunteer labor (or even with paid labor; Mailpile, while promising, is nowhere near ready for production use, for example), so none of the full-featured, stable, ones you'll find are newer than five+ years old, and many are much older, and often the designs were made as an afterthought by the developer rather than someone focused on design. Open Source has always had a problem with UI quality. That's not new, or specific to webmail. I don't know the solution (the webmail I work on, Usermin, is getting its first UI overhaul in about a decade, as we speak, and only because a good UI person stepped up and started working on it on a volunteer basis, and then we started paying him).
- r3bl 11y agoRoundcube is going to adjust its design. They have successfully funded their Indiegogo campaign[0] in July. [0] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/roundcube-next--2#/story https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/roundcube-next--2#/story
- ChrisArgyle 11y agoUnfortunately this article neglects one of Gmail's strongest features: superb turnkey spam filtering. Anyone with an email address older than 5 years is going to be buried in spam thus will need spam filtering with a super low false positive rate.
- sbierwagen 11y agoGoing through the hassle of setting up SPF and DKIM for my domain reduced the amount of spam I get quite a bit.
- ikawe 11y agoHow do those affect the amount of spam you receive? I thought they were just to make it less likely your outgoing mail would be marked as spam by someone else.
- cowsandmilk 11y ago> I thought they were just to make it less likely your outgoing mail would be marked as spam by someone else. Setting it up can mean that you check these things on the receiving end. Big difference between self-hosting and accepting all e-mails and self-hosting and checking the sender's SPF and DKIM.
- trumpd 11y agoYou can check incoming SPF/DKIM/DMARC regardless of whether you implement it for your own mail. That said, it will reduce bounce-back from spam that forges your domain.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoGoogle's spam filtering is currently useless, IMO. It's too aggressive, so you have to regularly check your spam box for messages. If I have to check the spam box regularly, why bother having one?
- leejoramo 11y agoThe are not real comparisons with Gmail with is a web-based client, an email server and a managed service. On this list, I believe at only Zimbra provides all of these options, but the article really only looks at the client. Having run my own email server for about 10 years (1996-2006), I eventually gave up due to the huge amount of work it took to stay secure, current with email server "policy" and deal with spam. I have always either run my own server or paid for the service. I have never used Gmail beyond a use as a testing and backup email account.
- stinos 11y agoMaybe have a look at mailinabox [1] on your own server, that would actually come close to a proper comparision? Have been running it under Docker for half a year or so and had no real problems so far. Setup is easy enough in comparision with a complete DIY server. Community is fairly active as well. [1] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
- kermit666 11y agoWith CloudFleet, we're trying to provide the complete self-hosted service for Mailpile. https://cloudfleet.io/ https://cloudfleet.io/ (currently in development - looking to launch around November)
- ChrisArgyle 11y agoSame experience here running a client's email server (Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, ClamAV) for 2 years. Spam filtering techniques (and subsequent techniques for circumventing them) are constantly changing.
- adders 11y agoI've used Virtualmin and Horde for my personal email service. Virtualmin does a very good job configuring Dovecot, Spamassassin, Postfix, DNS, Apache/Nginx, etc and Horde is a very good web client for email, contacts, calaendar etc.
- SwellJoe 11y agoI'm happy Virtualmin is working well for you. We've been working quite a bit lately on making Usermin nicer as a mail client, as well (not to discourage use of Horde or others; we also provide easy installers for Roundcube, SquirrelMail, and a couple of other webmail clients...some are even free in the GPL version). We're planning a major new release as soon as I finish the new website and we get some integration work done, that completely overhauls the UI in Virtualmin/Webmin and Usermin, which I think is the biggest issue with Usermin for webmail and one of the reasons I don't even use Usermin heavily for mail (I use Thunderbird on my laptop and GMail on my phone).
- tbrock 11y agoWhy does everyone make these with PHP? Serious question. Maybe it "just works" but all of these projects feel ancient to me because of their stack despite being brand new. Sure as a user it doesn't matter but as the maintainer/administrator I just don't want to deal with it. Modphp? Yuck. We don't always need to use the new new thing all the time but I can't shake the feeling that the same person who runs this is also rocking an unpached PHPMyAdmin and PHPMySQL.
- lorenzhs 11y agoThe same goes for forum software, but what bothers me more than PHP is that these things usually only work with MySQL. Is this due to shared hosting providers usually only supporting MySQL and not PostgreSQL, or what is the reason? I honestly don't understand.
- forgottenpass 11y agoThe Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack was the hotness about a decade ago, so that's the kind of hosting that was most available. Shared hosting was much more popular (physical hosting was more expensive, VMs were expensive and new, and tooling was worse). In 2025 someone might ask why $oldStack developers don't always do $newHotness. It's often the timing of popularity that tools grow together. This is just apocrypha, but MySQL was popular during the rise of PHP because MySQL was more performant on small databases on developer workstations.
- de_dave 11y agoProjects like this were often started many years ago, back when PHP was the language of choice.
- tbrock 11y agoOk, so then the right question is why aren't people starting these projects today?
- 11y ago
- bastion1704 11y agoIs it a joke ? SquirrelMail as a gmail replacement, did you used it ? I did for years and it is a pice of ... Zimbra is the only real contender here.
- lorenzhs 11y agoThere's also Mailpile, which looks and feels a lot more modern: https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ - unfortunately, the demo seems to be broken at the moment.
- jagermo 11y agoLooking forward to the release, but it will take some more time. And I'm fine with that.
- pascalmemories 11y agoI'm really surprised there is no mention of SOGo (http://www.sogo.nu/ http://www.sogo.nu/). It has a nice mail interface plus calendaring and even provides mobile device integration via an Exchange compatible interface (so your mobile device calendar and email integrates using the Exchange connector). I've never understood why it does not get more traction (or mention on HN).
- joshmn 11y agoThere is no open-source alternative to being a sysadmin, and there is no open-source alternative to your sanity.
- moreentropy 11y agoFeaturing: PHP, obsolete PHP, commercial software and a project that didn't have any commits in over a year.
- vblord 11y agoJust curious here... what is wrong with gmail? What does the open-source alternative have that gmail doesnt?
- moreentropy 11y agoSelf hosted. Not hosted in the US. Sadly that's increasingly becoming an important aspect for the rest of the world.
- vblord 11y agoAhh... that makes sense.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoLet's remember Gmail's primary business model is snooping and selling out customers. Best to not do business with such companies, esp if you have valuable data. Self-hosting was a great idea even before the Snowden leaks made it a better idea.
- moreentropy 11y agoGoogle's business model is about data mining and targeted advertising, not about selling someone's private, identifiable data. That's a big difference. Actually I trust Google more than anyone else that they do everything they can to keep anyone's private data private. The problem is that that doesn't help when a government agency walks in with a secret court order, be it legitimate or illegitimate. That's why european end users (and corporations w/ valuable IP) walk away from US based cloud providers or even want to go back to being all self hosted. You can't be 100% sure about your data safety with them and you'll be in deep trouble with your own customers if a data breach - be it lawful under US law, but not under european law - should happen.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThat's what they tell us and their main model. I'd have to carefully read the ToS to be sure. And regularly.
- quadrangle 11y agoThey failed to include ProtonMail https://protonmail.ch/ https://protonmail.ch/ which is actually hosted and secure and probably the closest thing.
- webwanderings 11y agoWhat's the experience like, is it worth investing time/energy in using this? I reckon that they are also suffering from the same problem, of people not being able to easily migrate from their long-standing email address(es).
- lorenzhs 11y agoIt doesn't fit into the article as it seems proprietary. The article is about open source webmailers.
- chojeen 11y agoIf you don't need open-source, but instead just want to migrate away from advertising-supported email, I find that FastMail works pretty great and is cheap to boot.
- zo1 11y agoI've found the mail app from Zoho to be very good (assuming you have your own domain). It's obviously not perfect, and there are always pros/cons when switching between apps. I found it relatively quick to setup and get working. And compared to Google-apps for business, it is free for X amount of users per domain. Not affiliated to them in any way, just thought I'd share what I've been using recently alongside my main gmail user account.
- alexvoda 11y agojust for the completeness of this tread there is also this alternative from the makers of the Opa language: http://peps.in/ http://peps.in/
- jakeogh 11y agoIt's not an alternative if you are looking for a web based interface, but I wrote gpgmda[1] (which integrates the alot MUA) to move myself off gmail when the TOS changed a few years ago. [1] https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda https://github.com/jakeogh/gpgmda
- oxprplsukxm 11y agoodofdopif