11 ms·

Decommission of Cyrus Email

144 points by Jerry2 9y ago

colechristensen 9y ago
It's really disappointing that nothing better than gmail has come along. There _are_ open source alternatives, but they aren't as good, that's all there is to it. Setting up a mail server is hard, not because it needs to be but because the software requires eldritch incantations to make it work properly (there are too many things to keep track of in order to A) get email delivered at all and B) not become a spam relay) It's possible to be something in between the "Just Works" walled garden that gives you no options or control and the archaic wizardry which requires a 2 foot grey beard to understand.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  For me, the killer feature of Gmail that's hard to compete with is spam filtering. I remember when people thought spam was single handedly going to make email unusable.
  - CPLX 9y ago
    Well we did get the flipside of that, which is that there really aren't many good open platforms where you can send digital communication that you can be sure will reliably reach someone, except for maybe SMS.
    - gogopuppygogo 9y ago
      SMS has the two faced downsides of being more expensive to use in large quantities than email alongside being highly regulated making it easy to prosecute those who choose to spam.
  - Tharkun 9y ago
    On the other side of that, sending mail to gmail can be rather challenging. They have a tendency of 541-ing mails for no apparent reason, under the pretense of "poor mail server reputation". Basically you don't control who gets to send you mails. You're entirely at Google's uncompromising and unreachable mercy.
    - andybak 9y ago
      Is this bulk mail? (I'm not implying spam - transactional or opt-in) I only ask because I don't recall any problems over the years with one to one emails either to my gmail or from me to other people's gmail accounts.
    - colechristensen 9y ago
      If you run DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, you shouldn't have any delivery problems. DKIM is signing your email with the public key in DNS. SPF is whitelisting which mail servers send mail from your domain DMARC is how receiving ends should report how your mail is delivered (or not). Unless you're actively spamming (ahem, "marketing") to large volumes of users, you should have no trouble at all getting mail delivered to users. If you are doing mass email marketing, stick with your core competence and let someone else handle the mail servers.
      - JoshTriplett 9y ago
        If you're not careful with how you do those things, though, then you'll be unable to send mail through quite a bit of standard mailing list software. It's possible to configure some (not all) of those in a way that allows mailing lists to work, but some of them are just completely incompatible.
        colechristensen 9y ago
        True. When it comes down to it, I'm on the side that says mailman is doing wrong when it modifies messages breaking their signatures. Here's some background https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DKIM https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DKIM
        JoshTriplett 9y ago
        I'm not a big fan of mailing list software that modifies the non-header parts of messages. But, for instance, some of the signature schemes utterly break the ability of a mailing list to send mails on to the rest of the list members while preserving all the headers.
  - JohnTHaller 9y ago
    Spam filtering is the killer feature for a lot of people. I'm using Rackspace hosted email on a paid basis at the moment. Any spammer that wants to can bypass the spam and manual filtering just by using UTF8 encoding on most of the message. It's been an open bug in the product for 2 years now and will likely never be fixed.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    Spam filtering is the "killing" features for my Gmail use. It traps way too much legitimate e-mail for me, to the point where I know I need to move off Gmail, it's just a matter of finding the time - I can't trust it any more.
    - acdha 9y ago
      That's really curious - my false-positive rate is really low (I do review my spam folder) and often arguably correct (e.g. legit senders who've hosed their SPF settings). Do you have an idea what's triggering the false positives – keywords, IP reputation, etc?
      - vidarh 9y ago
        I see a wide variety. E.g. anything that can generate bursts of mails, such as alerting tends to regularly end up in the spam folder and that's particularly problematic. And it keeps happening even though the sending addresses is in my contact list and I've repeatedly pressed "not spam". Newsletters I've signed up to and where they keep ending up in the spam folder despite me repeatly pressing "not spam". Personal, individual e-mail messages sent from Gmail by freinds. I've even had messages generated by Google get caught by the spam filters, including idiotically enough moderation reports from Google groups. The overall rate relative to my total e-mail volume is quite low, but it's enough that I have to check far more often than I'd like. It wouldn't be a problem if I had a reliable way of whitelisting addresses, but none of the methods seems to be consistently reliable.
        lloeki 9y ago
        I moved to FastMail lately and was pleased to discover that you could have some control over the spam filter[0], as well as useful advice: Note: We recommend that you do not mark your Spam/Junk Mail folder to automatically learn "As spam". This can create a false positive feedback loop. Imagine an email is incorrectly classified as spam, put in your Spam/Junk Mail folder, and then learned as spam. That means future emails that aren't spam are now more likely to be incorrectly marked as spam, sent to your Spam/Junk Mail folder, and learned as spam. Only mark folders to learn "As spam" if they're folders you manually move email to. Now on top of that say you're using a MUA and its own spam filter runs atop of that, and decides to move a couple of legit stuff to Gmail's spam folder, triggering the server-side spam learning process. Surefire way to screw the whole thing up (happened). [0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html?u=b83140ac https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html?u=b83140...
  - fencepost 9y ago
    Spam filtering seems to be pretty solved if you're beyond the single user level. I the thing I'd value more is malware filtering in attachments.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    For me, the killing feature is search. I'm used to being able to pull, say, the details of some order that I've made two years ago, based on a couple keywords that I vaguely remember.
    - danieldk 9y ago
      That's not exclusive to Google Mail. I have never noticed any regression in search since switching to Fastmail.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        It used to be that their search worked a lot better - but I've been using them since they were invite-only (I think it was 2004?), and haven't really looked much at other alternatives. One other thing that I kinda sorta like in GMail is labels (as opposed to folders). As I understand, it's not a popular feature, because there's no reliable way to map it to IMAP? So anything that assumes that IMAP (rather than a custom client or web app) will be used as a mail reader, will probably only provide folders.
        mavhc 9y ago
        What's weird is IMAP has keywords, but they can't be used exactly like labels, no idea why IMAP hasn't been extended to include labels, seems rather easy.
        brongondwana 9y ago
        The hardest bit when building a client is that keywords are per-folder, so unless you store all the email in a single folder server-side, you have to run the keyword search in every folder, every time, and you can't get updates to multiple folders at once, so you have to re-run that search frequently, which hammers servers pretty hard.
        raphman 9y ago
        Huh, I've been extensively using custom IMAP flags/labels with Opera M2. It worked great.
  - Semaphor 9y ago
    > For me, the killer feature of Gmail that's hard to compete with is spam filtering. I have absolutely no problem with Fastmail's spam filtering. Maybe Gmail changed things since I switched, around 3-4 years ago, but with both, I used to get 0-1 spam emails per month, though I haven't gotten any on FM in the last few months.
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  I don't qualify for a 2 foot grey beard yet, but if you set up /etc/mail/access to only accept your domain, virtualusertable to your emails only, you should be set. Oh, and configure fail2ban for sendmail. Oh yeah, and MX records take some time to update within popular services, so some gmail users might be able to reach you while others will get a user not found error. If you think about it, it makes sense, but it drove me nuts the first time.
- _wmd 9y ago
  One of the simplest things to do in software land is cloning an existing application, all the design work has pretty much been done for you and there is legal precedent even supporting direct rips of the look and feel of a UI (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor.... ). While it would be quite straightforward to clone an almost pixel-perfect version of Gmail, there is something in hacker culture that makes this kind of project unattractive. I don't really understand why. Instead what we end up with when someone starts a new mail app is some half-cocked design that makes sense for that particular user, who is always an engineer, and the result is suboptimal for pretty much anyone else. So the project fizzles and dies before it even gets started. This happens over and over again even for larger and more visible projects like Mailpile
  - zakki 9y ago
    Correct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._B.... I think you deleted the last "."
    - _wmd 9y ago
      Curious, looks like an HN bug. Try this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor...
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    You can clone the UI, but that's not where the work or the value of gmail is. Gmail is _fast_. The browser doesn't reload when you navigate around and when you click on something it gets loaded very quickly. You can't just put a shiny UI in front of an IMAP server and get this sort of functionality, you have to write your own mail server with a rather intense database backing it. I have 70,000 emails spanning a decade (mostly useless) and searching is a breeze. Everything works fine and quick with a huge volume of data. When I send messages they're actually sent in a second or two, when I click next message the next message appears in a fraction of a second. The UI is the frosting on the cake. It's critical that it's very fast, but the underlying mechanics have to be very fast too, and that's not just a manner of copying pixels.
- inimino 9y ago
  I'm using Mail in a Box, it's not perfect but it's pretty good, and no beard required.
- ReligiousFlames 9y ago
  Zimbra and Roundcube are the closest OSS solutions. After running an email startup, it's a very hard business to crack (people change email providers infrequently and what they're willing to pay doesn't justify investment except at massive scale.) Zoho is sorta free and good for BYO domain-based basic web/email.
  - KaiserPro 9y ago
    running zimbra is a massive massive faff. custom bundled ldap server with lots of java custom goop. Not fun to support at scale
    - ReligiousFlames 9y ago
      BTDTBTTS. That's an ignorant mischaracterization and it's not hard to do with competent staff. My team and I ran several full HA Zimbra (when owned by Vmware) deployments including major components MySQL, Lucene and Webmail (the only JVM components) OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, Nginx and various antispam plugins.
- duncan_bayne 9y ago
  > It's really disappointing that nothing better than gmail has come along. That's what I thought, until I discovered Fastmail. I'm now a happy family account holder, enjoying great support from human beings, and happy that my children won't be data mined for advertising (at least, not in this particular case). I'm not kidding about the support either. One of their developers was on Github helping out with an issue on an open source tool that, in the end, proved to be a problem with their implementation of a protocol. Fix was in Fastmail staging a week later, and in prod a few weeks after that.
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    CMU uses G Suite so they do have support and their email is not "datamined" >Unlike Google’s consumer offerings, which may show ads, we do not collect, scan or use your G Suite data for advertising purposes and do not display ads in G Suite, Education, or Government core services. We use your data to provide the G Suite services, and for system support, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spell-checking, capacity planning, traffic routing, and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.
    - duncan_bayne 9y ago
      > CMU uses G Suite so they do have support and their email is not "datamined" Sure. I was talking about their "consumer" offerings though.
    - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
      I'd think very hard about that "for advertising purposes" hedge before claiming fully that mail is not mined. It's also not clear if "collect" and "scan" attach to that hedge as well, or if they're in totality and "use" is the only one hedged. Oxford commas have become relevant in contract law before, oddly enough. I agree it's unlikely, I'm just saying your quote leaves several possibilities open in unkind interpretations.
0x0 9y ago
The big story here is that CMU appears to be the actual developers and maintainers of the Cyrus IMAP mail software, no?
- brongondwana 9y ago
  CMU still employs one of the Cyrus IMAP developers for now, but FastMail has been sponsoring the bulk of the development work for a while. We (the Cyrus IMAP board - https://www.cyrusimap.org/overview/cyrus_bylaws.html https://www.cyrusimap.org/overview/cyrus_bylaws.html) are looking for a new home for the project which is independent of any one single company. I'd hoped to have more news to post before this was made quite so public!
  - teddyh 9y ago
    Might I suggest the Software Freedom Conservancy? (https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/ https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/)
    - brongondwana 9y ago
      Thanks, they're one of our top two contenders for a new home :) I was going to contact them last week, but the week became a bit busy because we had overseas staff in the office and wanted to use the time with them for face-to-face tasks.
shirro 9y ago
Perhaps they should have tried Dovecot.
- creeble 9y ago
  Indeed, one surprise here is that Cyrus is still around. Sad that gmail now owns ~50% of all email now though. (I made that number up. Anyone have any idea how close it may be?)
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    For personal email addresses in the US, my experience would put that number closer to 80%. In some audiences, it'll be even higher.
    - nocman 9y ago
      And even for the people who have non-Gmail accounts, Google has made deals with a ton of ISPs to host their email service for them -- so you have a Gmail account even if don't have a Gmail account (in a manner of speaking).
      - tinus_hn 9y ago
        Do people still use ISP email addresses?
        nocman 9y ago
        Yes people do. I know a lot of people don't, but there are still a lot of people who do.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  Cyrus isn't particularly inferior to Dovecot. Dovecot is a newer project (but still quite old), and thus maybe a little less crufty. But, I don't know anyone that considers Cyrus to be a bad tool or poorly maintained. I chose Dovecot for Virtualmin a dozen years ago, but it wasn't because Cyrus was bad. Dovecot has some advantages, but Cyrus has a few, too; Cyrus is much further along on their JMAP implementation than Dovecot, for example, as far as I can tell.
brongondwana 9y ago
Cyrus development will not be affected by this. While CMU has been running Cyrus, and employing one of the key developers, FastMail has a team dedicated to supporting the biggest open source project that we use. We have a new developer starting on Wednesday next week as well as Ken from CMU who has agreed to keep working on Cyrus as a FastMail employee and representing the project at conferences. We are committed to improving the project and keeping it open. As a member of the Cyrus IMAP board, I'm very proud of the 3.0 release that we recently made, and we're currently planning for the 3.1 release which will include further significant improvements.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  That's great news. We've been considering migrating to Cyrus instead of Dovecot in Virtualmin default installs, as Cyrus seems much closer to JMAP support and we're planning a rebuild of our webmail to use JMAP. I often worry about infrastructure projects like IMAP, SMTP, DNS, SSH, OpenSSL, etc. They often have very small teams, mostly volunteers, and the implications of a bug, particularly a security bug, can be catastrophic. And, if something we rely on were to be abandoned, we'd probably be screwed; even in cases where we have the technical ability in-house to maintain another major project, we don't have the time (or the budget to add more people to our small team).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    This worry is why we try to keep in-house expertise for our key tools. That's what got me hacking on Cyrus about 8 years ago to fix some problems we had - and look at us now!
- fencepost 9y ago
  I was concerned about what it might mean for Kolab, so I'm glad to hear you're keeping it alive. Though admittedly I'm inclined to move the customer I have using it to Office365 hosted Exchange since they recently decided (against advice) that it was Very Important that their users start using Outlook which has meant a shift to local PST files.
Tharkun 9y ago
Ah yes. Just what the world needs: more organizations throwing their data over the fence at Google's walled garden. We might as well decomission decentralized e-mail and move everyone on to GMail and FB Messenger. Sigh.
- a2tech 9y ago
  Yup. Computers and the open Internet that we grew up with/believed in is being trashed for 'free' products.
a2tech 9y ago
The university that I work at switched over to Gmail and its been a big step back in terms of user experience. We canned a small team of dedicated professionals that delivered a rock solid experience for a 'free' option from Google. And since its IMAP implementation is half-assed at best and their web product is also super difficult for older people (and don't even get me started on disabled users-Gmail is completely inaccessible for them) our support requests have skyrocketed and we've got people constantly whining. So we've replaced 5 guys with a data mining product and support costs that would easily cover their salaries. A real net gain.
- sitharus 9y ago
  I switch my family email from google apps to fastmail because I got sick of the support calls every time google changed the UI, which seemed to be monthly. Fastmail has been rock solid and lives up to its name. The spam filtering isn't as good, but Google's false positive rate is atrocious
  - incompatible 9y ago
    Fastmail isn't free anymore though, it's $30 or more per year.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      Good products cost money.
      - a3n 9y ago
        If "cost money" means that the user pays for the product ... I didn't pay for my Linux desktop, I think it's pretty good. :) But I do pay for my Fastmail service. :) :)
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - 9y ago
dboreham 9y ago
Amazing how long some code lasts. Fond memories of working once in a while with John Gardiner Myers in the 90s.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Hey excellent, maybe you can explain why <...> :p
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- leg 9y ago
  Yeah, John is great. His Unicode handling in Cyrus was way ahead of it's time. I left CMU & the project 14 years ago. It's nice to know that some code lives on.
minimaxir 9y ago
As a CMU alum, the benefits of Gmail outweigh the sheer frustration using the SquirrelMail web client in the public computer clusters.
- hueving 9y ago
  >the benefits of Gmail outweigh the sheer frustration using the SquirrelMail web This sentence doesn't really make sense. When comparing two things an advantage of one thing doesn't "outweigh" a disadvantage of another. Those are both negatives for the second thing.
  - ryandvm 9y ago
    That may be the most pedantic comment I've ever seen.
  - Ensorceled 9y ago
    So you actually didn't understand what was meant by the sentence?
    - hueving 9y ago
      No, because it implies there is a tradeoff but doesn't highlight what that tradeoff is.
  - zhte415 9y ago
    Have you never used SquirrelMail?
- fencepost 9y ago
  SquirrelMail is just one client, and from what I recall it's one designed to me minimalist. I suspect that Roundcube or Horde might be more acceptable to you if made available.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    Zimbra community edition? One of my employers uses Zimbra on their own servers. Does a Web based calendar and email and seems to work OK.
hueving 9y ago
This is sad, Red Hat switching to Gmail was probably the most shocking to me since it's supposed to be a company pushing open source forward.
- mgbmtl 9y ago
  Do you have any reference about that? I could not tell just by looking at their MX record, and the subject is difficult to google.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  the IPs for redhat's MXs are still redhat owned, unless they are doing some kind of proxy setup, seems like they still control their own mail.
stefantalpalaru 9y ago
Brought to you by the people who attacked Tor for the feds: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-mellon-university-attacked-tor-was-subpoenaed-by-feds https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-mellon-u...
bitmapbrother 9y ago
As expected, the Fastmail pitchmen are out in full force anytime the word email is in the topic. As the article stated they have a choice of Gmail or Exchange.
- brongondwana 9y ago
  Yeah, I got tagged in to talk about Cyrus, as one of the Cyrus IMAP Board. But of course I'll talk about FastMail too, since we do most of the work on Cyrus these days.
Faaak 9y ago
What we need is a complete open source "work email" solution: email, calendar, tasks, address book. I have to say that exchange is very good at that, but its not open source. I would pay, and it would be wonderful, if an open source project similar to exchange gave birth.
- codefined 9y ago
  I've been trying to create a complete open source solution to this exact problem, although I've only been working on it for a month and so far have only semi-complete the email part of it. You can see the current iteration of it here: https://github.com/femto-email/client https://github.com/femto-email/client

144 points by Jerry2 9y ago

It's really disappointing that nothing better than gmail has come along. There _are_ open source alternatives, but they aren't as good, that's all there is to it. Setting up a mail server is hard, not because it needs to be but because the software requires eldritch incantations to make it work properly (there are too many things to keep track of in order to A) get email delivered at all and B) not become a spam relay) It's possible to be something in between the "Just Works" walled garden that gives you no options or control and the archaic wizardry which requires a 2 foot grey beard to understand.

paulddraper 9y ago
For me, the killer feature of Gmail that's hard to compete with is spam filtering. I remember when people thought spam was single handedly going to make email unusable.
- CPLX 9y ago
  Well we did get the flipside of that, which is that there really aren't many good open platforms where you can send digital communication that you can be sure will reliably reach someone, except for maybe SMS.
  - gogopuppygogo 9y ago
    SMS has the two faced downsides of being more expensive to use in large quantities than email alongside being highly regulated making it easy to prosecute those who choose to spam.
- Tharkun 9y ago
  On the other side of that, sending mail to gmail can be rather challenging. They have a tendency of 541-ing mails for no apparent reason, under the pretense of "poor mail server reputation". Basically you don't control who gets to send you mails. You're entirely at Google's uncompromising and unreachable mercy.
  - andybak 9y ago
    Is this bulk mail? (I'm not implying spam - transactional or opt-in) I only ask because I don't recall any problems over the years with one to one emails either to my gmail or from me to other people's gmail accounts.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    If you run DKIM, SPF, and DMARC, you shouldn't have any delivery problems. DKIM is signing your email with the public key in DNS. SPF is whitelisting which mail servers send mail from your domain DMARC is how receiving ends should report how your mail is delivered (or not). Unless you're actively spamming (ahem, "marketing") to large volumes of users, you should have no trouble at all getting mail delivered to users. If you are doing mass email marketing, stick with your core competence and let someone else handle the mail servers.
    - JoshTriplett 9y ago
      If you're not careful with how you do those things, though, then you'll be unable to send mail through quite a bit of standard mailing list software. It's possible to configure some (not all) of those in a way that allows mailing lists to work, but some of them are just completely incompatible.
      - colechristensen 9y ago
        True. When it comes down to it, I'm on the side that says mailman is doing wrong when it modifies messages breaking their signatures. Here's some background https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DKIM https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DKIM
        JoshTriplett 9y ago
        I'm not a big fan of mailing list software that modifies the non-header parts of messages. But, for instance, some of the signature schemes utterly break the ability of a mailing list to send mails on to the rest of the list members while preserving all the headers.
- JohnTHaller 9y ago
  Spam filtering is the killer feature for a lot of people. I'm using Rackspace hosted email on a paid basis at the moment. Any spammer that wants to can bypass the spam and manual filtering just by using UTF8 encoding on most of the message. It's been an open bug in the product for 2 years now and will likely never be fixed.
- vidarh 9y ago
  Spam filtering is the "killing" features for my Gmail use. It traps way too much legitimate e-mail for me, to the point where I know I need to move off Gmail, it's just a matter of finding the time - I can't trust it any more.
  - acdha 9y ago
    That's really curious - my false-positive rate is really low (I do review my spam folder) and often arguably correct (e.g. legit senders who've hosed their SPF settings). Do you have an idea what's triggering the false positives – keywords, IP reputation, etc?
    - vidarh 9y ago
      I see a wide variety. E.g. anything that can generate bursts of mails, such as alerting tends to regularly end up in the spam folder and that's particularly problematic. And it keeps happening even though the sending addresses is in my contact list and I've repeatedly pressed "not spam". Newsletters I've signed up to and where they keep ending up in the spam folder despite me repeatly pressing "not spam". Personal, individual e-mail messages sent from Gmail by freinds. I've even had messages generated by Google get caught by the spam filters, including idiotically enough moderation reports from Google groups. The overall rate relative to my total e-mail volume is quite low, but it's enough that I have to check far more often than I'd like. It wouldn't be a problem if I had a reliable way of whitelisting addresses, but none of the methods seems to be consistently reliable.
      - lloeki 9y ago
        I moved to FastMail lately and was pleased to discover that you could have some control over the spam filter[0], as well as useful advice: Note: We recommend that you do not mark your Spam/Junk Mail folder to automatically learn "As spam". This can create a false positive feedback loop. Imagine an email is incorrectly classified as spam, put in your Spam/Junk Mail folder, and then learned as spam. That means future emails that aren't spam are now more likely to be incorrectly marked as spam, sent to your Spam/Junk Mail folder, and learned as spam. Only mark folders to learn "As spam" if they're folders you manually move email to. Now on top of that say you're using a MUA and its own spam filter runs atop of that, and decides to move a couple of legit stuff to Gmail's spam folder, triggering the server-side spam learning process. Surefire way to screw the whole thing up (happened). [0]: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html?u=b83140ac https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/stopspam.html?u=b83140...
- fencepost 9y ago
  Spam filtering seems to be pretty solved if you're beyond the single user level. I the thing I'd value more is malware filtering in attachments.
- int_19h 9y ago
  For me, the killing feature is search. I'm used to being able to pull, say, the details of some order that I've made two years ago, based on a couple keywords that I vaguely remember.
  - danieldk 9y ago
    That's not exclusive to Google Mail. I have never noticed any regression in search since switching to Fastmail.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      It used to be that their search worked a lot better - but I've been using them since they were invite-only (I think it was 2004?), and haven't really looked much at other alternatives. One other thing that I kinda sorta like in GMail is labels (as opposed to folders). As I understand, it's not a popular feature, because there's no reliable way to map it to IMAP? So anything that assumes that IMAP (rather than a custom client or web app) will be used as a mail reader, will probably only provide folders.
      - mavhc 9y ago
        What's weird is IMAP has keywords, but they can't be used exactly like labels, no idea why IMAP hasn't been extended to include labels, seems rather easy.
        brongondwana 9y ago
        The hardest bit when building a client is that keywords are per-folder, so unless you store all the email in a single folder server-side, you have to run the keyword search in every folder, every time, and you can't get updates to multiple folders at once, so you have to re-run that search frequently, which hammers servers pretty hard.
        raphman 9y ago
        Huh, I've been extensively using custom IMAP flags/labels with Opera M2. It worked great.
- Semaphor 9y ago
  > For me, the killer feature of Gmail that's hard to compete with is spam filtering. I have absolutely no problem with Fastmail's spam filtering. Maybe Gmail changed things since I switched, around 3-4 years ago, but with both, I used to get 0-1 spam emails per month, though I haven't gotten any on FM in the last few months.
tambourine_man 9y ago
I don't qualify for a 2 foot grey beard yet, but if you set up /etc/mail/access to only accept your domain, virtualusertable to your emails only, you should be set. Oh, and configure fail2ban for sendmail. Oh yeah, and MX records take some time to update within popular services, so some gmail users might be able to reach you while others will get a user not found error. If you think about it, it makes sense, but it drove me nuts the first time.
_wmd 9y ago
One of the simplest things to do in software land is cloning an existing application, all the design work has pretty much been done for you and there is legal precedent even supporting direct rips of the look and feel of a UI (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor.... ). While it would be quite straightforward to clone an almost pixel-perfect version of Gmail, there is something in hacker culture that makes this kind of project unattractive. I don't really understand why. Instead what we end up with when someone starts a new mail app is some half-cocked design that makes sense for that particular user, who is always an engineer, and the result is suboptimal for pretty much anyone else. So the project fizzles and dies before it even gets started. This happens over and over again even for larger and more visible projects like Mailpile
- zakki 9y ago
  Correct link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._B.... I think you deleted the last "."
  - _wmd 9y ago
    Curious, looks like an HN bug. Try this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Borland_International,_Inc%2e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Development_Corp._v._Bor...
- colechristensen 9y ago
  You can clone the UI, but that's not where the work or the value of gmail is. Gmail is _fast_. The browser doesn't reload when you navigate around and when you click on something it gets loaded very quickly. You can't just put a shiny UI in front of an IMAP server and get this sort of functionality, you have to write your own mail server with a rather intense database backing it. I have 70,000 emails spanning a decade (mostly useless) and searching is a breeze. Everything works fine and quick with a huge volume of data. When I send messages they're actually sent in a second or two, when I click next message the next message appears in a fraction of a second. The UI is the frosting on the cake. It's critical that it's very fast, but the underlying mechanics have to be very fast too, and that's not just a manner of copying pixels.
inimino 9y ago
I'm using Mail in a Box, it's not perfect but it's pretty good, and no beard required.
ReligiousFlames 9y ago
Zimbra and Roundcube are the closest OSS solutions. After running an email startup, it's a very hard business to crack (people change email providers infrequently and what they're willing to pay doesn't justify investment except at massive scale.) Zoho is sorta free and good for BYO domain-based basic web/email.
- KaiserPro 9y ago
  running zimbra is a massive massive faff. custom bundled ldap server with lots of java custom goop. Not fun to support at scale
  - ReligiousFlames 9y ago
    BTDTBTTS. That's an ignorant mischaracterization and it's not hard to do with competent staff. My team and I ran several full HA Zimbra (when owned by Vmware) deployments including major components MySQL, Lucene and Webmail (the only JVM components) OpenLDAP, Postfix, Dovecot, Nginx and various antispam plugins.
duncan_bayne 9y ago
> It's really disappointing that nothing better than gmail has come along. That's what I thought, until I discovered Fastmail. I'm now a happy family account holder, enjoying great support from human beings, and happy that my children won't be data mined for advertising (at least, not in this particular case). I'm not kidding about the support either. One of their developers was on Github helping out with an issue on an open source tool that, in the end, proved to be a problem with their implementation of a protocol. Fix was in Fastmail staging a week later, and in prod a few weeks after that.
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  CMU uses G Suite so they do have support and their email is not "datamined" >Unlike Google’s consumer offerings, which may show ads, we do not collect, scan or use your G Suite data for advertising purposes and do not display ads in G Suite, Education, or Government core services. We use your data to provide the G Suite services, and for system support, such as spam filtering, virus detection, spell-checking, capacity planning, traffic routing, and the ability to search for emails and files within an individual account.
  - duncan_bayne 9y ago
    > CMU uses G Suite so they do have support and their email is not "datamined" Sure. I was talking about their "consumer" offerings though.
  - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
    I'd think very hard about that "for advertising purposes" hedge before claiming fully that mail is not mined. It's also not clear if "collect" and "scan" attach to that hedge as well, or if they're in totality and "use" is the only one hedged. Oxford commas have become relevant in contract law before, oddly enough. I agree it's unlikely, I'm just saying your quote leaves several possibilities open in unkind interpretations.

0x0 9y ago

The big story here is that CMU appears to be the actual developers and maintainers of the Cyrus IMAP mail software, no?

brongondwana 9y ago
CMU still employs one of the Cyrus IMAP developers for now, but FastMail has been sponsoring the bulk of the development work for a while. We (the Cyrus IMAP board - https://www.cyrusimap.org/overview/cyrus_bylaws.html https://www.cyrusimap.org/overview/cyrus_bylaws.html) are looking for a new home for the project which is independent of any one single company. I'd hoped to have more news to post before this was made quite so public!
- teddyh 9y ago
  Might I suggest the Software Freedom Conservancy? (https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/ https://sfconservancy.org/projects/apply/)
  - brongondwana 9y ago
    Thanks, they're one of our top two contenders for a new home :) I was going to contact them last week, but the week became a bit busy because we had overseas staff in the office and wanted to use the time with them for face-to-face tasks.

shirro 9y ago

Perhaps they should have tried Dovecot.

creeble 9y ago
Indeed, one surprise here is that Cyrus is still around. Sad that gmail now owns ~50% of all email now though. (I made that number up. Anyone have any idea how close it may be?)
- duskwuff 9y ago
  For personal email addresses in the US, my experience would put that number closer to 80%. In some audiences, it'll be even higher.
  - nocman 9y ago
    And even for the people who have non-Gmail accounts, Google has made deals with a ton of ISPs to host their email service for them -- so you have a Gmail account even if don't have a Gmail account (in a manner of speaking).
    - tinus_hn 9y ago
      Do people still use ISP email addresses?
      - nocman 9y ago
        Yes people do. I know a lot of people don't, but there are still a lot of people who do.
SwellJoe 9y ago
Cyrus isn't particularly inferior to Dovecot. Dovecot is a newer project (but still quite old), and thus maybe a little less crufty. But, I don't know anyone that considers Cyrus to be a bad tool or poorly maintained. I chose Dovecot for Virtualmin a dozen years ago, but it wasn't because Cyrus was bad. Dovecot has some advantages, but Cyrus has a few, too; Cyrus is much further along on their JMAP implementation than Dovecot, for example, as far as I can tell.

brongondwana 9y ago

Cyrus development will not be affected by this. While CMU has been running Cyrus, and employing one of the key developers, FastMail has a team dedicated to supporting the biggest open source project that we use. We have a new developer starting on Wednesday next week as well as Ken from CMU who has agreed to keep working on Cyrus as a FastMail employee and representing the project at conferences. We are committed to improving the project and keeping it open. As a member of the Cyrus IMAP board, I'm very proud of the 3.0 release that we recently made, and we're currently planning for the 3.1 release which will include further significant improvements.

SwellJoe 9y ago
That's great news. We've been considering migrating to Cyrus instead of Dovecot in Virtualmin default installs, as Cyrus seems much closer to JMAP support and we're planning a rebuild of our webmail to use JMAP. I often worry about infrastructure projects like IMAP, SMTP, DNS, SSH, OpenSSL, etc. They often have very small teams, mostly volunteers, and the implications of a bug, particularly a security bug, can be catastrophic. And, if something we rely on were to be abandoned, we'd probably be screwed; even in cases where we have the technical ability in-house to maintain another major project, we don't have the time (or the budget to add more people to our small team).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- brongondwana 9y ago
  This worry is why we try to keep in-house expertise for our key tools. That's what got me hacking on Cyrus about 8 years ago to fix some problems we had - and look at us now!
fencepost 9y ago
I was concerned about what it might mean for Kolab, so I'm glad to hear you're keeping it alive. Though admittedly I'm inclined to move the customer I have using it to Office365 hosted Exchange since they recently decided (against advice) that it was Very Important that their users start using Outlook which has meant a shift to local PST files.

Tharkun 9y ago

Ah yes. Just what the world needs: more organizations throwing their data over the fence at Google's walled garden. We might as well decomission decentralized e-mail and move everyone on to GMail and FB Messenger. Sigh.

a2tech 9y ago
Yup. Computers and the open Internet that we grew up with/believed in is being trashed for 'free' products.

a2tech 9y ago

The university that I work at switched over to Gmail and its been a big step back in terms of user experience. We canned a small team of dedicated professionals that delivered a rock solid experience for a 'free' option from Google. And since its IMAP implementation is half-assed at best and their web product is also super difficult for older people (and don't even get me started on disabled users-Gmail is completely inaccessible for them) our support requests have skyrocketed and we've got people constantly whining. So we've replaced 5 guys with a data mining product and support costs that would easily cover their salaries. A real net gain.

sitharus 9y ago
I switch my family email from google apps to fastmail because I got sick of the support calls every time google changed the UI, which seemed to be monthly. Fastmail has been rock solid and lives up to its name. The spam filtering isn't as good, but Google's false positive rate is atrocious
- incompatible 9y ago
  Fastmail isn't free anymore though, it's $30 or more per year.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Good products cost money.
    - a3n 9y ago
      If "cost money" means that the user pays for the product ... I didn't pay for my Linux desktop, I think it's pretty good. :) But I do pay for my Fastmail service. :) :)
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - 9y ago

dboreham 9y ago

Amazing how long some code lasts. Fond memories of working once in a while with John Gardiner Myers in the 90s.

brongondwana 9y ago
Hey excellent, maybe you can explain why <...> :p
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
leg 9y ago
Yeah, John is great. His Unicode handling in Cyrus was way ahead of it's time. I left CMU & the project 14 years ago. It's nice to know that some code lives on.

minimaxir 9y ago

As a CMU alum, the benefits of Gmail outweigh the sheer frustration using the SquirrelMail web client in the public computer clusters.

hueving 9y ago
>the benefits of Gmail outweigh the sheer frustration using the SquirrelMail web This sentence doesn't really make sense. When comparing two things an advantage of one thing doesn't "outweigh" a disadvantage of another. Those are both negatives for the second thing.
- ryandvm 9y ago
  That may be the most pedantic comment I've ever seen.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  So you actually didn't understand what was meant by the sentence?
  - hueving 9y ago
    No, because it implies there is a tradeoff but doesn't highlight what that tradeoff is.
- zhte415 9y ago
  Have you never used SquirrelMail?
fencepost 9y ago
SquirrelMail is just one client, and from what I recall it's one designed to me minimalist. I suspect that Roundcube or Horde might be more acceptable to you if made available.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Zimbra community edition? One of my employers uses Zimbra on their own servers. Does a Web based calendar and email and seems to work OK.

hueving 9y ago

This is sad, Red Hat switching to Gmail was probably the most shocking to me since it's supposed to be a company pushing open source forward.

mgbmtl 9y ago
Do you have any reference about that? I could not tell just by looking at their MX record, and the subject is difficult to google.
throwaway2048 9y ago
the IPs for redhat's MXs are still redhat owned, unless they are doing some kind of proxy setup, seems like they still control their own mail.

stefantalpalaru 9y ago

Brought to you by the people who attacked Tor for the feds: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-mellon-university-attacked-tor-was-subpoenaed-by-feds https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/carnegie-mellon-u...

bitmapbrother 9y ago

As expected, the Fastmail pitchmen are out in full force anytime the word email is in the topic. As the article stated they have a choice of Gmail or Exchange.

brongondwana 9y ago
Yeah, I got tagged in to talk about Cyrus, as one of the Cyrus IMAP Board. But of course I'll talk about FastMail too, since we do most of the work on Cyrus these days.

Faaak 9y ago

What we need is a complete open source "work email" solution: email, calendar, tasks, address book. I have to say that exchange is very good at that, but its not open source. I would pay, and it would be wonderful, if an open source project similar to exchange gave birth.

codefined 9y ago
I've been trying to create a complete open source solution to this exact problem, although I've only been working on it for a month and so far have only semi-complete the email part of it. You can see the current iteration of it here: https://github.com/femto-email/client https://github.com/femto-email/client