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<--CONT'D [Wow! --first time I've hit HN's post character limit!] Now, someone said they have this kind of attitude as a way of targeting their offering towar

<--CONT'D [Wow! --first time I've hit HN's post character limit!] Now, someone said they have this kind of attitude as a way of targeting their offering towards more tech-minded people and deterring the more needy users. And, at first, I thought; "OK. Fair enough". But, the more I thought about it the more it started sounding a bit like Steve Jobs. If I sign up and find it's not to my needs, I basically get told to fuck off because I'm obviously 'holding it wrong'. That attitude might be fine for someone offering a free product. But it's not acceptable for a paid service. As I've said on here before, I think there are far too many developers about these days, who've seen Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds and think that being an obnoxious arrogant arsehole makes you some kind of techie rock star. When, in fact, it just makes you an obnoxious arrogant arsehole. So there's where I'm up to at the minute. Anyone got any comments re the three mentioned above, or know any other email services which are using this kind of business model, as opposed to per email account charging? The way things are going at the moment, I can see myself ending up spinning up a Mail-in-a-Box[5] server. As nothing I've found out there so far seems worthy of giving my money to. [0] https://www.migadu.com https://www.migadu.com [1] https://postale.io https://postale.io [2] https://mxroute.com https://mxroute.com [3] https://www.migadu.com/use https://www.migadu.com/use [4] https://postale.io/about-us https://postale.io/about-us [5] https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/

Reitet00 5y ago
FTR I've migrated from Google Apps to Migadu and I'm pretty happy with them but I must say the "acceptable use" clause also raised my suspicion. I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things" they will trigger the termination. Which, to be honest, happens with other providers even if that's not in the ToS (see Cloudflare case).
- Normille 5y ago
  >I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things" Maybe they don't. But, as I said in another comment, I'd prefer not to depend on what I think they mean, when they might actually mean something else. Besides, as I said in the original post who decides what is 'socially acceptable'? It's not too long ago that being gay or trans might have been construed as 'socially unacceptable'. Who decides what's 'Nazi'? Vlad the Mad seems to think he's liberating Ukraine from Nazis. The west seems to think he's the goose-stepper. A sizeable number of commenters on HN have been accused of being Nazis, coz they disagreed with someone else. Who decides what's immoral? That's probably the vaguest one of the lot. Morality is an individual thing. I'm sure there are things I'd consider immoral that you wouldn't and vice versa. Nope. I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality. Imagine if your snail mail postman opened your letters and refused to deliver any he didn't approve of.
  - pcmaffey 5y ago
    More like if you send hate mail to someone and they complain to the post office, then the post office will stop sending your mail.
  - Reitet00 5y ago
    > I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality. Then your only choice is self hosting because the provider can, and will, enforce any rules that they deem necessary even if they don't put it in the ToS explicitly (usually hidden behind "ToS can change at any time" clause). I've given the Cloudflare/Nazi case as an example.
jeroenhd 5y ago
If you're going the mailinabox route, I recommend also looking at Mailcow. Mailinabox is a full Linux distribution, Mailcow puts a mail server in docker-compose. Both are fully featured, but last time I looked into it I found that Mailinabox is running on more outdated/near-EOL software than I'd like. As an added bonus, you have can pay the Mailcow devs for a hosted server so you don't need to deal with updates and such, whereas mailinabox seems exclusively aimed at running your own (which is a perfectly valid position to have as an open source dev!) Either way, you'll probably need to do some configuration on any self-hosted mail service because SMTPUTF support for mail addresses is surprisingly uncommon in default compilation settings on open source software. Notably, the Dovecot devs seem convinced that nobody needs UTF8 in their email addresses and sometimes even dismiss this feature as "silly". Sadly, most self-hosted email options use Dovecot in some way or another so you may be out of luck if you try to run this stuff yourself.
dejan 4y ago
We could all bake our own bread at home, but very few do. It boils down to convenience and time best spent. By all means, I would recommend [5] if you have the technical knowledge to run it. This will give you more insight and appreciation for email as well [2] & [1] and humbly... [0]. Unfortunately, running an email service is a very underappreciated task; after Gmail - it is taken for granted. Cheers to Postmasters at MXRoute and Postale.io!

Reitet00 5y ago

FTR I've migrated from Google Apps to Migadu and I'm pretty happy with them but I must say the "acceptable use" clause also raised my suspicion. I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things" they will trigger the termination. Which, to be honest, happens with other providers even if that's not in the ToS (see Cloudflare case).

Normille 5y ago
>I guess they don't scan your email automatically but when someone brings to their attention that you're using the service for "unacceptable things" Maybe they don't. But, as I said in another comment, I'd prefer not to depend on what I think they mean, when they might actually mean something else. Besides, as I said in the original post who decides what is 'socially acceptable'? It's not too long ago that being gay or trans might have been construed as 'socially unacceptable'. Who decides what's 'Nazi'? Vlad the Mad seems to think he's liberating Ukraine from Nazis. The west seems to think he's the goose-stepper. A sizeable number of commenters on HN have been accused of being Nazis, coz they disagreed with someone else. Who decides what's immoral? That's probably the vaguest one of the lot. Morality is an individual thing. I'm sure there are things I'd consider immoral that you wouldn't and vice versa. Nope. I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality. Imagine if your snail mail postman opened your letters and refused to deliver any he didn't approve of.
- pcmaffey 5y ago
  More like if you send hate mail to someone and they complain to the post office, then the post office will stop sending your mail.
- Reitet00 5y ago
  > I don't care what the mechanics of the censuring process are. But I know I don't want to trust my correspondence to a company which sets itself up as an arbitrator of social acceptability and morality. Then your only choice is self hosting because the provider can, and will, enforce any rules that they deem necessary even if they don't put it in the ToS explicitly (usually hidden behind "ToS can change at any time" clause). I've given the Cloudflare/Nazi case as an example.

jeroenhd 5y ago

If you're going the mailinabox route, I recommend also looking at Mailcow. Mailinabox is a full Linux distribution, Mailcow puts a mail server in docker-compose. Both are fully featured, but last time I looked into it I found that Mailinabox is running on more outdated/near-EOL software than I'd like. As an added bonus, you have can pay the Mailcow devs for a hosted server so you don't need to deal with updates and such, whereas mailinabox seems exclusively aimed at running your own (which is a perfectly valid position to have as an open source dev!) Either way, you'll probably need to do some configuration on any self-hosted mail service because SMTPUTF support for mail addresses is surprisingly uncommon in default compilation settings on open source software. Notably, the Dovecot devs seem convinced that nobody needs UTF8 in their email addresses and sometimes even dismiss this feature as "silly". Sadly, most self-hosted email options use Dovecot in some way or another so you may be out of luck if you try to run this stuff yourself.

dejan 4y ago

We could all bake our own bread at home, but very few do. It boils down to convenience and time best spent. By all means, I would recommend [5] if you have the technical knowledge to run it. This will give you more insight and appreciation for email as well [2] & [1] and humbly... [0]. Unfortunately, running an email service is a very underappreciated task; after Gmail - it is taken for granted. Cheers to Postmasters at MXRoute and Postale.io!