19 ms·

Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

506 points by corywright 13y ago

300bps 13y ago
All I know is that I sleep a lot better that I have two-factor authentication turned on for gmail. I would leave gmail quickly if a good alternative had that. Looking at the OP's recommendation of fastmail.fm, it seems to have multi-factor authentication: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html 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?
- aroch 13y ago
  Erm, literally a few pixels under the Yubikey entry: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_google_authenticator.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_google_authenticator.html
acabal 13y ago
I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal (http://http://baikal-server.com/ 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.
- justin0 13y ago
  For an OSS self-hosted e-mail appliance, I've been using iRedMail. It's built on dovecot/postfix with a decent management interface for free. I run it on Ramnode for 2 bucks a month with no other costs. Works fine.
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    128mb RAM is enough?
    - tr4656 13y ago
      Theres a coupon so that its around ~$2.79 a month for the 256MB OpenVZ one. That should probably be enough.
    - justin0 13y ago
      128mb of RAM works for me with clamav turned off.
- ineedtosleep 13y ago
  I agree that email is scary and downright complicated, but it is definitely not an unreasonable task. 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.
  - tomkarlo 13y ago
    Setting up email servers, especially ensuring that they don't get blacklisted by other servers, is a huge pain and definitely not worth the trouble for an individual or a small team. If you're concerned about Google, there are lots of other providers out there, and whatever they're charging is probably a bargain relative to rolling your own.
    - 13y ago
RexRollman 13y ago
Personally, I closed my Google account when my CR-48 died. I don't think Google is evil, so much as they simply had too much information about me. Still use Google for search, though.
pwelch 13y ago
I was actually considering owncloud but there seems to be a lot of negative experiences. Anyone know if its getting better/actively developed?
- kenkinder 13y ago
  It's definitely being actively developed.
- socceroos 13y ago
  It is a very active project. I'm using it at home with a 12Tb server for a central storage point in our household. It's been great for us. It is quite basic at the moment, but has a tonne of promise. Haven't found it to be buggy myself.
- Semaphor 13y ago
  As other said it's actively developed. The disadvantage is that the UI/UX so far is not exactly great for now. I tried it for 2 months but I stopped using it as Google is far easier to use. I'll probably give it another try in a year or so.
rpicard 13y ago
I use Zoho Mail and I definitely recommend it. I've never had any problems with it.
wiredfool 13y ago
I'm wondering if there's a twilio based replacement for google voice. It's got most of the building blocks.
- scott_karana 13y ago
  There are plenty of paid replacements for Google Voice, so a Twilio one would fit right in. However, I suspect it's the free aspect that everyone's bemoaning. :-)
  - rdl 13y ago
    I haven't seen a lot of voice to sms services, or SMS forwarding. Getting SMS-enabled voip trunks is hard, or at least was hard the last time I checked (admittedly a few years ago)
    - wiredfool 13y ago
      Pretty sure that's a twilio api.
- kenkinder 13y ago
  I had been thinking of that, though Twilio's pricing would probably be prohibitive. They actually charge more than my cell provider for minutes. But everything you'd need is right in the API.
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    Yeah, it wouldn't work with free, since even their (whatever) -> client is 1/4 c/ minute. 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.
    - 13y ago
freehunter 13y ago
Fix your certificates! Your cert is signed for webfaction but you're hosted at kkinder. Host: kkinder.com Common name: .webfaction.com Alternative subject names: regex([^.]\.webfaction\.com), regex(webfaction\.com)
- kenkinder 13y ago
  OP (as in the site) here. 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.
  - richardwhiuk 13y ago
    I assume you mean SNI, not TLS?
  - freehunter 13y ago
    I'm actually using Chrome Version 26.0.1410.64 m on Windows 7.
jph 13y ago
Zoho provides good email, calendar, and many of additional apps for business such as CRM, invoices, etc. My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.
- SonicSoul 13y ago
  I've used their docs for years.. but found them buggy. For example bigger documents formatting would just start acting in a weird way (where i just couldn't set the text size correctly anymore).. copy/paste wasn't consistent.. wasn't crazy how regular browser shortcuts were overridden .. mobile app was locking.. i do command them for coming out with a great free product ahead of the the competition, but it does feel like Google leapfrogged them as far as UX and multi-platform support.
- kenkinder 13y ago
  I seem to recall it not offering things like CalDav and CardDav.
- BoyWizard 13y ago
  I used Zoho for a while in the place of Google Apps, and migrated back to Google Apps after about 9 months as I absolutely hated Zoho Mail. Webmail interface was awful, and it didn't play nicely with the POP client on Android.
  - nkorth 13y ago
    Yeah, I also noticed that POP doesn't work with Zoho on my Nexus. I switched to IMAP and it works fine.
Angelo8000 13y ago
Zoho.com
eknkc 13y ago
Anyone using hosted.im? 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)?
- kenkinder 13y ago
  I would think the service you move to would need your friends list in order for you to be able to communicate without re-authorizing everyone. 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.
- stevejohnson 13y ago
  I'm using hosted.im with my own domain. It works fine, except you can't add GTalk contacts right now, since Google is blocking incoming contact requests from other servers. I doubt your contacts will migrate unless you do it on the client side.
themstheones 13y ago
How well would all of these tie in with android or some other mobile OS?
- prg318 13y ago
  Unfortunately CalDAV and CarDAV are not supported natively by Android. In order to utilize a CalDAV or CarDAV server, an android user needs to purchase both a CalDAV adapter [1] and a CarDAV adapter [2]. Both of these products are in beta and last time I checked they were lacking support for much of the protocol. It's really a shame that Google doesn't support open standards for contacts and calendar in Android. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.caldav.lib https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda... [2]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.Sync https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...
  - seagreen 13y ago
    Ouch. Thanks for the info. Switching to CarDAV is one of my upcoming projects but I'm not looking forward to it.
zerovox 13y ago
Are there any good alternatives to Google Calendar? If not, seems like there may be a gap in the market for a next generation calendar service, as the core of Google Calendar has been the same for a while, I'm sure there must be some innovation available there.
- justjohn 13y ago
  The best replacement I found was to host my own instance of Kolab 3[1] which was a pain to setup, but seems to work pretty well and looks nice. I couldn't find any good hosted solutions though. [1] http://kolab.org/ http://kolab.org/
- tbirdz 13y ago
  I think zoho has a similar Calendar.
vertis 13y ago
I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat. I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(
- easyfrag 13y ago
  I've switched to feedbin.me ($2 a month), web app is ok, iPhone Reeder (iOS) can sync but not yet iPad version. 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.
  - CrazedGeek 13y ago
    Seconding Feedbin. Still missing a couple things (feed renaming...), but seems to work the best out of all the post-Reader RSS readers.
- masnick 13y ago
  I also recently did the Gmail -> Fastmail switch. I had some trouble with the automated import, but I found a Perl script that did the trick: https://gist.github.com/masnick/5239278#file-gmail_to_fastmail-md https://gist.github.com/masnick/5239278#file-gmail_to_fastma... So far I've loved Fastmail. It's great having a real human respond to a support ticket, usually within a few hours!
- unicornporn 13y ago
  https://www.newsblur.com/ https://www.newsblur.com/ or https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
- swanson 13y ago
  I'm quite happy with own open-source Reader replacement: https://github.com/swanson/stringer https://github.com/swanson/stringer
- aniket_ray 13y ago
  It took me less than 1 min to move all my feeds from Google Reader to Feedly. There is not really much to figure out there.
arunabha 13y ago
Fastmail.fm seemed to be good till I read the fine print. For the personal account you have 100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)
- masnick 13y ago
  The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.
  - slg 13y ago
    "and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." 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?
    - masnick 13y ago
      It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model. I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.
      - slg 13y ago
        I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail. It is also worth noting that changing the revenue producers from advertisers to consumers doesn't automatically make a business model sustainable. In a vacuum, I have no reason to believe an RSS reader (webmail, instant messenger, or any random service) that I pay for is any more viable than a competitor that serves me advertisements. Finally, the issue I take with your second point is that a company's motives are going to be dictated by their finances. That may even be a legal requirement if they are publicly owned. Both Fastmail and Google have a financial incentive to keep their user-base happy and growing. One because they are taking cash directly from users and one because they are using users to generate cash. I don't think that slight difference changes their motives as drastically as you might think.
rdl 13y ago
I'd never heard of Lavabit before; it looks like they're still operational, although their website hasn't been updated much since around 2007. Looks interesting. I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.
- footoverhand 13y ago
  I've been using them for quite a while and found their service to be reliable. Even their webmail access is decent. A con is that their spam filtering isn't as good as gmail.
- umsm 13y ago
  Agreed! And I actually have an idea on how this can be done, but no time to implement it...
- nwh 13y ago
  It's unfortunate that they've closed registrations, with no indication as to when they'll reopen.
- amirmc 13y ago
  Can you break down what "high-quality" means for you? eg Web UI, specific features, hosted/self-hosted etc. Are you rolling your own at the moment or on gApps? I've started looking into this with a view of building something so understanding what's important to folks is v useful.
  - rdl 13y ago
    I roll my own now. 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
rufugee 13y ago
I've been eyeing some of the some of the Zimbra hosts (01.com, xmission.com) as a possible home for my email accounts, as we've been testing Zimbra at my day job for a possible Exchange replacement and I've liked the experience so far. Anyone have experiences with Zimbra (and the hosts) to share?
- namityadav 13y ago
  I was also looking at Zimbra some time back. But threads like this made me stay with Gmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662348
  - k3n 13y ago
    I don't have a dog in this fight, but to be fair, that thread is 1434 days old. 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.
    - rufugee 13y ago
      Agreed. Our testing at work has shown it to be fairly reliable.
thezilch 13y ago
You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own server. 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.
- J_Darnley 13y ago
  > Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. Sorry but the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative perhaps with the exception of performance.
  - jmgrosen 13y ago
    Such as?
    - J_Darnley 13y ago
      Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.
      - richardwhiuk 13y ago
        Tabs in the title bar is a better UI decision. The URL box belongs to the tab, so it should be part of the tab. Your objection here seems to be 'Firefox mimicked Chrome and this is a bad thing', rather than these things being objectively bad.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
cpursley 13y ago
AOL Alto makes a nice alternative than Gmail. And a much better one at that.
canthonytucci 13y ago
"Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives to some Google properties. Maps...." For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.
- ajross 13y ago
  I don't see how protesting against Google's perceived abandonment of open standards[1] by using a Microsoft product makes any sense. 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.
- dublinben 13y ago
  I think the obvious alternative would be Open Street Maps. Microsoft is no better than Google in these regards, they're just not the current market leader.
  - hexis 13y ago
    Furthermore, Mapquest has an Open Street Map layer, if that suits you - http://open.mapquest.com/ http://open.mapquest.com/
- unwiredben 13y ago
  There's also here.com, based on Nokia/Navteq's map data. It's quite nice, and I've been enjoying the Nokia maps on my Lumia phone a lot.
eggbrain 13y ago
I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. 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.
- a3n 13y ago
  There used to be a free tier, which was my first use of fastmail. At some point, possibly the Opera acquisition, the free tier went away.
- ineedtosleep 13y ago
  To clarify and to add onto what masnick wrote, the article _was_ right. The free tier was an option previously, but FastMail has recently dropped that tier in favor of a free trial and, I'm assuming, a lower tier that has a lower cost. 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."
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. FastMail has archiving, great search, and a superior interface. The Gmail interface is pretty bad IMO. It's cluttered with a lot of stuff that have nothing to do with email like: 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
masnick 13y ago
For those interested in replacing the Gmail's built-in voice calling feature, I wrote up instructions for setting up a SIP endpoint: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/ 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).
tocomment 13y ago
I just switched to commafeed for rss. My only complaint so far is the iphone display.
kghose 13y ago
lavabit isn't accepting new users right now.
tbirdz 13y ago
Also another suggestion, for a Google Analytics replacement you could try using Piwik, an open source web analytics platform. Of course I think you'll have to provide your own hosting for it.
- imperialWicket 13y ago
  Senseless self plug: I'm working on a saas piwik platform and looking for beta users. Email is in the profile.
  - nsmartt 13y ago
    Piwik seems to be exactly what I've been trying to find. I'm pretty excited at a glance. 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.
    - imperialWicket 13y ago
      I'm not directly associated with Piwik, but your complaints are valid. The Piwik project recently moved to Github, and some of that transition is lagging as most effort goes to the code itself.
      - nsmartt 13y ago
        Ah, I misunderstood. I'll try to get in touch with the team. Thanks for letting me know.
codereflection 13y ago
The biggest problem with Gmail alternatives is missing hotkeys. Outlook.com is the only one I've found that even comes close, but things are still different enough to be irritating.
- unicornporn 13y ago
  Outlook.com has an option for using the Gmail keyboard shortcuts.
  - xwei 13y ago
    They put half of my important mail into Spam. The shortcuts is used to mark all spam as important as fast as possible.
  - codereflection 13y ago
    Yep, and that's what I meant. However not all of them are identical to Gmail, and some pretty basic commands at that.
- laydros 13y ago
  Fastmail.fm has keyboard shortcuts that are pretty similar to gmail.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
It would be really great if somebody wrapped up all the open source material available and made an image available to AWS and other VPS users. Use the image, have email, an XMPP server, etc -- out of the box. On your own dime. I'd pay for it.
- lifeguard 13y ago
  Here you go: http://www.ispconfig.org/support/ http://www.ispconfig.org/support/ http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-13.04-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3 http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-13.04-nginx-...
- stfu 13y ago
  Me too. But it would need to be open source, super easy to install, and vetted by a 3rd party with experience in security related issues.
- gelnior 13y ago
  You should have a look at this: http://cozy.io/ http://cozy.io/
- Gygash 13y ago
  The Citadel groupware suite[1] provides provides KVM and VMWare images[2] that could easily be imported into EC2. Found it as part of my own research into reducing my reliance on Gmail and other hosted services, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet. [1] http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/doku.php?id=start http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/doku.php?id=start [2] http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/installation:appliance http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/installation:appliance
  - jackbravo 13y ago
    I installed them, and the service seems really reliable. And is also really easy to install. The main drawback is the horrible interface. But you can use your favorite email cliente with smtp.
- mh- 13y ago
latj 13y ago
I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.
- mvgoogler 13y ago
  > I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP 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.
  - latj 13y ago
jarjoura 13y ago
I have been extremely happy with the Office 365 service. It works perfectly on my Mac and iPhone.
arindone 13y ago
I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat. 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.
- SEMW 13y ago
  > I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned ... Also, Yahoo ... 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."
  - gurkendoktor 13y ago
    I don't think Microsoft cares about advertisement to the same degree that Yahoo and Google do. Of course they will still try to lock you in.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
xwei 13y ago
silo? oh, just because of THE READER again...
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I went through this process a few months ago but I chose to still use some silos. I moved my blog (blog.markwatson.com) from Blogger to a cheap Wordpress host, maintaining article URLs. I asked people to start using my email at my own domain; I still forward it through GMail but I back it up frequently. I can flip my domain email to my VPS email hosting service very quickly. I could live with loosing my calendar so I left it on Google. 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.
lifeguard 13y ago
mail.com + netvibes.com Netvibes has AJAX widgets for all one's needs. http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us
andor 13y ago
If you need calendar and contacts synchronization, a hosted Exchange account might fit your needs. For example, Microsoft sells accounts with 25GB storage for $4 per user and month. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans-hosted-email-for-business-FX103764022.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compar...
hrktb 13y ago
A side point: Does it make signifiant difference from a legal point of view to have the mail provider in Australia ? For example, would it free from the 13 years old limitation on account ownership?
jrochkind1 13y ago
I've been considering zohomail for gmail alternative. 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).
yanw 13y ago
Sigh. It's the same anti-Google post on HN again.
darxius 13y ago
Does anyone know of a secure (like lavabit) web mail service (that doesn't look like crap) that integrates chat (irc, google chat, etc)?
- prg318 13y ago
  Lavabit. I use lavabit and either run a desktop IMAP client or I run a roundcube [1] instance for webmail. Lavabit also provides an XMPP server and address to its users, so you can use any XMPP client for chat. Since lavabit supports IMAP you can use any IMAP client, not just the minimal web client on their site. [1] http://www.roundcube.net/ http://www.roundcube.net/
jksmith 13y ago
Is DDG reading this?
guelo 13y ago
When evaluating communication services you should give extra credit to hosts that are located in a different country than the one that you live in in order to get some privacy from government spying. It might not stop spy agencies like the NSA but it should at least stop the local police, and in some cases even the FBI, from casually snooping your email at their whim.
- IgorPartola 13y ago
  Not necessarily. If you are a US citizen and all your commu ovations are with US citizens, then mostly what you expect happens. But if you are a non-US citizen passing data through the US, different laws apply. AANAL, so I will not quote specifics, but I do believe that your advice might not be accurate and warrants more research.
subway 13y ago
The biggest problem with moving back to XMPP now is that Google us cut us off from anyone now using Hangouts. Less than a year ago I drank the Google Kool-Aid and started using GApps instead of my personal server running Postfix/Dovecot/EJabberd. Since 87% of my XMPP contacts are on the GSuite, by going back I lose all IM connectivity with them. I almost feel like I'm being held hostage at this point. I've also invested a few grand in services, software, and hardware that ties into the GSuite, providing further disincentive to move away. In summary: Bah.
- stanleydrew 13y ago
  I don't understand. I thought Google's Hangouts app didn't use XMPP but everyone with a Google account still has a gTalk account and you can still communicate with XMPP. Am I wrong? Would those chats not show up in gMail? And would they not possibly also show up in the Hangouts app?
  - subway 13y ago
    The GTalk and Hangouts appear to be two entirely different things. Once I switched over to Hangouts, folks subscribed to my presence information no longer saw me online, and from within GMail I have no way of messaging them without switching back to GTalk Mode. On Android I don't even have a way to switch back.
dorznak 13y ago
So basically this article finds no good open source / self hosted alternatives, but instead lists a bunch of paid services. And even those don't live up to the "Google Silo".
PonyGumbo 13y ago
I rolled my own Google Voice using the Twilio API. It's not free, but it works.
rogerchucker 13y ago
This is probably not gonna be a popular sentiment here but I actually like the G+ integration with all the services. The main reasons for that are my expectation of better personalization and synchronization, and a better experience with Google Now. And BTW I'm an iOS user.
plg 13y ago
google's silo is as good as or better than most, and I trust Larry Page not to do the-wrong-thing more than most CEOs out there... just always keep a backup and don't worry, be happy
- rogerchucker 13y ago
  I guess this is a backlash (albeit an opportunistic one for some) against Google's previously touted love for openness. I agree with the OP that unlike Larry Page, Eric Schmidt was the one who always talked openly (forgive the pun) about openness.
Thiz 13y ago
Mozilla should build a whole suite of services like mail, calendar, docs, files, photos, etc so they can start offering free ad-based or vip ad-free subscriptions. 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.
piyush_soni 13y ago
A lot of people here are suggesting moving from one closed ecosystem (Google) to another. Unless you are really moving to a fully open source alternative which has all - email, calendar, cloud storage, may be a browser and an integrated smartphone etc. I don't see much point behind doing that, especially since Google doesn't have much track record of "misusing" your data in practical terms (that I know of at east). 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?
kofman 13y ago
For a Docs replacement, do give https://hackpad.com https://hackpad.com a try. It's web-native and optimized for collaboration and sharing (vs trying to bring a desktop experience to the web).
mutantmonkey 13y ago
The issue he is discussing with ownCloud and timezones is not a limitation that applies to their CalDAV implementation, it is just an issue with their web client. If you use a CalDAV client that supports time zones properly (most do), it will work fine.
- j-kidd 13y ago
  I am pretty sure ownCloud web client does have timezone support, but he didn't change the setting. From http://owncloud.org/support/calendars/ 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.
  - kenkinder 13y ago
    You can change the timezone on the web GUI, but that's just the offset. The issue is that CalDav PUT requests included a timezone, which the server just discards. You can try it yourself. Setup OwnCloud with Lightning or something. Create an event and specify a timezone in the event itself. Close and reopen the app, or use another app, and you'll find that OwnCloud simply truncates the data and stores it as UTC with no adjustment.
EGreg 13y ago
Why not just host your own email, calendar etc? You can even do it in your personal cloud and replicated it SECURELY to machines who won't give out your information at the drop of a hat or are hacked by a high profile attack. 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
xentronium 13y ago
There is always yandex, if you aren't afraid of a Russian company. https://mail.yandex.com https://mail.yandex.com You can also set up a personal domain there for free, if you can read/translate Russian instructions at http://pdd.yandex.ru 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
- kapranoff 13y ago
  I am from Yandex Mail team. 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.
tteam 13y ago
If you want to run your personal cloud please check us out at tonido.com. we have an awesome workspace that can take care of your tasks, calendar and contacts, dropbox like sync and really good mobile apps for ios and android. We don't have mail app though. But tonido is a platform and so something to consider in our roadmap.
nkorth 13y ago
I actually just switched my personal email over to Zoho today (before reading this). It's pretty nice; I was surprised not to see it mentioned here as a Gmail/Google Apps alternative.
eduardo_f 13y ago
We have a free migration tool that you can use to move your email in and out of Google Apps: http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud
gwern 13y ago
> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really. 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.
- aniket_ray 13y ago
  Umm ... XMPP is not being dropped only support for XMPP federation.
  - claudius 13y ago
    And what’s the point of XMPP if you drop federation?
    - nileshtrivedi 13y ago
      Well, you can continue using third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin. Federation has the inherent problem of spamming. I think whitelisting domains could have been a way out.
      - claudius 13y ago
        I’ve been using XMPP for quite a while, first on jabber.ccc.de, then on my own server (and on a Google account in parallel), but have so far not received a single spam message. Is XMPP spamming really a thing?
        nileshtrivedi 13y ago
        That's what Google claims: Chee Chew said that "we haven't seen significant uptake" in federation with Google Talk via server-to-server connections. The majority of the uptake Google did see was from organizations or individuals looking to bombard Google Talk users with chat spam, Chew said. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-on-with-hangouts-googles-new-text-and-video-chat-architecture/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-... This is the original email thread with more details when Google disabled XMPP federation for a while in GTalk: http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001571.html http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...
jspiros 13y ago
I posted this as a comment on the article, but I figured I should mention it here too: I’ve switched to Twilio + OpenVBX (http://openvbx.org/ http://openvbx.org/) as a replacement for Google Voice. The per-month cost is low (something like $2/month per number), though you do have to pay a per-minute charge when you’re actually handling calls. I think transcription might be an additional fee, too.
anuraj 13y ago
I am especially looking at alternative after Google started charging for the use of GMail for small businesses (in spite of their promise to support up to 50 users free). I am sure the alternative will not be as much polished, but I can roll my own postfix+roundcube and run it for 100+ users at < 100$ a year vs Google's $5000 a year! I don't need all the social shit Google throws in with an account, just mail and chat will do.
logn 13y ago
ZohoMail seems to be a decent replacement for Gmail/Docs. I've set up one of my domains there now (free for up to 5 users). Looks pretty nice. Has email/docs/wiki/chat/calendar. It's very much designed to be a gmail alternative. I like.
imonkey 13y ago
I don't like that Google killing some great technologies, like Reader or push-email for iPhone (especially last one). I was Gmail user for a long time, but switch on iCloud recently, because i'm looking something fresh and easy-to-use and still want to have push in my iPhone. 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.
PaulFreund 13y ago
I left Google in favour of self hosted applications: * 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/)
- aw3c2 13y ago
  Jappix looks really nice. Is there a lightweight Android client that polls every few minutes for new messages? I would need to be notified about new messages when the phone is inactive (screen off). A browser is too big for that.
  - PaulFreund 13y ago
    There are many ways to accomplish that. As Jappix requires an XMPP account you can also use a native android client like Xabber (http://www.xabber.com/ http://www.xabber.com/). For my part I wrote a node.js server application that acts as a notification central: myhub (https://github.com/PaulFreund/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.
    - aw3c2 13y ago
      Sorry, I was not verbose enough: It is sync between multiple clients I would be interested in. So if I used XMPP on my mobile and accessed the mobile interface via a browser elsewhere, would both show the same messages (in and out)? I wish more Jabber servers would support http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html and http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html
lorenzfx 13y ago
does anybody know a decent CalDAV web GUI? I have been using agendav and caldavzap for the last months, but am not super happy with any of them.
- janmate 13y ago
  Why you are not happy with CalDavZAP? Have you tried the upcoming 0.9 version? http://www.inf-it.com/CalDavZAP_0.9rc4.zip http://www.inf-it.com/CalDavZAP_0.9rc4.zip demo: http://www.inf-it.com/caldavzap-next/ http://www.inf-it.com/caldavzap-next/ ... please send me your problems with CalDavZAP to jan.mate at inf-it dot com.
alifaizan 13y ago
there arent many alternative to move out of the google's domain. But sooner or later we will all have too as google's privacy policy Sucks... (Source:http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/ http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/)
pagekicker 13y ago
The article does not state a major problem which is that fastmail.fm is not free.
khafra 13y ago
A man said to Google, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied Google, "That fact has not created in me "A sense of obligation."

506 points by corywright 13y ago

All I know is that I sleep a lot better that I have two-factor authentication turned on for gmail. I would leave gmail quickly if a good alternative had that. Looking at the OP's recommendation of fastmail.fm, it seems to have multi-factor authentication: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html 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?

aroch 13y ago
Erm, literally a few pixels under the Yubikey entry: https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_google_authenticator.html https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_google_authenticator.html

acabal 13y ago

I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle. I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal (http://http://baikal-server.com/ 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.

justin0 13y ago
For an OSS self-hosted e-mail appliance, I've been using iRedMail. It's built on dovecot/postfix with a decent management interface for free. I run it on Ramnode for 2 bucks a month with no other costs. Works fine.
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  128mb RAM is enough?
  - tr4656 13y ago
    Theres a coupon so that its around ~$2.79 a month for the 256MB OpenVZ one. That should probably be enough.
  - justin0 13y ago
    128mb of RAM works for me with clamav turned off.
ineedtosleep 13y ago
I agree that email is scary and downright complicated, but it is definitely not an unreasonable task. 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.
- tomkarlo 13y ago
  Setting up email servers, especially ensuring that they don't get blacklisted by other servers, is a huge pain and definitely not worth the trouble for an individual or a small team. If you're concerned about Google, there are lots of other providers out there, and whatever they're charging is probably a bargain relative to rolling your own.
  - 13y ago

RexRollman 13y ago

Personally, I closed my Google account when my CR-48 died. I don't think Google is evil, so much as they simply had too much information about me. Still use Google for search, though.

pwelch 13y ago

I was actually considering owncloud but there seems to be a lot of negative experiences. Anyone know if its getting better/actively developed?

kenkinder 13y ago
It's definitely being actively developed.
socceroos 13y ago
It is a very active project. I'm using it at home with a 12Tb server for a central storage point in our household. It's been great for us. It is quite basic at the moment, but has a tonne of promise. Haven't found it to be buggy myself.
Semaphor 13y ago
As other said it's actively developed. The disadvantage is that the UI/UX so far is not exactly great for now. I tried it for 2 months but I stopped using it as Google is far easier to use. I'll probably give it another try in a year or so.

rpicard 13y ago

I use Zoho Mail and I definitely recommend it. I've never had any problems with it.

wiredfool 13y ago

I'm wondering if there's a twilio based replacement for google voice. It's got most of the building blocks.

scott_karana 13y ago
There are plenty of paid replacements for Google Voice, so a Twilio one would fit right in. However, I suspect it's the free aspect that everyone's bemoaning. :-)
- rdl 13y ago
  I haven't seen a lot of voice to sms services, or SMS forwarding. Getting SMS-enabled voip trunks is hard, or at least was hard the last time I checked (admittedly a few years ago)
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    Pretty sure that's a twilio api.
kenkinder 13y ago
I had been thinking of that, though Twilio's pricing would probably be prohibitive. They actually charge more than my cell provider for minutes. But everything you'd need is right in the API.
- wiredfool 13y ago
  Yeah, it wouldn't work with free, since even their (whatever) -> client is 1/4 c/ minute. 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.
  - 13y ago

freehunter 13y ago

Fix your certificates! Your cert is signed for webfaction but you're hosted at kkinder. Host: kkinder.com Common name: .webfaction.com Alternative subject names: regex([^.]\.webfaction\.com), regex(webfaction\.com)

kenkinder 13y ago
OP (as in the site) here. 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.
- richardwhiuk 13y ago
  I assume you mean SNI, not TLS?
- freehunter 13y ago
  I'm actually using Chrome Version 26.0.1410.64 m on Windows 7.

jph 13y ago

Zoho provides good email, calendar, and many of additional apps for business such as CRM, invoices, etc. My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.

SonicSoul 13y ago
I've used their docs for years.. but found them buggy. For example bigger documents formatting would just start acting in a weird way (where i just couldn't set the text size correctly anymore).. copy/paste wasn't consistent.. wasn't crazy how regular browser shortcuts were overridden .. mobile app was locking.. i do command them for coming out with a great free product ahead of the the competition, but it does feel like Google leapfrogged them as far as UX and multi-platform support.
kenkinder 13y ago
I seem to recall it not offering things like CalDav and CardDav.
BoyWizard 13y ago
I used Zoho for a while in the place of Google Apps, and migrated back to Google Apps after about 9 months as I absolutely hated Zoho Mail. Webmail interface was awful, and it didn't play nicely with the POP client on Android.
- nkorth 13y ago
  Yeah, I also noticed that POP doesn't work with Zoho on my Nexus. I switched to IMAP and it works fine.

Angelo8000 13y ago

Zoho.com

eknkc 13y ago

Anyone using hosted.im? 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)?

kenkinder 13y ago
I would think the service you move to would need your friends list in order for you to be able to communicate without re-authorizing everyone. 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.
stevejohnson 13y ago
I'm using hosted.im with my own domain. It works fine, except you can't add GTalk contacts right now, since Google is blocking incoming contact requests from other servers. I doubt your contacts will migrate unless you do it on the client side.

themstheones 13y ago

How well would all of these tie in with android or some other mobile OS?

prg318 13y ago
Unfortunately CalDAV and CarDAV are not supported natively by Android. In order to utilize a CalDAV or CarDAV server, an android user needs to purchase both a CalDAV adapter [1] and a CarDAV adapter [2]. Both of these products are in beta and last time I checked they were lacking support for much of the protocol. It's really a shame that Google doesn't support open standards for contacts and calendar in Android. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.caldav.lib https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda... [2]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.Sync https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...
- seagreen 13y ago
  Ouch. Thanks for the info. Switching to CarDAV is one of my upcoming projects but I'm not looking forward to it.

zerovox 13y ago

Are there any good alternatives to Google Calendar? If not, seems like there may be a gap in the market for a next generation calendar service, as the core of Google Calendar has been the same for a while, I'm sure there must be some innovation available there.

justjohn 13y ago
The best replacement I found was to host my own instance of Kolab 3[1] which was a pain to setup, but seems to work pretty well and looks nice. I couldn't find any good hosted solutions though. [1] http://kolab.org/ http://kolab.org/
tbirdz 13y ago
I think zoho has a similar Calendar.

vertis 13y ago

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat. I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

easyfrag 13y ago
I've switched to feedbin.me ($2 a month), web app is ok, iPhone Reeder (iOS) can sync but not yet iPad version. 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.
- CrazedGeek 13y ago
  Seconding Feedbin. Still missing a couple things (feed renaming...), but seems to work the best out of all the post-Reader RSS readers.
masnick 13y ago
I also recently did the Gmail -> Fastmail switch. I had some trouble with the automated import, but I found a Perl script that did the trick: https://gist.github.com/masnick/5239278#file-gmail_to_fastmail-md https://gist.github.com/masnick/5239278#file-gmail_to_fastma... So far I've loved Fastmail. It's great having a real human respond to a support ticket, usually within a few hours!
unicornporn 13y ago
https://www.newsblur.com/ https://www.newsblur.com/ or https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
swanson 13y ago
I'm quite happy with own open-source Reader replacement: https://github.com/swanson/stringer https://github.com/swanson/stringer
aniket_ray 13y ago
It took me less than 1 min to move all my feeds from Google Reader to Feedly. There is not really much to figure out there.

arunabha 13y ago

Fastmail.fm seemed to be good till I read the fine print. For the personal account you have 100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)

masnick 13y ago
The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.
- slg 13y ago
  "and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." 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?
  - masnick 13y ago
    It's about paying for services you use so the businesses that provide those services can have a sustainable business model. I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.
    - slg 13y ago
      I don't think your first point is relevant to mine. I don't exactly stay up at night worrying if Coca-Cola is making enough money with their Dasani business model. Likewise, as a consumer I don't care about the viability of Google's business model in terms of Gmail. It is also worth noting that changing the revenue producers from advertisers to consumers doesn't automatically make a business model sustainable. In a vacuum, I have no reason to believe an RSS reader (webmail, instant messenger, or any random service) that I pay for is any more viable than a competitor that serves me advertisements. Finally, the issue I take with your second point is that a company's motives are going to be dictated by their finances. That may even be a legal requirement if they are publicly owned. Both Fastmail and Google have a financial incentive to keep their user-base happy and growing. One because they are taking cash directly from users and one because they are using users to generate cash. I don't think that slight difference changes their motives as drastically as you might think.

rdl 13y ago

I'd never heard of Lavabit before; it looks like they're still operational, although their website hasn't been updated much since around 2007. Looks interesting. I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.

footoverhand 13y ago
I've been using them for quite a while and found their service to be reliable. Even their webmail access is decent. A con is that their spam filtering isn't as good as gmail.
umsm 13y ago
Agreed! And I actually have an idea on how this can be done, but no time to implement it...
nwh 13y ago
It's unfortunate that they've closed registrations, with no indication as to when they'll reopen.
amirmc 13y ago
Can you break down what "high-quality" means for you? eg Web UI, specific features, hosted/self-hosted etc. Are you rolling your own at the moment or on gApps? I've started looking into this with a view of building something so understanding what's important to folks is v useful.
- rdl 13y ago
  I roll my own now. 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

rufugee 13y ago

I've been eyeing some of the some of the Zimbra hosts (01.com, xmission.com) as a possible home for my email accounts, as we've been testing Zimbra at my day job for a possible Exchange replacement and I've liked the experience so far. Anyone have experiences with Zimbra (and the hosts) to share?

namityadav 13y ago
I was also looking at Zimbra some time back. But threads like this made me stay with Gmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662348
- k3n 13y ago
  I don't have a dog in this fight, but to be fair, that thread is 1434 days old. 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.
  - rufugee 13y ago
    Agreed. Our testing at work has shown it to be fairly reliable.

thezilch 13y ago

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own server. 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.

J_Darnley 13y ago
> Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome. Sorry but the influence of Chrome on Firefox has been universally negative perhaps with the exception of performance.
- jmgrosen 13y ago
  Such as?
  - J_Darnley 13y ago
    Hiding protocol in the URL bar. Fading the server "file path" after a domain name. Tabs in the title bar. Non-native look. No menu toolbar. Status bar. And those are just the ones I'm aware of.
    - richardwhiuk 13y ago
      Tabs in the title bar is a better UI decision. The URL box belongs to the tab, so it should be part of the tab. Your objection here seems to be 'Firefox mimicked Chrome and this is a bad thing', rather than these things being objectively bad.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

cpursley 13y ago

AOL Alto makes a nice alternative than Gmail. And a much better one at that.

canthonytucci 13y ago

"Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives to some Google properties. Maps...." For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.

ajross 13y ago
I don't see how protesting against Google's perceived abandonment of open standards[1] by using a Microsoft product makes any sense. 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.
dublinben 13y ago
I think the obvious alternative would be Open Street Maps. Microsoft is no better than Google in these regards, they're just not the current market leader.
- hexis 13y ago
  Furthermore, Mapquest has an Open Street Map layer, if that suits you - http://open.mapquest.com/ http://open.mapquest.com/
unwiredben 13y ago
There's also here.com, based on Nokia/Navteq's map data. It's quite nice, and I've been enjoying the Nokia maps on my Lumia phone a lot.

eggbrain 13y ago

I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. 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.

a3n 13y ago
There used to be a free tier, which was my first use of fastmail. At some point, possibly the Opera acquisition, the free tier went away.
ineedtosleep 13y ago
To clarify and to add onto what masnick wrote, the article _was_ right. The free tier was an option previously, but FastMail has recently dropped that tier in favor of a free trial and, I'm assuming, a lower tier that has a lower cost. 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."
MatthewPhillips 13y ago
I use FastMail. For one FastMail offers email for your domain, which Gmail no longer does. FastMail has archiving, great search, and a superior interface. The Gmail interface is pretty bad IMO. It's cluttered with a lot of stuff that have nothing to do with email like: 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

masnick 13y ago

For those interested in replacing the Gmail's built-in voice calling feature, I wrote up instructions for setting up a SIP endpoint: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/ 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).

tocomment 13y ago

I just switched to commafeed for rss. My only complaint so far is the iphone display.

kghose 13y ago

lavabit isn't accepting new users right now.

tbirdz 13y ago

Also another suggestion, for a Google Analytics replacement you could try using Piwik, an open source web analytics platform. Of course I think you'll have to provide your own hosting for it.

imperialWicket 13y ago
Senseless self plug: I'm working on a saas piwik platform and looking for beta users. Email is in the profile.
- nsmartt 13y ago
  Piwik seems to be exactly what I've been trying to find. I'm pretty excited at a glance. 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.
  - imperialWicket 13y ago
    I'm not directly associated with Piwik, but your complaints are valid. The Piwik project recently moved to Github, and some of that transition is lagging as most effort goes to the code itself.
    - nsmartt 13y ago
      Ah, I misunderstood. I'll try to get in touch with the team. Thanks for letting me know.

codereflection 13y ago

The biggest problem with Gmail alternatives is missing hotkeys. Outlook.com is the only one I've found that even comes close, but things are still different enough to be irritating.

unicornporn 13y ago
Outlook.com has an option for using the Gmail keyboard shortcuts.
- xwei 13y ago
  They put half of my important mail into Spam. The shortcuts is used to mark all spam as important as fast as possible.
- codereflection 13y ago
  Yep, and that's what I meant. However not all of them are identical to Gmail, and some pretty basic commands at that.
laydros 13y ago
Fastmail.fm has keyboard shortcuts that are pretty similar to gmail.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

It would be really great if somebody wrapped up all the open source material available and made an image available to AWS and other VPS users. Use the image, have email, an XMPP server, etc -- out of the box. On your own dime. I'd pay for it.

lifeguard 13y ago
Here you go: http://www.ispconfig.org/support/ http://www.ispconfig.org/support/ http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-13.04-nginx-bind-dovecot-ispconfig-3 http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-ubuntu-13.04-nginx-...
stfu 13y ago
Me too. But it would need to be open source, super easy to install, and vetted by a 3rd party with experience in security related issues.
gelnior 13y ago
You should have a look at this: http://cozy.io/ http://cozy.io/
Gygash 13y ago
The Citadel groupware suite[1] provides provides KVM and VMWare images[2] that could easily be imported into EC2. Found it as part of my own research into reducing my reliance on Gmail and other hosted services, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet. [1] http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/doku.php?id=start http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/doku.php?id=start [2] http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/installation:appliance http://www.citadel.org/doku.php/installation:appliance
- jackbravo 13y ago
  I installed them, and the service seems really reliable. And is also really easy to install. The main drawback is the horrible interface. But you can use your favorite email cliente with smtp.
mh- 13y ago

latj 13y ago

I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.

mvgoogler 13y ago
> I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP 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.
- latj 13y ago

jarjoura 13y ago

I have been extremely happy with the Office 365 service. It works perfectly on my Mac and iPhone.

arindone 13y ago

I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat. 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.

SEMW 13y ago
> I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned ... Also, Yahoo ... 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."
- gurkendoktor 13y ago
  I don't think Microsoft cares about advertisement to the same degree that Yahoo and Google do. Of course they will still try to lock you in.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

xwei 13y ago

silo? oh, just because of THE READER again...

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I went through this process a few months ago but I chose to still use some silos. I moved my blog (blog.markwatson.com) from Blogger to a cheap Wordpress host, maintaining article URLs. I asked people to start using my email at my own domain; I still forward it through GMail but I back it up frequently. I can flip my domain email to my VPS email hosting service very quickly. I could live with loosing my calendar so I left it on Google. 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.

lifeguard 13y ago

mail.com + netvibes.com Netvibes has AJAX widgets for all one's needs. http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us

andor 13y ago

If you need calendar and contacts synchronization, a hosted Exchange account might fit your needs. For example, Microsoft sells accounts with 25GB storage for $4 per user and month. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans-hosted-email-for-business-FX103764022.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compar...

hrktb 13y ago

A side point: Does it make signifiant difference from a legal point of view to have the mail provider in Australia ? For example, would it free from the 13 years old limitation on account ownership?

jrochkind1 13y ago

I've been considering zohomail for gmail alternative. 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).

yanw 13y ago

Sigh. It's the same anti-Google post on HN again.

darxius 13y ago

Does anyone know of a secure (like lavabit) web mail service (that doesn't look like crap) that integrates chat (irc, google chat, etc)?

prg318 13y ago
Lavabit. I use lavabit and either run a desktop IMAP client or I run a roundcube [1] instance for webmail. Lavabit also provides an XMPP server and address to its users, so you can use any XMPP client for chat. Since lavabit supports IMAP you can use any IMAP client, not just the minimal web client on their site. [1] http://www.roundcube.net/ http://www.roundcube.net/

jksmith 13y ago

Is DDG reading this?

guelo 13y ago

When evaluating communication services you should give extra credit to hosts that are located in a different country than the one that you live in in order to get some privacy from government spying. It might not stop spy agencies like the NSA but it should at least stop the local police, and in some cases even the FBI, from casually snooping your email at their whim.

IgorPartola 13y ago
Not necessarily. If you are a US citizen and all your commu ovations are with US citizens, then mostly what you expect happens. But if you are a non-US citizen passing data through the US, different laws apply. AANAL, so I will not quote specifics, but I do believe that your advice might not be accurate and warrants more research.

subway 13y ago

The biggest problem with moving back to XMPP now is that Google us cut us off from anyone now using Hangouts. Less than a year ago I drank the Google Kool-Aid and started using GApps instead of my personal server running Postfix/Dovecot/EJabberd. Since 87% of my XMPP contacts are on the GSuite, by going back I lose all IM connectivity with them. I almost feel like I'm being held hostage at this point. I've also invested a few grand in services, software, and hardware that ties into the GSuite, providing further disincentive to move away. In summary: Bah.

stanleydrew 13y ago
I don't understand. I thought Google's Hangouts app didn't use XMPP but everyone with a Google account still has a gTalk account and you can still communicate with XMPP. Am I wrong? Would those chats not show up in gMail? And would they not possibly also show up in the Hangouts app?
- subway 13y ago
  The GTalk and Hangouts appear to be two entirely different things. Once I switched over to Hangouts, folks subscribed to my presence information no longer saw me online, and from within GMail I have no way of messaging them without switching back to GTalk Mode. On Android I don't even have a way to switch back.

dorznak 13y ago

So basically this article finds no good open source / self hosted alternatives, but instead lists a bunch of paid services. And even those don't live up to the "Google Silo".

PonyGumbo 13y ago

I rolled my own Google Voice using the Twilio API. It's not free, but it works.

rogerchucker 13y ago

This is probably not gonna be a popular sentiment here but I actually like the G+ integration with all the services. The main reasons for that are my expectation of better personalization and synchronization, and a better experience with Google Now. And BTW I'm an iOS user.

plg 13y ago

google's silo is as good as or better than most, and I trust Larry Page not to do the-wrong-thing more than most CEOs out there... just always keep a backup and don't worry, be happy

rogerchucker 13y ago
I guess this is a backlash (albeit an opportunistic one for some) against Google's previously touted love for openness. I agree with the OP that unlike Larry Page, Eric Schmidt was the one who always talked openly (forgive the pun) about openness.

Thiz 13y ago

Mozilla should build a whole suite of services like mail, calendar, docs, files, photos, etc so they can start offering free ad-based or vip ad-free subscriptions. 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.

piyush_soni 13y ago

A lot of people here are suggesting moving from one closed ecosystem (Google) to another. Unless you are really moving to a fully open source alternative which has all - email, calendar, cloud storage, may be a browser and an integrated smartphone etc. I don't see much point behind doing that, especially since Google doesn't have much track record of "misusing" your data in practical terms (that I know of at east). 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?

kofman 13y ago

For a Docs replacement, do give https://hackpad.com https://hackpad.com a try. It's web-native and optimized for collaboration and sharing (vs trying to bring a desktop experience to the web).

mutantmonkey 13y ago

The issue he is discussing with ownCloud and timezones is not a limitation that applies to their CalDAV implementation, it is just an issue with their web client. If you use a CalDAV client that supports time zones properly (most do), it will work fine.

j-kidd 13y ago
I am pretty sure ownCloud web client does have timezone support, but he didn't change the setting. From http://owncloud.org/support/calendars/ 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.
- kenkinder 13y ago
  You can change the timezone on the web GUI, but that's just the offset. The issue is that CalDav PUT requests included a timezone, which the server just discards. You can try it yourself. Setup OwnCloud with Lightning or something. Create an event and specify a timezone in the event itself. Close and reopen the app, or use another app, and you'll find that OwnCloud simply truncates the data and stores it as UTC with no adjustment.

EGreg 13y ago

Why not just host your own email, calendar etc? You can even do it in your personal cloud and replicated it SECURELY to machines who won't give out your information at the drop of a hat or are hacked by a high profile attack. 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

xentronium 13y ago

There is always yandex, if you aren't afraid of a Russian company. https://mail.yandex.com https://mail.yandex.com You can also set up a personal domain there for free, if you can read/translate Russian instructions at http://pdd.yandex.ru 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

kapranoff 13y ago
I am from Yandex Mail team. 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.

tteam 13y ago

If you want to run your personal cloud please check us out at tonido.com. we have an awesome workspace that can take care of your tasks, calendar and contacts, dropbox like sync and really good mobile apps for ios and android. We don't have mail app though. But tonido is a platform and so something to consider in our roadmap.

nkorth 13y ago

I actually just switched my personal email over to Zoho today (before reading this). It's pretty nice; I was surprised not to see it mentioned here as a Gmail/Google Apps alternative.

eduardo_f 13y ago

We have a free migration tool that you can use to move your email in and out of Google Apps: http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud

gwern 13y ago

> Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really. 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.

aniket_ray 13y ago
Umm ... XMPP is not being dropped only support for XMPP federation.
- claudius 13y ago
  And what’s the point of XMPP if you drop federation?
  - nileshtrivedi 13y ago
    Well, you can continue using third-party XMPP clients like Pidgin. Federation has the inherent problem of spamming. I think whitelisting domains could have been a way out.
    - claudius 13y ago
      I’ve been using XMPP for quite a while, first on jabber.ccc.de, then on my own server (and on a Google account in parallel), but have so far not received a single spam message. Is XMPP spamming really a thing?
      - nileshtrivedi 13y ago
        That's what Google claims: Chee Chew said that "we haven't seen significant uptake" in federation with Google Talk via server-to-server connections. The majority of the uptake Google did see was from organizations or individuals looking to bombard Google Talk users with chat spam, Chew said. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-on-with-hangouts-googles-new-text-and-video-chat-architecture/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-... This is the original email thread with more details when Google disabled XMPP federation for a while in GTalk: http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001571.html http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...

jspiros 13y ago

I posted this as a comment on the article, but I figured I should mention it here too: I’ve switched to Twilio + OpenVBX (http://openvbx.org/ http://openvbx.org/) as a replacement for Google Voice. The per-month cost is low (something like $2/month per number), though you do have to pay a per-minute charge when you’re actually handling calls. I think transcription might be an additional fee, too.

anuraj 13y ago

I am especially looking at alternative after Google started charging for the use of GMail for small businesses (in spite of their promise to support up to 50 users free). I am sure the alternative will not be as much polished, but I can roll my own postfix+roundcube and run it for 100+ users at < 100$ a year vs Google's $5000 a year! I don't need all the social shit Google throws in with an account, just mail and chat will do.

logn 13y ago

ZohoMail seems to be a decent replacement for Gmail/Docs. I've set up one of my domains there now (free for up to 5 users). Looks pretty nice. Has email/docs/wiki/chat/calendar. It's very much designed to be a gmail alternative. I like.

imonkey 13y ago

I don't like that Google killing some great technologies, like Reader or push-email for iPhone (especially last one). I was Gmail user for a long time, but switch on iCloud recently, because i'm looking something fresh and easy-to-use and still want to have push in my iPhone. 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.

PaulFreund 13y ago

I left Google in favour of self hosted applications: * 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/)

aw3c2 13y ago
Jappix looks really nice. Is there a lightweight Android client that polls every few minutes for new messages? I would need to be notified about new messages when the phone is inactive (screen off). A browser is too big for that.
- PaulFreund 13y ago
  There are many ways to accomplish that. As Jappix requires an XMPP account you can also use a native android client like Xabber (http://www.xabber.com/ http://www.xabber.com/). For my part I wrote a node.js server application that acts as a notification central: myhub (https://github.com/PaulFreund/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.
  - aw3c2 13y ago
    Sorry, I was not verbose enough: It is sync between multiple clients I would be interested in. So if I used XMPP on my mobile and accessed the mobile interface via a browser elsewhere, would both show the same messages (in and out)? I wish more Jabber servers would support http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html and http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html

lorenzfx 13y ago

does anybody know a decent CalDAV web GUI? I have been using agendav and caldavzap for the last months, but am not super happy with any of them.

janmate 13y ago
Why you are not happy with CalDavZAP? Have you tried the upcoming 0.9 version? http://www.inf-it.com/CalDavZAP_0.9rc4.zip http://www.inf-it.com/CalDavZAP_0.9rc4.zip demo: http://www.inf-it.com/caldavzap-next/ http://www.inf-it.com/caldavzap-next/ ... please send me your problems with CalDavZAP to jan.mate at inf-it dot com.

alifaizan 13y ago

there arent many alternative to move out of the google's domain. But sooner or later we will all have too as google's privacy policy Sucks... (Source:http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/ http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/)

pagekicker 13y ago

The article does not state a major problem which is that fastmail.fm is not free.

khafra 13y ago

A man said to Google, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied Google, "That fact has not created in me "A sense of obligation."