8 ms·
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 G
by 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 agoFor 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.
- ineedtosleep 13y agoI 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 agoSetting 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.
- ineedtosleep 13y agoCan you elaborate on the blacklisting part? I've had my mailserver for a little over a year now and never had any issues with my mail going to spam, but my uses for that mailserver only revolve around 2-3 email accounts.
- tomkarlo 13y agoSorry, I was a little unclear - the setup is easy, it's the maintenance that's annoying. (I've run mail servers in one way or another for ~15 years. I use Google Apps for my personal email now but still maintain some servers that do about 10,000 emails a day.) Even if you have DKM/SPF setup, someone can decide to start spoofing email from your domain to send spam, especially if your domain has been around a while and is relatively clean. Since you don't send a lot of real mail, all of a sudden 99% of the email marked as coming from your domain is spam. It's not always even obvious that you've been blacklisted; mails may simply be significantly delayed (AOL does this, I guess so they can check for similar messages to other users), etc. This is an issue for email providers as well, but they have people on staff paid to deal with it. Even if you only have to deal with this once every 2-3 years, that's still generally going to be worse than simply paying someone $5 a month for a managed email service, not to mention to you have to deal with backups, etc.
- tomphoolery 13y agoI'm working on this right now! It's going to integrate with both Amazon S3 for file storage and Amazon Glacier for backup. I hope to get it working with the BitTorrent Sync protocol so I don't have to write my own app that watches a dir and uploads files to the server.
- frio 13y agoMost of the work for the "hacker alternative" is already done, in the form of [iRedmail]. [iRedMail]: http://www.iredmail.org/ http://www.iredmail.org/
- majelix 13y agoAs others have mentioned, it's not really the technical aspects of SMTP that make hosting your own email difficult. It's the entire deliverability ecosystem that's developed (ostensibly to protect from spam), such as most residential providers blocking outgoing port 25, or most mailservers filtering incoming mail from dynamic IPs.
- naa42 13y agoI used iRedMail to setup department mail server and it just worked. I had no problems with configuration: IMAP, SSL, SMTP - everything works out of the box. Spam protection is also adequate, at least for a relatively low-volume usage.
- vidarh 13y agoYou're not addressing what majelix mentions. How about DKIM? SPF? Do you know if/when you end up on any block-lists? What about deferrals from the major providers? It is by no means impossible that everything "just works" for you, but depending on your e-mail patterns, and what ISP you uses, and whether or not there's any spammers or spammer-look-alikes on the same netblocks as you, the level of hassle in ensuring your outbound e-mails actually gets delivered to your recipients inboxes rather than spam-filtered can be immense.
- Steko 13y ago"I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo ... Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now." I must have missed something, did Google acquire Dropbox? Dropbox makes their money from the Dropbox product which is exactly why you should use a company like them instead of a borg offering. I prefer Sugarsync but there are no shortage of options.
- rogerchucker 13y agoI prefer these services free and have no problem being tracked for more personalized ads. I don't wanna pay with my wallet - I am OK with paying with my information.
- pyre 13y agoLots of people are OK with something until it bites them. Plenty of people are 'ok' with not backing up their information (e.g. family photos), until a storage failure takes it all away.
- rogerchucker 13y agoYes it's called taking risk. I am aware of it - people like you seem to get offended that we actually take that risk in exchange of the convenience (free and more or less stable services).
- pyre 13y agoI'm not offended. - Not everyone that pays with their information is aware of the risk they are taking. - Many people that know the the risks are misjudged their probability of coming to bear.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoIf you pay for it with information, it is no more "free" than if you payed for it with money.
- white_devil 13y ago
- akurtzhs 13y agoRackspace's hosted mail is $2/inbox/month now, and they have a minimum of 5 mailboxes. I used their service when it was Mailtrust, and continued on after Rackspace bought them without complaint, but that was when I could buy a single mailbox.
- lh7777 13y agoMe too; been with them since '04 when they were webmail.us and not a single issue.
- leejoramo 13y agoI have used Rackspace mail for 5 or 6 years, since I gave up trying managing email servers for firm and my clients. All it took was one client getting a spamming virus, and all email from the IP address would get black listed. I have found their email to be very reliable. The webmail aspect is not perfect, and some of my clients have run into occasional issues with it. I almost always use an IMAP client app and never have an issue. You can get an upgrade and enable full mobile sync using (I think) MS ActiveSync.
- stock_toaster 13y agoi also ise rackspace mail (almost entirely via imap/smtp), and it has been very reliable. Their lack of 2-factor auth is making we consider fastmail though.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago> 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. git-annex-assistant provides a friendly Dropbox replacement, with a web-based GUI and a magically synced/shared folder. Supports Linux, Android, and (very early stages) Windows and OS X. > Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Eventually I want to bite the bullet and host my own mail server (I still have nightmares from when I self-hosted email a few years ago) but in the meantime I've really liked Rackspace. I currently use Gandi's mail servers, which you get free when you have a domain through them. I run my own IMAP server and move the mail to it with getmail, but I let Gandi handle SMTP receipt and delivery.
- micloud 13y agoReplacing dropbox is an easy task. Have u tried tonido (http://www.tonido.com http://www.tonido.com)
- aw3c2 13y agoThat is neither self-hosted nor free open-source from a quick look at it.
- micloud 13y agoIt is self-hosted but it is not open source. Does it have to be an open source solution?
- omni 13y agoA lot of your short comment history is about Tonido. If you're affiliated with them in some way, you should disclose it when you talk about them on HN.
- thezach 13y agoRackspace is one of two providers I will never use... the second is Linode
- ekianjo 13y agoFor folder synchronization Bittorrent Sync is a pretty good alternative to Dropbox. Of course, you don't get the web interface and all, but you get the same functionality for folders, for free, with your own server.
- malnourish 13y agoThis is what I was thinking. I am strongly considering setting this up. I don't have a use for the web interface.
- tobeportable 13y agothis and seafile are the only contenders as real alternative
- nnutter 13y agoOne issue with self-hosted is that your ISP may block SMTP or worse they add their customer IP blocks to spam blacklists.
- jrabone 13y agoI think ISPs should firewall SMTP by default, and if they don't provide you with static IP they absolutely should add their dynamic IP blocks to the DUL / PBL etc. Almost all of the spam rejects from my mail server are from dynamic IPs. Them's the breaks. FWIW my ISP were perfectly happy to relax the firewall rules when I asked.
- terolacu 13y agoWhy replace Dropbox? I use it with encfs and works just fine. And it's free.
- fakeer 13y ago>>Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. No, it's $10/month minimum. Even if you are just ine user you have to buy 5 user plan. And even per user cost is $2 and not $1. There's no such solution that replaces Gmail. You look those services - one here, one there, one compromise, one arrangement etc. I wish there was one.
- gphilip 13y ago> Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Looks like it is $2/inbox/month now: http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/ http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/
- fanda 13y agoTake a look at RMails: https://github.com/fanda/rmails https://github.com/fanda/rmails It is Ruby on Rails application with Ruby scripts to autamate installation and configuration of E-mail server. Post-install configuration is done throught web application. Still in development but already usable. I opensourced it and I hope that somebody could contribute.
- extesy 13y agoFor replacing dropbox I recommend copy.com - they give you 15GB for free (or 20GB if you use my ref link: https://copy.com?r=alqolW https://copy.com?r=alqolW) instead of dropbox's tiny 2GB. Their client app looks and behaves very similar to dropbox and they support all important platforms.
- ansgri 13y agoAs for dropbox, its only upside is great mobile apps, for other tasks SpiderOak works for me. Actually, I have both and have SpiderOak put everything I often need on mobile into Dropbox.