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>both of them scoffed at the idea of paying for email. The problem is? google provides better email service, for free[1], than most pay providers. I am /exa

by lsc 13y ago

>both of them scoffed at the idea of paying for email. The problem is? google provides better email service, for free[1], than most pay providers. I am /exactly/ the sort who would run a for-pay email service; I wrote my first sendmail .mc before I was old enough to drink, (and that was back when sendmail was still a thing) and I've been maintaining mailservers longer than that. Also, I have a reasonable reputation for transparency. But I don't think I could compete with Google. I mean, sure, I could get you a much more private service, but for what people expect to pay, I just couldn't do as good of a job of actually maintaining the mailservers as google does. Hell, even if I could charge 1998 rates, like $5/box/month (which I can't) I don't think I could do a better job of that than google. If you really want the full privacy benefits of having private email (e.g. being able to know something is /really deleted/ when you delete it,) you have to run your own mail server. Doing this well is a fair spot of work, probably more than $5/day worth of work (I mean, if you are compensated well enough that a latte is worth $5 more than a drip coffee with milk made at home. It is a non-zero amount of work, and you do have some sort of 'emergency' work every couple of years; something that is broken that is causing mail to bounce. Personally, I rate 'emergency' work as more expensive than the kind I can do on my own schedule.) [1]I mean, in exchange for whatever monetary value they can extract from running their automated advertising tools against your data.

kybernetikos 13y ago
You might have been able to get my business if it wasn't too late - I've gone with fastmail. The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means.
- lsc 13y ago
  >The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means. Google exposes the mail through IMAP, no? why don't you use your own mail client with the google backend? I've written support software for and modified open-source pop3 and IMAP software, and I've gotten partway through writing my own SMTP server, but I never even /considered/ writing a client interface for mail. If I'm providing mail service, I will provide you mail service, and give you smtp and IMAP (encrypted, of course) interfaces to that mail service. Heck, I might support an open-source imap to web interface, too, but the way I see it? running the mailserver and running the mail client are two very different things. If you primarily choose your mail provider based on the provided web interface, you are probably not going to be a good customer for me, because I consider the mail client to be outside of my domain as a SysAdmin. Also, I come from an era where web-gateways to IMAP were considered some kind of cruel joke. I'm not saying that interfaces are unimportant, but it's a very different product than just managing mail servers. I'm good at managing mail servers. I have a difficult time coming up with someone who would be less qualified to write a custom web interface. (I mean, unless the current open-source imap-to-web interfaces are good enough; I can manage open-source software just fine; I'm just not a UI kind of person.) Personally, I wouldn't expect the sorts of companies that are best at running mail servers to also be the best at writing mail clients. That, and I wouldn't want to give up control of my client to other people, because a lot of what makes up a user interface is personal preference. That, and there's no real advantage to having the same people run the server and the client; IMAP is well-standardized.

by lsc 13y ago

kybernetikos 13y ago

You might have been able to get my business if it wasn't too late - I've gone with fastmail. The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means.

lsc 13y ago
>The gmail web interface has become really annoying of late. I don't think it's an impossible task to do better than them by any means. Google exposes the mail through IMAP, no? why don't you use your own mail client with the google backend? I've written support software for and modified open-source pop3 and IMAP software, and I've gotten partway through writing my own SMTP server, but I never even /considered/ writing a client interface for mail. If I'm providing mail service, I will provide you mail service, and give you smtp and IMAP (encrypted, of course) interfaces to that mail service. Heck, I might support an open-source imap to web interface, too, but the way I see it? running the mailserver and running the mail client are two very different things. If you primarily choose your mail provider based on the provided web interface, you are probably not going to be a good customer for me, because I consider the mail client to be outside of my domain as a SysAdmin. Also, I come from an era where web-gateways to IMAP were considered some kind of cruel joke. I'm not saying that interfaces are unimportant, but it's a very different product than just managing mail servers. I'm good at managing mail servers. I have a difficult time coming up with someone who would be less qualified to write a custom web interface. (I mean, unless the current open-source imap-to-web interfaces are good enough; I can manage open-source software just fine; I'm just not a UI kind of person.) Personally, I wouldn't expect the sorts of companies that are best at running mail servers to also be the best at writing mail clients. That, and I wouldn't want to give up control of my client to other people, because a lot of what makes up a user interface is personal preference. That, and there's no real advantage to having the same people run the server and the client; IMAP is well-standardized.