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Show HN: I'm working on an open-source Gmail replacement
- babuskov 13y agoThe main reason I'm using GMail is that it's available everywhere for free - both in money and my time. However, I like your project and it would be nice to have an alternative if I decide one day that I value my privacy more.
- plumeria 13y agoIt would be nice it supported PGP out of the box, I think it would be a strong selling point. Kudos for the initiative.
- danbmil99 13y agohave you seen/heard about mailpile?
- Joeboy 13y agoI thought mailpile was a native application rather than a web thing?
- tluyben2 13y agoIt's webmail: http://www.mailpile.is/ http://www.mailpile.is/
- Joeboy 13y agoIt looks like it's a native app with a web UI.
- tluyben2 13y agoIt says 'web-mail' ; they wouldn't say that then would they? Maybe someone here knows more about that?
- Joeboy 13y agohttps://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile says: > Mailpile has a built-in web server and will eventually include a proper web-based interface for searching, reading and composing e-mail. I'll have to check it out and work out what it actually is/does sometime.
- vorador 13y agoYes I did. I figured out that I should go ahead anyway. More choice is always good, right ?
- DoubleMalt 13y agoYes. Go ahead. Competition is the driver of innovation. However I am afraid without the opportunity to put a man year work into it, it will be hard to tick all the boxes. I really hope you succeed, though. (Disclaimer I am a backer of Mailpile)
- c3kwue 13y agoNot necessarily. Focusing talent on a collaborative effort can make one great product instead of many not so great ones.
- joelrunyon 13y agoCan you give me the 3 second overview of mailpile? Would love a gmail alternative for hosting email on various domains. Look at fastmail - but it's not quite what I want yet.
- marijn 13y agoCollaboration or integration with Mailpile [1] might be a useful direction to consider. They are doing interesting work on the backend, but as far as I am aware, there isn't much frontend present yet. [1]: https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile
- cpsaltis 13y agoThe biggest pain I've experienced with similar web interfaces was mobile. For the desktop there are a few that are decent, but on mobile they generally suck. So do the native email clients for Android and iOS. Do you plan to stick with a desktop version? Will you always design 'destop first'?
- nakedrobot2 13y agoThanks for working on this. I look forward to the day when it will be easy to set up and configure a mail server at home. By all accounts, it is currently a very painful process that is prone to error and interrupted service.
- Joeboy 13y agoDoing it at home probably isn't a practical option unless you somehow get an IP that isn't blacklisted, but doing it on a VDS isn't that bad. I host my email on a VDS. I would kind of like to be able to host other people's too, but I've always been freaked out by having the ability to read my friends' emails.
- lazylizard 13y agoer. this is probably a dumb idea. works for 1 person only i guess. you can use google's smtp after signing up for google apps. http://emailrelay.sourceforge.net/ http://emailrelay.sourceforge.net/ is 1 of the ways to relay(actually more forward than relay i guess) via smtp.gmail.com. now you're not blacklisted? even if you're running your server at home on dynamic ip? now u just need to be able to update enom or dyn whats your ip as it changes?
- Wingman4l7 13y agoCan anyone comment on Spamassassin's efficacy as compared to Google's spam filters?
- tluyben2 13y agoI commented on it in another comment on OP.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoIt's fucking terrible by comparison.
- brdrak 13y agoI beg to differ.
- Joeboy 13y agoGreat, as far as I know Roundcube is the only decent open source webmail thing, and it could do with some competition.
- tiatia 13y agoNo, there is Horde and Squirrel mail. I myself prefer webmail.afterlogic.com It has a free light version.
- yogo 13y agoI actually use squirrel mail but its interface is still stuck in 1999. Roundcube is pretty good but I didn't like it very much the last time I installed it.
- babuskov 13y agoHorde seems to be full of bugs regarding security. Several of my friends run it on their servers and had the server compromized. Looking at web server logs, the backdoor was always some part of Horde/Imp web interface. They have all moved away from it since, so I can't tell if all of those have been fixed recently, but the whole architecture of it is not something I would trust.
- psankar 13y agoSupport keyboard shortcuts, at the earliest. It is one of the most heavily used features for heavy email users.
- fit2rule 13y agoSquirrelmail?
- jagermo 13y agoNice client - but looks so 90s. No offense meant, but i have the mail client open all day. I need a fast, responsive client with a good search engine and spam detection. And a good look. Not sure if squirrelmail could do it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- stass 13y agoWhat is the benefit of a web client if you keep it open the entire day? I find standalone clients, like Sylpheed, much easier to use and you're not constrained by what you can run in browser.
- jagermo 13y agoAgree, but all day means several different systems as well (Tabelt, Notebook etc pp). I prefer to have everything online
- tluyben2 13y agoI welcome this as I welcome Mailpile and other efforts like it; I look for another mail solution every few years. Not with the idea of replacing gmail (might/might not do), but to see if anyone did anything useful yet. So far, no. All solutions, even considering the changes to gmail everyone seems to hate (I don't), are nothing compared. Every time some new frontend/backend comes up, I say the same (and have done on HN before); i'm not a typical user; I had email since '95, I have been a heavy user since then and I took my mail with me since. In 2005 I was looking, like I had been then as well, for a better mail solution and stumbled upon gmail. I wrote an export script for the mail system I was using at the time and imported 10 years of mail into gmail. I now have over a million mails in my mailbox (i'm not sure what is the total); I have over 50 mail addresses coming to my inbox, I receive 1000s (sometimes 10.000s) of spam messages per day which Google filters well. I guess this is due to the fact I have had/have businesses on those 50 mails since 1995. All clients I tried so far just simply hang when I try them, including outlook (exchange or imap), thunderbird and some free and commercial web versions (yahoo and outlook web/live simply don't work; I cannot even read my mail through the amount of spam and the clients are horrible for productivity imho. Slow as well). I also need a solid spam solution; spamassassin simply doesn't cut it; not only does it run high processor on my server, it doesn't actually filter stuff like google does. Google almost never goes wrong for me; actually; I have had very few mistakes / missing mails. While with spamassassin, I'll be carefully inspecting 5k mails / day while still getting spam in my inbox. I think my mailbox is a bit weird now, but it'll be quite normal as it'll be normal for people to have a mailbox since birth and taking it with them till they die. If you run a few businesses along the way, getting to 1 million messages is not hard; spam will find you as well. Media messages are getting common; I make a point of using dropbox/sftp for attachments, but not everyone does that, so I do get videos, huge blah megapixel cameras of birthdays of family etc. This is normal and will only grow; the current mail solutions don't handle it well. If you want to deliver a competitor to gmail, you need to make this work imho and it needs to be a test case.
- justinmk 13y agoYeah, the gmail UI (which is forgettable) is about 5% of the product; the other 95% is: * spam detection * search * mail header hacks I don't think that can be approximated in "a few months". > 50 mail addresses coming to my inbox On the other hand, no product (open source or not) should optimize for the outliers (not to be confused with edge cases).
- jroseattle 13y agoI'm looking forward to a day when a prominent model will be cloud-based applications storing data in private repositories.
- northisup 13y agocheck out https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail for a mature gmail alternative.
- jagermo 13y agoI really like it - good work, keep it up. It's a good thing that you guys (you, Mailpile, Roundcube) develop alternatives to gmail. However, for me to switch (like most here, I am a heavy email user), I need a few things: - PGP encryption - Contacts - Calendar Have you thought about expanding the developer base? Maybe via Kickstarter/Indiegogo? The alpha already looks good, I'm sure a lot of us would like to contribute to the development.
- yurikoval 13y agoWould be nice to see people get together and finalise a viable alternative. Keep up the good work! Meanwhile, here is another potential solution. https://assemblymade.com/amail https://assemblymade.com/amail
- darklajid 13y agoI just put the finishing touches on my ansible playbook for my 'Goodbye Google' server (Mail via dovecot/postfix w/ dkim, dspam, greylist, sieve, Radicale for CardDAV, CalDAV, Prosody for xmpp). Works fine so far. What I'm lacking right now is a decent webmail client. Roundcube isn't exactly my type of thing, mailpile might be interesting. This seems ambitious and interesting in general, but seems to come with too much strings attached (puppet? No, ansible. Comes with postfix? I already have that). So .. it is more than I'd need. I do like the idea of ready-made, easy mail server setups though (obviously, given the first paragraph). Perhaps a project like this could integrate well into owncloud or arkos though?
- levosmetalo 13y agoCare to make that playbook publicly available? I would also be interested to try out hosting my own email, but am somehow afraid of setting it up wrong.
- lazylizard 13y agoi found https://github.com/al3x/sovereign/blob/master/README.textile https://github.com/al3x/sovereign/blob/master/README.textile and http://yunohost.org/ http://yunohost.org/ from here actually...personally i also think https://library.linode.com/email/postfix https://library.linode.com/email/postfix is good.
- darklajid 13y agoJust pushed my current status to https://github.com/darklajid/ansible-communication Careful though: This isn't deployed outside of test machines yet. I'm still working on the proper backup/restore scenarios, consider a couple improvements etc. - the readme outlines what I would like to do next. Plus: While I self-host my mails for a while (without an automated setup of sorts, the one off snowflake sort of thing, so quite different from this here), I don't claim to be an expert here. Check what I did, take it as a template, don't use it without a basic understanding. If there are some postfix/dovecot gurus out here and would like to point out obvious flaws in my setup - go ahead!
- s-topper 13y agoTried out the demo; it's nice. Keyboard shortcuts and threaded display would be nice to have. Will check out the source for my learning.
- tiatia 13y agoAfterlogic has a free lite version I like it compared to other scripts like SquirrelMail or Horde. webmail.afterlogic.com
- yogo 13y agoThis is pretty neat. Not sure if these are features available in the pro version but two things I think it's missing are (or that I didn't see in the demo): - multiple identities, so that when sending email you can pick the from email address + signature - setting filters for any header. This is useful for filtering mail based on the spam level header so that they go straight to the spam folder. Really nice web interface though.
- tiatia 13y agoI think the demo is the pro version already. They have a decent forum: http://www.afterlogic.com/forum http://www.afterlogic.com/forum I installed it on a hosting account and it works well. But I still fighting to get a tiny VPS running to host my email. I plan to co-run Afterlogic and alpine via SSH. Alpine allows for multiple identities - you can put whatever you want in the FROM field if you enable this in the configuration settings.
- hipsters_unite 13y agoIs there a mailing list to track this project? I can't see any way of monitoring updates on the page.
- keyle 13y agoI do love the attention to detail, with the Nigerian's prince email. Doing good software is one thing, doing it with a good touch of humor is what makes it stick. +1.
- waterlion 13y agoHow much of GMail does this do (or intend to do)? Off the top of my head, GMail does this for me (in this order): - Email server that I can run for my domain. - Search a large number of messages on the server - Spam detection on the server - Automatic labelling / categorisation on the server for incoming mail - Address book - Saving of drafts on the server so I can edit and send on several devices - A webmail interface Is this intended to be a GMail replacement or another webmail interface?
- ozh 13y agoHow effective would it be to self host your mail regarding spam? In gmail I guess that once a few peeps click "Report Spam" on a mail that passed filters, similar mails are also flagged as spam in other accounts. I've always found gmail extremely effective at this, and I practically never flag mail as spam myself. Sure, there are automated spam filters to configure, but overall wouldn't going alone make things much less efficient on that topic?
- alexchamberlain 13y agoThere must be a spam filtering as a service? Send anything that wasn't signed and/or you're not 90%(?) sure isn't spam?
- btgeekboy 13y agoThere was Postini, which Google bought. You'd set your MX record to them, and they'd forward your non-spam email on to your SMTP server.
- brdrak 13y agoWe use Postini at work and it is terrible. Normal Gmail filters are much better. I hear Google is replacing Postini with something they developed themselves.
- ye 13y agohttp://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ http://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ http://akismet.com/ http://akismet.com/
- dcarmo 13y agoMaybe having an online database of spam emails that every self hosted mail can access could be an answer.
- lazylizard 13y agohttps://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingRazor https://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingRazor
- macmac 13y agoSearch is mentioned as a keep feature a lot in this thread. Would using elasticsearch be a feasible solution? It certainly scales easily.
- aioprisan 13y agoKudos! I think the hardest part will come in trying to maintain and scale this from an interoperability perspective. I used to work at an ISP where 80%+ of the work on the mail product was getting our IPs un-blacklisted and other ISPs from not blocking our traffic anymore, as well as pruning out the bad/bot users.
- rshlo 13y agoI appreciate the hard work. Nevertheless, IMHO it would be better if open source projects will bring original ideas to the market, instead of copying an existing product.
- mseebach 13y agoYeah, RMS shouldn't have bothered making a free version of UNIX. Linus shouldn't have have made a free, sub-standard version of MINIX. The Dovecot devs shouldn't have made Dovecot when we already had UW IMAP. Postfix is redundant, we've had Sendmail for decades. They all should really have done something original instead.
- cryptolect 13y agoI'd argue that post-PRISM, there's a big opportunity to re-create self-hosted options for services known to be open books to the government. It might not be creative, but it does provides users a familiar alternative to storing their data in the cloud.
- mverwijs 13y ago> post-PRISM Post? You optimist you. If anything we're smack in the middle of it.
- hajderr 13y ago+1. Would use it.
- dinduks 13y agoThe Distributed Everything blog post encouraged me to leave most of Google' services due to their closed ecosystem and the violation of privacy. I managed to leave everything (GTalk/Hangouts, Agenda, Contacts, Google+, etc.) except Gmail because of how great and useful filters and labels are. In my opinion, these two points are the reason why Gmail cannot be easily replaced. I thus would encourage working on these futures. Also, I don't want to sound like a troll, but I wish it was build in a more popular language, such as Java (it's not my favorite) to encourage contributions. Good luck!
- rattray 13y agoQuite a minor point of feedback, and not altogether fair, but attempting to obscure your email (~) gives me a bit of a lack of confidence in the spam filters you're using. I have my gmail up in plaintext on my homepage, and don't experience too many problems. If nothing else, putting your email in plaintext could help you debug your spam prevention?
- vorador 13y agoI haven't setup spam detection yet, so that's why I obscured my email.
- Mindless2112 13y agoThe expression "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" applies to spam too. The best spam filter is the one you don't need.
- infocollector 13y agoGreat Job. Ignore all the other projects that are out there please (If they are not BSD, they are useless for me). This is what I was waiting for. I would recommend developing both mobile / desktop together.
- uses 13y agoI think we'll see a lot more of this type of software in the near future. It's easier and cheaper than ever to automate the setup of servers. Imagine being able to click a few buttons, in something like the webmin of yore, and suddenly having a private mail server/file sync node/document editor application, set up at the VPS provider of your choice. This type of thing will encourage open standards, as the private servers will need to communicate with each other. It also ties in nicely with concerns about the implications of everything being hosted and controlled by major providers. There are probably business opportunities at many points in this model.
- samspenc 13y agoThis looks great. Just curious: Roundcube didn't cut it for you?
- wuschel 13y agoHappy to see more alternatives to Gmail. I am still using Gmail with the old HTML interface, as the new one is cluttered with all kinds of stuff I do not need. Stay with KISS, when it comes to functionality and interface, with optional integration of PGP. I wanted to quit using google services for long, but it is only now that I get active in that regard (e.g. duckduckgo as search engine). As such, I am searching an alternative for the 1. web based storage of emails 2. a good web interface. As for 1., I stil have not found anything really interesting that comes for free. As for 2., I was once using Mutt and found it quite efficient, and am now thinking to try out sup. However, there is still this feeling that there could be a better client when it comes to usability and ease of installation. Using Mutt on Windows can be really annoying.
- markthien 13y agoYou r just shooting your own foot
- cenhyperion 13y agoVery cool. Looks like a really good web interface that would be a pleasure to use. On a personal note, am I the only one that generally prefers a mail client? The ability to combine all my emails (work, gmail, @mydomain, etc) into one unified inbox is why I prefer it.
- brdrak 13y agoI do as well. That also opens up other possibilities like the ability to just drag and drop an email between IMAP accounts. The other day I was getting smtp errors from Google, so I sent a work email from a personal account, then dragged it to work sent items, because I won't remember to search for it in personal.
- tete 13y agoXMPP would be cool too and suddenly you have a chatbox. Would be cool to have in all the "home server" platforms (Freedom Box, ArkOS, ...) too!