6 ms·

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait unt

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? If there were such an alternative, all they would need to do is wait until gmail fouls up, as they did here. Then they'd have a flood of new users. I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address everywhere and forward from your gmail account. But what are the real reasons?

vex 13y ago
A better question is, why isn't there an open source webmail service like gmail that can be run on a server you control? My lab uses Gmail for business, and the outage took us down too. I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange
- chmars 13y ago
  You could use Kolab: http://kolab.org/ http://kolab.org/
- thrush 13y ago
  I think an even better question may be, why isn't there a decentralized approach to email to compete with centralized alternatives like Gmail. Imagine that you could still use your email when Gmail goes down, but you would lose a lot of features like autocomplete, search, recommended recipients, etc.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    IMAP
- benjohnson 13y ago
  There's plenty - we chose Roundcube. http://roundcube.net http://roundcube.net
- abvdasker 13y ago
  So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try self-hosting my email while I'm at it. Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up. The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started. I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerably improved upon.
    - abvdasker 13y ago
      Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.
      - aaronem 13y ago
        Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.
  - tilsammans 13y ago
    I've been using, and contributing to, Sovereign. It's fantastic. Even if you are only looking for a mail server, you can point it to a VPS and let it do its magic. Zero trouble, self-hosted IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail. https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign
scarmig 13y ago
Yes, it is a difficult problem. At least if you want to have enough of a track record of reliability that within a couple minutes of going down you've hit the top slot on Hacker News.
JohnBooty 13y ago
Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? Are you serious?
- chmars 13y ago
  I agree, there is no alternative, there are only other mail services, especially if you use not only Gmail but also Calendar and Contacts.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    You know Microsoft still exists, right? They've been dumping buckets of money into their web-based offerings. Obviously, MS is no less evil than Google. But they exist. If you don't want to use a tacky old Hotmail.com domain name, you can also register for an MS account at Live.com or Outlook.com - this gets you a web Outlook account which gives you email, contacts, SkyDrive (photos and docs/spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc) and calendar. And they don't have their own analogue to Plus and they've abandoned their old messaging systems, so the only "social layer" tedium is an optional integrated sidebar for Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter. It's actually pretty nice. I still use my gmail as my primary because there's not enough reason to switch and I like open-source Android, but MS has built a solid thing there.
    - ternaryoperator 13y ago
      Quite agreed. Microsoft has done a very nice job updating its offering. The paid versions are also very well done.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to think that we could sit down and make an open source gmail clone.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
petercooper 13y ago
Then they'd have a flood of new users. There are a handful of alternatives each with their own pros and cons but the key problem is lock in, psychological or technological. Even if Gmail were down for an hour every day, I'd have to think and work hard to migrate away due to (over)-relying on their service and some of the unique features it has.
Touche 13y ago
There are many alternatives of the caliber. Fastmail for example. Probably the problem is that you are expecting an alternative that is exactly like Gmail but if that's the way you judge alternatives you will never find one you accept.
- colanderman 13y ago
  +1 for FastMail. Its interface is beautiful and blazingly fast (while GMail is unusably slow on my machine). It integrated trivially with my personal domain, including federated XMPP. GMail jumped the shark when they forced the new interface on everyone, killing usability in the process. It doesn't deserve my eyeball time any more.
- pmcg 13y ago
  As a long time paid Fastmail user, Fastmail will probably stay as good as it is for longer if we don't tell everyone about it! :)
rattray 13y ago
I've heard terrific things about fastmail.fm's web client. Many people say it's faster and has most of Gmail's cherished features. Edit: plus, no Google-snooping of course.
- alfiejohn_ 13y ago
  No Google-snooping, and there never will be.
jordibunster 13y ago
Have you tried outlook.com? Disclosure: I work for Microsoft (not outlook.com team though).
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I'm curious about the branding - I still connect to Live.com for my Hotmail account although the header says Outlook... is Microsoft ever going to get this mess settled? And can you actually get an outlook.com email account or is it only Hotmail.com and Live.com? edit: google reveals that yes, you can get an outlook.com account.
makmanalp 13y ago
I don't think there are network effects, really. The contact list you can export just fine. I think it's just a good product overall. - The search is very good, even searches within attachments. - You can have large attachments. - Doesn't run out of space and is free. - Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good. - The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this. - The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this. - Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this. I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere. Alternatives seem to be: - http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/ - https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ - http://www.horde.org/ http://www.horde.org/ - http://openwebmail.org/ http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad) - http://squirrelmail.org/ http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible) edit: Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated. Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho. edit2: Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  I use roundcube to front-end mail for friends and family. The problem is that you mention you run your own mail server and even plenty of tech-savvy folks will look at you like you're the Unibomber.
smacktoward 13y ago
The "killer feature" of Gmail that people generally cite is its spam filtering, and that is hard to replicate, because one reason Google's spam filters are so good is because they have an enormous corpus of messages at hand to train them with. This presents would-be competitors with a chicken-and-egg problem: you need lots of users to be able to pull together a corpus like that, but you can't attract lots of users without your spam filters having that large corpus to learn from. It's not the interface that's hard to replicate, in other words; it's the backend, the service component. This is pretty consistent with the type of "moats" Google has generally built around its properties, they're almost always more about magic on the backend than magic on the front.
- daigoba66 13y ago
  Google used to have spam filtering as a (pay to use) service: http://www.google.com/postini http://www.google.com/postini. My e-mail (I don't use gmail) used it before it was shutdown. Now they use http://www.roaringpenguin.com/ http://www.roaringpenguin.com/.
- nfoz 13y ago
  Honestly, my gmail gets a lot more spam (and I mean into my Inbox) than the self-hosted email that I actually use (I rarely touch my gmail). Also they seem to engage in very spammer-friendly activities such as notifying spammers if and when you read their spam email (if images are turned on by default). Soooo, I can't imagine that competing against their spam filtering is as impossible as people tend to believe.
  - andrewem 13y ago
    Now they're caching each image once for all users, which pretty much defeats that.
    - schrodinger 13y ago
      Not really, now you just have to have a unique image URL for each email you send. How could they possibly tell they are the same image before downloading them?
stevewilhelm 13y ago
My GMail was back up in minutes. It would take a great deal of effort for me to move my years of Google Mail (professional and personal), Contacts, Calendars, and Drive-based documents to some other service.
- jsz0 13y ago
  To their credit Google makes it very easy to get your data out. I was really surprised how easy it was to transition to different services.
- scholia 13y ago
  Probably not as much effort as you think.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7119301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7119301
duaneb 13y ago
For me, at least, it's a combination of IMAP sucking (and GMail's tag/filter interface improving functionality of mail immensely) and their having the best spam filtering around.
hyperbovine 13y ago
I suspect in part because Google eats its own dogfood here. GMail evolved out of Google's original internal e-mail system and is still the default mode of communication within the company today. That is in part why it is so fast and responsive: inefficiency equates to Google losing $$ on wasted productivity. By comparison, I suspect that MS largely uses Outlook internally rather than Hotmail; surprisingly, the same is true of Yahoo (http://goo.gl/82mlql http://goo.gl/82mlql). FB employees, for their part, apparently use their personal accounts for a lot of work-related communication, which strikes me as a little weird.
superuser2 13y ago
Why would an alternative service (or self hosting or whatever) be better at reliability than Google?
korzun 13y ago
I use Zoho and have nothing negative to say about them. They lack Android integration, but as a mail service (with a web mail) they are totally fine. Spam filtering works well too.
Xorlev 13y ago
How about https://www.fastmail.fm/ https://www.fastmail.fm/ ?
scholia 13y ago
Outlook.com is an alternative and it is the calibre of Gmail. The differences are marginal. See my comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120745 I use Outlook.com as a backup to Gmail and I use Gmail with my own domain name. I haven't switched, but it wouldn't be a problem if I had to.
bzliu94 13y ago
Look, if you're looking for an alternative, you might as well go as simple as possible. Otherwise, you're never going to get unhooked from the behemoths of today.

vex 13y ago

A better question is, why isn't there an open source webmail service like gmail that can be run on a server you control? My lab uses Gmail for business, and the outage took us down too. I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange

chmars 13y ago
You could use Kolab: http://kolab.org/ http://kolab.org/
thrush 13y ago
I think an even better question may be, why isn't there a decentralized approach to email to compete with centralized alternatives like Gmail. Imagine that you could still use your email when Gmail goes down, but you would lose a lot of features like autocomplete, search, recommended recipients, etc.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  IMAP
benjohnson 13y ago
There's plenty - we chose Roundcube. http://roundcube.net http://roundcube.net
abvdasker 13y ago
So coincidentally I was just looking into this earlier this week. I just got a server to host the blog I've been working on and figured hey, why don't I try self-hosting my email while I'm at it. Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up. The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started. I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.
- aaronem 13y ago
  I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices. The really hard part was finding a halfway decent CalDAV/CardDAV server that didn't require undue suffering to configure; I settled on Baïkal, which works okay, but could be considerably improved upon.
  - abvdasker 13y ago
    Thanks for the tip on dovecot. I'll give that a shot.
    - aaronem 13y ago
      Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.
- tilsammans 13y ago
  I've been using, and contributing to, Sovereign. It's fantastic. Even if you are only looking for a mail server, you can point it to a VPS and let it do its magic. Zero trouble, self-hosted IMAP/POP3/SMTP/Webmail. https://github.com/al3x/sovereign https://github.com/al3x/sovereign

scarmig 13y ago

Yes, it is a difficult problem. At least if you want to have enough of a track record of reliability that within a couple minutes of going down you've hit the top slot on Hacker News.

JohnBooty 13y ago

Why is there no alternative webmail of the caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem? Are you serious?

chmars 13y ago
I agree, there is no alternative, there are only other mail services, especially if you use not only Gmail but also Calendar and Contacts.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  You know Microsoft still exists, right? They've been dumping buckets of money into their web-based offerings. Obviously, MS is no less evil than Google. But they exist. If you don't want to use a tacky old Hotmail.com domain name, you can also register for an MS account at Live.com or Outlook.com - this gets you a web Outlook account which gives you email, contacts, SkyDrive (photos and docs/spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc) and calendar. And they don't have their own analogue to Plus and they've abandoned their old messaging systems, so the only "social layer" tedium is an optional integrated sidebar for Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter. It's actually pretty nice. I still use my gmail as my primary because there's not enough reason to switch and I like open-source Android, but MS has built a solid thing there.
  - ternaryoperator 13y ago
    Quite agreed. Microsoft has done a very nice job updating its offering. The paid versions are also very well done.
sillysaurus2 13y ago
I'm old enough to remember that gmail was largely the creation of one person; a person who was neither a programming god nor business guru. It's tempting to think that we could sit down and make an open source gmail clone.
- maxerickson 13y ago

petercooper 13y ago

Then they'd have a flood of new users. There are a handful of alternatives each with their own pros and cons but the key problem is lock in, psychological or technological. Even if Gmail were down for an hour every day, I'd have to think and work hard to migrate away due to (over)-relying on their service and some of the unique features it has.

Touche 13y ago

There are many alternatives of the caliber. Fastmail for example. Probably the problem is that you are expecting an alternative that is exactly like Gmail but if that's the way you judge alternatives you will never find one you accept.

colanderman 13y ago
+1 for FastMail. Its interface is beautiful and blazingly fast (while GMail is unusably slow on my machine). It integrated trivially with my personal domain, including federated XMPP. GMail jumped the shark when they forced the new interface on everyone, killing usability in the process. It doesn't deserve my eyeball time any more.
pmcg 13y ago
As a long time paid Fastmail user, Fastmail will probably stay as good as it is for longer if we don't tell everyone about it! :)

rattray 13y ago

I've heard terrific things about fastmail.fm's web client. Many people say it's faster and has most of Gmail's cherished features. Edit: plus, no Google-snooping of course.

alfiejohn_ 13y ago
No Google-snooping, and there never will be.

jordibunster 13y ago

Have you tried outlook.com? Disclosure: I work for Microsoft (not outlook.com team though).

Pxtl 13y ago
I'm curious about the branding - I still connect to Live.com for my Hotmail account although the header says Outlook... is Microsoft ever going to get this mess settled? And can you actually get an outlook.com email account or is it only Hotmail.com and Live.com? edit: google reveals that yes, you can get an outlook.com account.

makmanalp 13y ago

I don't think there are network effects, really. The contact list you can export just fine. I think it's just a good product overall. - The search is very good, even searches within attachments. - You can have large attachments. - Doesn't run out of space and is free. - Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good. - The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this. - The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this. - Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this. I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere. Alternatives seem to be: - http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/ - https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/ - http://www.horde.org/ http://www.horde.org/ - http://openwebmail.org/ http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad) - http://squirrelmail.org/ http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible) edit: Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated. Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho. edit2: Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.

rodgerd 13y ago
I use roundcube to front-end mail for friends and family. The problem is that you mention you run your own mail server and even plenty of tech-savvy folks will look at you like you're the Unibomber.

smacktoward 13y ago

The "killer feature" of Gmail that people generally cite is its spam filtering, and that is hard to replicate, because one reason Google's spam filters are so good is because they have an enormous corpus of messages at hand to train them with. This presents would-be competitors with a chicken-and-egg problem: you need lots of users to be able to pull together a corpus like that, but you can't attract lots of users without your spam filters having that large corpus to learn from. It's not the interface that's hard to replicate, in other words; it's the backend, the service component. This is pretty consistent with the type of "moats" Google has generally built around its properties, they're almost always more about magic on the backend than magic on the front.

daigoba66 13y ago
Google used to have spam filtering as a (pay to use) service: http://www.google.com/postini http://www.google.com/postini. My e-mail (I don't use gmail) used it before it was shutdown. Now they use http://www.roaringpenguin.com/ http://www.roaringpenguin.com/.
nfoz 13y ago
Honestly, my gmail gets a lot more spam (and I mean into my Inbox) than the self-hosted email that I actually use (I rarely touch my gmail). Also they seem to engage in very spammer-friendly activities such as notifying spammers if and when you read their spam email (if images are turned on by default). Soooo, I can't imagine that competing against their spam filtering is as impossible as people tend to believe.
- andrewem 13y ago
  Now they're caching each image once for all users, which pretty much defeats that.
  - schrodinger 13y ago
    Not really, now you just have to have a unique image URL for each email you send. How could they possibly tell they are the same image before downloading them?

stevewilhelm 13y ago

My GMail was back up in minutes. It would take a great deal of effort for me to move my years of Google Mail (professional and personal), Contacts, Calendars, and Drive-based documents to some other service.

jsz0 13y ago
To their credit Google makes it very easy to get your data out. I was really surprised how easy it was to transition to different services.
scholia 13y ago
Probably not as much effort as you think.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7119301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7119301

duaneb 13y ago

For me, at least, it's a combination of IMAP sucking (and GMail's tag/filter interface improving functionality of mail immensely) and their having the best spam filtering around.

hyperbovine 13y ago

I suspect in part because Google eats its own dogfood here. GMail evolved out of Google's original internal e-mail system and is still the default mode of communication within the company today. That is in part why it is so fast and responsive: inefficiency equates to Google losing $$ on wasted productivity. By comparison, I suspect that MS largely uses Outlook internally rather than Hotmail; surprisingly, the same is true of Yahoo (http://goo.gl/82mlql http://goo.gl/82mlql). FB employees, for their part, apparently use their personal accounts for a lot of work-related communication, which strikes me as a little weird.

superuser2 13y ago

Why would an alternative service (or self hosting or whatever) be better at reliability than Google?

korzun 13y ago

I use Zoho and have nothing negative to say about them. They lack Android integration, but as a mail service (with a web mail) they are totally fine. Spam filtering works well too.

Xorlev 13y ago

How about https://www.fastmail.fm/ https://www.fastmail.fm/ ?

scholia 13y ago

Outlook.com is an alternative and it is the calibre of Gmail. The differences are marginal. See my comment above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120745 I use Outlook.com as a backup to Gmail and I use Gmail with my own domain name. I haven't switched, but it wouldn't be a problem if I had to.

bzliu94 13y ago

Look, if you're looking for an alternative, you might as well go as simple as possible. Otherwise, you're never going to get unhooked from the behemoths of today.