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Fits in well with this recent story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 about it being time for personal serve

Fits in well with this recent story http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261 about it being time for personal servers. Just like I can run my own blog on my own server with Wordpress instead of needing to have it hosted on Wordpress.com, I wish someone would release an open source webmail client of equivalent quality to Gmail that could be installed on personal servers, would also support XMPP, etc. Same for other cloud software now. Why not offer it as an upfront purchase price, plus a continuing support contract, with the software running on hardware that the end user has ultimate control over.

jacquesm 17y ago
I use horde for webmail, I don't use XMPP but I think it is supported.
- xinsight 17y ago
  While Horde is an open-source email reader, it's not in the same league as gmail. Not even close.
  - e1ven 17y ago
    I've had decent experiences with Roundcube, if you're looking for a more AJAX-driven client; The versions I've tested were a bit buggy, but that was a few years back, I'm sure it's improved by now. http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/
- litewulf 17y ago
  Webmail is, I think, a substantially "easier" problem (with the caveat that this is mainly for technically proficient users) I use gmail for email hosting but it all routes through a domain I control, so if Google one day goes crazy, I can switch out of gmail. (And IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off), whereas things like my facebook friends are much harder to migrate.
  - pyre 17y ago
    > IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off It's probably a good idea to start those backups now with something like offlineimap. You don't want to wait until Google 'goes crazy' or your account is randomly suspended.
    - litewulf 17y ago
      Just in case anyone ever wants to be cool like me, I actually sync all my email using Windows Mail (yah, I know, I'm not very cool), which means it shows up in my desktop search as well as in gmail. Just in general, the backup strategy of storing things in at least two places is the only way to go, and simply knowing in the abstract that I could backup my data if I so chose is meaningless. Make a cron job, sync your home directory, whatever floats your boat, just do it. (I work at Google, and I am consistently surprised by the amount of effort people put into portability. I think this is important and underappreciated)
- pyre 17y ago
  Depends on what you're looking for in Gmail. Currently Gmail is the only way to have 'tags' supported. If you truly wanted a similar experience from your email, you'd need a backend that supported tags as well as a web frontend. That said SquirrelMail, Horde and RoundCube are all open-source webmail apps off the top of my head. RoundCube being the AJAX-y Gmail-ish one.
kilps 17y ago
Don't forget social networks - I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to host our own profiles along the wordpress/email/xmpp model. Imagine Facebook and Myspace were just two clients to some form of decentralised social network - then they'd be true competition, no need to go only where your friends are.
- warfangle 17y ago
  It would have to be not just decentralized - but federated in the same way that, say, email is. User is identified as user@facebook.com, or so forth, and other social networks could add said user as a connection to someone on their network (and vice versa) via an API. Could wave/xmmp be used as an underlying protocol for this?
  - agazso 17y ago
    Xmpp is federated like email: you have a unique identifier like your email address, belonging to the same domain as your xmpp provider. It is callled JabberID or jid and it (almost) looks like an email address and in case of gtalk, it is your gmail address. So the answer is yes, xmpp (or wave as an extension of it) technically can be used for IM federation, because that's one of the goal of it. But I think the big social networks like to keep their users inside their walled gardens, and rather not let them communicate with users of other networks. Let's hope this will change.
david 17y ago
I just forward *@mydomain.com to gmail. Having web software you can put up on your personal server is nice, but it poses a whole different set of challenges to just hosting it yourself. You have to worry about how to manage copyrights, coming up with a distribution that will work on a wide variety of server configurations, and handling upgrades and customer support gets a lot more complicated. One more problem that I've seen with popular open source programs that run on your server, is that hacker's will look for exploits in the source code, and search the web for sites runnning that program, attacking every one. They can keep using these exploits for a long time, because most of the site owners are too lazy to download the latest upgrades as they come out. Right now, at least on the low-cost end of the scale, it seems to me like open-source software is usually more up to those challenges. This is the best distribution model I could think of, if you were going to try to sell software like this. You would try to work out something with cpanel or some hosting companies where users could choose a plan, pay for, and install you're software package and have everything managed right from their hosting admin panel. If you were going to sell software for personal servers rather than host it yourself, then, I think you should do a lot of thinking about you're target market first, because you'll be causing yourself a lot of headaches. I don't think individuals with personal servers are the best target market for this business model right now either.

jacquesm 17y ago

I use horde for webmail, I don't use XMPP but I think it is supported.

xinsight 17y ago
While Horde is an open-source email reader, it's not in the same league as gmail. Not even close.
- e1ven 17y ago
  I've had decent experiences with Roundcube, if you're looking for a more AJAX-driven client; The versions I've tested were a bit buggy, but that was a few years back, I'm sure it's improved by now. http://roundcube.net/ http://roundcube.net/
litewulf 17y ago
Webmail is, I think, a substantially "easier" problem (with the caveat that this is mainly for technically proficient users) I use gmail for email hosting but it all routes through a domain I control, so if Google one day goes crazy, I can switch out of gmail. (And IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off), whereas things like my facebook friends are much harder to migrate.
- pyre 17y ago
  > IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off It's probably a good idea to start those backups now with something like offlineimap. You don't want to wait until Google 'goes crazy' or your account is randomly suspended.
  - litewulf 17y ago
    Just in case anyone ever wants to be cool like me, I actually sync all my email using Windows Mail (yah, I know, I'm not very cool), which means it shows up in my desktop search as well as in gmail. Just in general, the backup strategy of storing things in at least two places is the only way to go, and simply knowing in the abstract that I could backup my data if I so chose is meaningless. Make a cron job, sync your home directory, whatever floats your boat, just do it. (I work at Google, and I am consistently surprised by the amount of effort people put into portability. I think this is important and underappreciated)
pyre 17y ago
Depends on what you're looking for in Gmail. Currently Gmail is the only way to have 'tags' supported. If you truly wanted a similar experience from your email, you'd need a backend that supported tags as well as a web frontend. That said SquirrelMail, Horde and RoundCube are all open-source webmail apps off the top of my head. RoundCube being the AJAX-y Gmail-ish one.

kilps 17y ago

Don't forget social networks - I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to host our own profiles along the wordpress/email/xmpp model. Imagine Facebook and Myspace were just two clients to some form of decentralised social network - then they'd be true competition, no need to go only where your friends are.

warfangle 17y ago
It would have to be not just decentralized - but federated in the same way that, say, email is. User is identified as user@facebook.com, or so forth, and other social networks could add said user as a connection to someone on their network (and vice versa) via an API. Could wave/xmmp be used as an underlying protocol for this?
- agazso 17y ago
  Xmpp is federated like email: you have a unique identifier like your email address, belonging to the same domain as your xmpp provider. It is callled JabberID or jid and it (almost) looks like an email address and in case of gtalk, it is your gmail address. So the answer is yes, xmpp (or wave as an extension of it) technically can be used for IM federation, because that's one of the goal of it. But I think the big social networks like to keep their users inside their walled gardens, and rather not let them communicate with users of other networks. Let's hope this will change.

david 17y ago

I just forward *@mydomain.com to gmail. Having web software you can put up on your personal server is nice, but it poses a whole different set of challenges to just hosting it yourself. You have to worry about how to manage copyrights, coming up with a distribution that will work on a wide variety of server configurations, and handling upgrades and customer support gets a lot more complicated. One more problem that I've seen with popular open source programs that run on your server, is that hacker's will look for exploits in the source code, and search the web for sites runnning that program, attacking every one. They can keep using these exploits for a long time, because most of the site owners are too lazy to download the latest upgrades as they come out. Right now, at least on the low-cost end of the scale, it seems to me like open-source software is usually more up to those challenges. This is the best distribution model I could think of, if you were going to try to sell software like this. You would try to work out something with cpanel or some hosting companies where users could choose a plan, pay for, and install you're software package and have everything managed right from their hosting admin panel. If you were going to sell software for personal servers rather than host it yourself, then, I think you should do a lot of thinking about you're target market first, because you'll be causing yourself a lot of headaches. I don't think individuals with personal servers are the best target market for this business model right now either.