Alternative to Gmail

moisespedro · 06-11-2014, 01:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eloi

Some advices I use to give to my friends (but they ignore me

).

Buy a domain, contract some cheap web hosting. It's not so expensive to have your own site and your own email accounts.

If you have not time to learn html, use seamonkey composer.

No facebooring, no linketontin no stupid blogs, no tweetin shit, put in your web site what you want to share.

If you're of those that have a machine 24/7 you can pay instead to your ISP for a static IP to run your own http and mail server at home with Slackware (the only way to be sure no one cat read your mail). Then you get a free CA here:

https://www.startssl.com/

to associate to sendmail to avoid your emails go to SPAM ;-). You can associate a certificate to apache to run https site.

And use this free dns server:

http://freedns.afraid.org/

If you use a external server get used to download and archive the messages you want to preserve and remove the rest from the server. Anyone with root access can read your emails; google isn't free, it tracks your data for market statistics. Take care where you put your email address on internet if you want to avoid spam. In a blog or a site use a image with the email address written on it to avoid it get tracked by bots.

To avoid using too much disk save the files attached in your home (i.e. pictures) and remove attachments from your archived mail. Your plain text email will pass to occupy megabytes instead of gigabytes Having a server to send files you can upload to a folder and just to add a link in your emails. You can send your file to 100 recipients just adding links in your message, plain text.

Hmm, interesting solution and it would be fun to implement (a learning experience). Can it run on a old machine? I have one here lying around (it is really old) and I wonder if it could be used as a mail server (maybe with some old Slackware version?).

enine · 06-11-2014, 01:29 PM

yea, it doesn't take much to run a mail server, I'm running more on a 6 year old laptop.
Its similar to what I suggested, setup your own domain so you can control the mail addresses. Weather you host the mail server yourself or pay someone else it works the same.

eloi · 06-11-2014, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by moisespedro

Hmm, interesting solution and it would be fun to implement (a learning experience). Can it run on a old machine? I have one here lying around (it is really old) and I wonder if it could be used as a mail server (maybe with some old Slackware version?).

An old machine will eat more WATTs. And ask your ISP how much is a static IP. Make numbers first

. The performance for just *one* simple html site and your email accounts will not be a problem.

enine solution of using a laptop could be good for saving you in case of power outage (as a replacement to a UPS).

To just learn a VPS could be fine too.

Anyway, the economically affordable solution is to pay a web hosting service.

enine · 06-11-2014, 01:58 PM

Or just a mail hosting service which is less $ than a full web hosting.

moisespedro · 06-11-2014, 01:59 PM

I don't think I would need a static IP. I could use a service like No-IP. Well, the machine is really old (it runs a pre-Pentium 4 processor) it might not be worth it to the energy bill and to my ears (it is very loud).

eloi · 06-11-2014, 02:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by moisespedro

I don't think I would need a static IP. I could use a service like No-IP.

For a web server fine, but your email will go to spam.

A pentium 3 would be better.

ReaperX7 · 06-11-2014, 02:38 PM

I personally use:

gmail
hotmail
yahoo

for my e-mail needs. My suggestion turn on the spam filtering and keep moving unwanted stuff to spam and eventually it stops showing up.

gargamel · 06-13-2014, 05:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by e5150

For my "proper" email I use posteo.de (1 EUR/month), where I've set up a few aliases so that I don't have to disclose my "official" email address when registering for stuff of lesser importance. If an alias gets compromised by spammers (haven't happened yet, touch wood), I can just delete it and set up another one.
For mailing lists and a few newsletters I used to use gmail (which the spammers eventually got to), now I use yandex.ru (russian equivalent of the google overlords). Which also allows pop/smtp/imap. If it starts to receive spam, I'll probably migrate it to posteo.
And, for pure throw-away-registrations and such, I use dispostable.com, since I seem to have forgotten my old hotmail password.

+1!

Posteo has exceptionally high security and data protection standards, and registration is possible with a minimum of personal data. They only request you to enter just enough data so that they can track payment. No home address etc. required. As they and their data centre are located in Berlin, they underly the (quite strict) German data protection regulations. Also, they are the first email provider ever (to my knowledge, at least) to publish a transparency report, where they list what inquiries from governmental authorities they received and how they were answered (of course, the report contains no personal data, too, just statistics.

This all wouldn't make it an attractive offering, if there were no comfortable UI or a lack of features. But the UI is quite friendly and (as it is a paid service) free of advertisements, and the feature list is rather complete.

Highly recommended!

However, in case you don't like Posteo, there a couple of similar offerings coming up, like Kolab in Switzerland. They are all better, in the sense of customer and user-friendly, as opposed to business model friendly, than what Gmail, Yahoo and all the other big ones have to offer.

gargamel

sgosnell · 06-14-2014, 09:20 PM

You're not limited to one GMail account. You can have as many as you want. I have a couple that I use just for registering on websites. I never give my main GMail account to websites. And I never see spam, or almost never.

Knightron · 06-14-2014, 11:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gezley

I used to have Gmail as a second account, just for all those annoying sites you have to sign up to.

lol, porn? I use my antient hotmail adress for them. Thing's so chock full of viagra adds and other recondite political crap, and the obviouse porn, that it's quite useless as a propper email adress.

Quote:

Originally Posted by moisespedro

@Knightron Wow, openmailbox seems to be really interesting too, gonna give it a try.

Hope you like it man, it works great with Thunderbird.