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Comment by confident_inept | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people like and use Google. For me, I've moved away from their services for email and communication. Their tendency to launch a new project with tremendous momentum and support only to suddenly and without warning cancel the whole project (looking at you Google Wave) combined with their Orwellian level of control over the internet as a whole was the one-two punch that put me off entirely.

The duopoly of having Apple and Google control the entire mobile universe is gut wrenching. This developer is now unable to develop for millions of phones based on an algorithm deciding they were a bad actor and Google likely won't be compelled to care, a drop in the vast ocean of their concerns.

There aren't any alternatives for commercial or monetary apps. I've taken to using finds on f-droid for mission critical mobile applications but that's just not viable for most people.

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For me the red line was when it became clear that Google was going to start taking a more active political role some time around 2017.

I don't see how anyone can trust them to control more than one out of email/search data/phone operating system/online identity. They're an ad-funded media company - there is not a track record of high standards in this space once people start flexing editorial muscle. And taking the chance of losing access to multiple fairly important communication channels at once is just needless risk. They're too big to trust.

To be honest, Wave didn't have any momentum at all, it was dead mere weeks after release. No one cared. Besides marketing-avid people. They try to keep their business a startup, and that's ok.

Likewise, you won't blame Clubhouse for closing their product.

But Google did close some very used products, with tons of momentum, among my favorite are Picasa and Reader.

> Wave didn't have any momentum at all, it was dead mere weeks after release.

That's what happens when you make a collaborative tool invite only and severely limited the number of invites you can send out. What a truly bizarre choice.

Worked extremely well with GMail.

GMail is not a closed platform like Wave was, though. In fact, it's one of the few tools Google offer that's designed to let you communicate with people who aren't on a Google platform.

> The duopoly of having Apple and Google control the entire mobile universe is gut wrenching. This developer is now unable to develop for millions of phones based on an algorithm deciding they were a bad actor and Google likely won't be compelled to care, a drop in the vast ocean of their concerns.

Not surprising. A duopoly is little better than a monopoly. This is why we needed other viable platforms - which we had in Blackberry and Windows Phone - but didn't support them enough so we lost them. And here we are, caught between Apple and Google.

> This is why we needed other viable platforms

Consider supporting GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone), which support desktop Linux apps.

hoo yeah. libreoffice on my phone. sign me up!

In some ways a duopoly is worse. In a monopoly the government will generally force the actor to behave. In a duopoly the actors can point at each other and say the end user has a choice, even when actors behaviour is the same.

We see the same dynamic in two-party politics.

i moved to mailinabox last year and it has been great. i can only encourage more people to try self hosting stuff and start from the simplest of things.

I'm currently testing out the Mailu docker container collection for self hosting email to get off custom-domain gmail. Looking good so far.

self hosting at home or self hosting on a 3rd party server? I'm also interested in going down this route.

How do you handle the fact that supposedly most large email corps mark your emails as spam?

No OP, but I’m using mailinabox on a linode vps for $5/month. The IP is in a range that doesn’t typically get marked as spam by default, and there are several checkers in place on the admin console to make sure that you’re dotting all of your “i”s and crossing all of your “t”s, from MTA-STS to DNSSEC. I do still run into problems from time to time, but it’s very rare these days.

Mailgun and others also have a free tier for relaying smaller numbers of email.

I've configured Postfix to use it for fallback if I can't deliver directly.

I use Digital Ocean and seem to struggle a bit delivering directly. 60 emails this month had to be delivered through mailgun since direct failed. Their free tier is up to 1250 emails per month.

Is there a documented reason to believe that DNSSEC is important, or really even at all influential, with deliverability? Most email origins, even the ones doing their own hosting, aren't DNSSEC-signed; if DNSSEC was a deliverability signal, most domains would be having problems.

Currently hosting at home, but tossing up whether it would be better off on a VPS.

I'm not currently getting blocked by Google or Microsoft, and maybe that's because it's hosted via my home connection (and therefore not within a set of known untrustworthy IP addresses), but Mailu has an easy path to ensuring SPF and DKIM are setup, which add legitimacy to the email domain.

I've been testing with a domain name that I haven't used for email before, so it's a clean slate, though I'm not sure how much difference that makes in getting blocked or not.

Fellow mailinabox user here. I love how their system “just works”, and wish there was more support for getting mail servers back in the hands of the masses.

Something that I very much enjoy is that mailinabox comes with nextcloud installed, which it uses for its exchange activesync calendar. I can sync everything from my keepass database to contacts and reminders to my mailinabox across devices.

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