Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I'm Sorry I'm Leaving You | Hacker News Reader

Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I'm Sorry I'm Leaving You

nytimes.com

20 pointscoatta11 comments

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.

That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.

[1] https://stalwa.rt

[2] https://immich.app

[3] https://nextcloud.com/

* [1] should be https://stalw.art

It's a neat project though, that I hadn't heard of before. I have ran Postfix to do domain-wide email forwarding (to Gmail coincidentally) but going the other way around and having the end destination be self hosted is on my to-do list.

Thanks for fixing the link! There's also wildduck.email and others! :-)

https://archive.ph/jFv4R

I’ve been slowly building my own take on how e-mail should work for me. The complexity of IMAP was frustrating until I realized I don’t like or want the mail readers that use it (and have since started on my own). It’s liberating to see life after Gmail (and Outlook) on the horizon.

Tell me more please.

This[1] is the heart of it. The solution here allows me to support inbound and outbound email for several domains, be super robust, and roughly compliant with rules like GDPR. This is as “industrial strength” as anything I’ve seen.

I have nothing public to show on the mail reading side, but once the data is available it’s remarkably easy to present.

[1] https://github.com/mlhpdx/email-delivery

Oh, and it’s basically free to run.

> I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself.

I agree with most of the article, but not with these statements. The corporations are certainly to be blamed for all the problems stated in this article.

While the author may have the luxury to pay for email at $99 a year (even more expensive than Fastmail, which is an expensive service for more than one person), billions of people can’t afford (or don’t want) to pay so much for email. I don’t think we should blame all those people for choosing Gmail (or Yahoo or Outlook or some other “free” service).

I agree with you - comma - and there's also a perception that email is less important to the workings of daily life than it is because it's free. Much like car insurance or education or good nutrition a reliable email service not subject to the whims of a tech giant is worth paying for and should also be available to those unable to pay full price.

I'm not particularly interested in this topic, but man I love Ezra Klein. I've spent so many hours listening to his podcast about all sorts of topics, and while I don't always agree with him on every political issue, he is really very very good at what he does.

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