1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc.
2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice.
3. Filters mail at the server side.
4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscation and get maybe 1-2 spams per month.
Cumulative: it's one more thing I don't have to jerk around with. It just works.
1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public newsgroups and forums.
2. It's a matter of preference. I too use Mail.app primarily, but I like being able to SSH to my server and read my mail in Mutt. As nice as Gmail's UI is in many regards, it's useless for threaded discussions on mailing lists.
3. Err, ever heard of procmail or maildrop, among (many) others? This is one of the major advantages of running your own mail server, actually; Gmail gives you very limited filtering options, especially when it comes to mailing lists.
4. Gmail has great spam filtering, but I find my Postgrey + SpamAssassin setup to work just as well.
The one that got me was spam filtering. Google does a pretty good job at that, and I was really drowning in it.
I think they deserve a lot of credit for creating a product that both my mother (definitely not a 'power user') and I (previous email client: Emacs' Gnus) can both be reasonably productive with.
Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc.
Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filters on the server, roundcube as webmail (on a new product I would pay for @mail), decent spam filter (right now we run our own system based on commtouch and spamassasin), etc. You can export the whole cyrus mail storage folder or export mail to other server with imapsync, same thing with the database that contains the account, domains and aliases, so you are not locked. Billing can be done by hard drive space or accounts. They are also good as outgoing mail servers because you are on your own ip.
I run everything by myself, right now we have 126 servers with about 12300 accounts and thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin. I've always thought that I should try to do it by myself.
I haven't used Mail.app since an incident about 2 years ago where it deleted a bunch of my messages. I was moving them from one folder to another when the connection to the server dropped.
I don't know why this should happen with IMAP (it is possible to move messages from one folder to another atomically) but it did.
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups?
Because we're lazy.
you give away control over your personal data
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.
Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too.
You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
I wouldn't even call it lazy, I call it efficient. Google makes email management easy so I can focus on something more interesting and hopefully more beneficial to my peers.
> There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too.
Right, I'd personally be more concerned about random mailing list administrators "looking through their logs" and drawing conclusions about me than by Google scanning my email for the purpose of targeting better ads to me... hmm...
1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.
2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.
3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.
> 1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.
That's what IMAP is for. If these are computers you don't directly control, then I'd say any downsides of using gmail pale in comparison to the security implications inherent in your usage model.
[edit] Can't say I understand the negative downvotes. Maybe I inadvertently denigrated people's preference for webmail over mutt/mail.app/etc?
Regardless, the fact is that if you're utilizing webmail for remote e-mail access on shared computers, then there are much more significant risk scenarios at play than those of gmail.
I took "the pragmatic UNIX way" about 15 years ago with email. It works. I've not had to change it and don't feel compelled to bother changing it.
I host my own mail server. It's not hard regardless of the platform you use. I use debian+postfix+mutt as it pretty much works out of the box. I've changed perhaps two lines of postfix configuration (to set up maildir) and added a couple of lines to my muttrc to pick up maildir and view html mail using links.
I don't get SPAM at all. I don't stick my email address anywhere on the Internet where it will get snagged into a spam database. I never have. I've not had a single SPAM message in 15 years with the same email address. I do not use any spam filtering software.
I use aliases for mailing lists which are created and destroyed on demand using a couple of 2 line scripts ("append, newalises" -and- "sed, newalises").
I can get into it quite happily from anywhere using SSH on my mobile device using MIDPSSH or another machine with PuTTY, iSSH, or good old terminal SSH.
I don't keep emails ever. I action them, then throw them away. Those who keep everything are like the crazy old people who live in rooms stacked to the ceiling with newspapers. I have nothing to backup or care for in that department. If I lose my mailbox, I have lost nothing.
I do not manage my tasks with email. I use a text file in my home directory called notes.txt.
My contacts list is a text file called contacts.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped.
My calendar is a text file called cal.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped.
I probably spent about an hour in the last 10 years on email server configuration. That's considerably less time than some of my peers spend dredging through their 5 years of gmail junk.
I unlike you, took the pragmatic way (without quotes or Unix). Email is part of my life and I don't want it going down.
I don't spend time configuring servers, updating packages, guaranteeing uptime. My email is [email protected], and I write it everywhere. I still don't get any spam. If I need an alias I just append characters to the email address and I don't have to fiddle with anything else.
I can get it quite happily through IMAP using Emacs or the client on my phone. I can search for past emails in seconds without worrying about the space they consume. I can share my contacts and calendar appointments with one M-x command.
I'm curious about your setup since Debian/Postfix/Mutt are not enough for POP3 or IMAP. How do you access your email from other devices (phone, table, etc)?
I hate Gmail, with passion, but Google Apps is the easiest way to keep all my email working without thinking about reliability/installation/etc.
1. Because Google solved the spam problem better than anyone else has
2. Because maintaining your own email server (which many on HN are perfectly capable of) is a giant pain, especially when you have to deal with SpamAssassin, DKIM, and all of the other things that you need to do correctly to have your email work
3. Because I still have my data even if Google loses it — I have a backup from downloaded email through Sparrow as well as an entire backup directly from my Gmail through Backupify (https://www.backupify.com/)
4. Because I like to outsource the tools and services that I need to people that are experts at it. It's the same reason that I use Beanstalk for Subversion instead of hosting my own server, use FreshBooks for invoicing clients instead of doing it myself, and send transactional email through Postmark.
It's easier. Much easier. And they are all very good at what they do.
Bottom line: So that I don't have to worry about email. It just works, which allows me to do exactly the same thing.
1) Black listing - if someone in your IP neighborhood sends spam you can be silently blacklisted by Comcast, AOL, some random crazy zealots running a blacklist that other random people choose to use… et.al. and people stop getting your mail. Good luck getting unlisted. Wasted hours. Sometimes it's futile.
2) Spam filtering - If you are the sort of hacker that publishes their email address in order to interact with the community, and you become popular with spammers, then it is difficult to beat Google's spam filtering on the hundreds of spam you will receive each day.
Until a few years ago I used to run my own servers and corporate servers. Nicely trained bogospam filters (this is work and involves the brain killing activity of reading borderline emails to categorize) got most of it with little risk of resource consumption failures. SpamAssassin got some of the remainder, albeit with some risk of exploding, but spam still got through.
Those same addresses now let about 4 spam per year through the Google filters. You can't beat them. Your sample size is too small.
I hosted my own e-mail on a VPS for a few months before going back to Google Hosted e-mail, mainly for the two reasons you list here. I do want to go back to hosting it myself though.
This point can't be made often enough. I can't say that I think there are "too many" (or even "an increasing number") of posts on HN that seem to assume that everyone here has precisely the same set of (often extreme) values, but these kinds of presumptuous, somewhat self-righteous postings do pop up from time to time, and this is precisely the reaction I always have. The definition of "self-respecting hacker" does, after all, probably very between self-respecting hackers.
I agree. His post smacks of the same attitude that many people (negatively) attribute to engineers in general. The, "this is how I do it, so this is how everyone should be doing it," attitude.
Simply put, Gmail provides a compelling user experience:
* fast and accurate search. This is key, and I don't know of a single desktop email client that even comes close to providing a decent search feature. Decent here means "answer full-text queries accurately within a second or so". I didn't realize how useful this was until switching to Gmail; now I have it, I can't switch back. I don't even bother organizing my email more than a minimal amount any more, I just search for things when I need them.
* remote access is also key. I regularly access the internet from at least 4 different devices, on at least 3 different operating systems. Sometimes I do so while traveling. Gmail makes this convenient --- all I need is a web browser. IMAP need not apply --- I found IMAP appallingly slow last time I tried it.
My experience is the polar opposite. I have to rely on a native client to search because GMail search is so bad. It hasn't been that fast for a while -- waiting 30+s for a search is pretty routine nowadays. But worse, it's never really handled stemming well -- it has to be an exact word match, even for singular vs plural. And the number of false positives I get usually doesn't even make it worthwhile. I had resorted to deleting mail rather than archiving it, but that only helped marginally.
Having said that, I rely on too many marketplace apps now to make switching a reasonable alternative. So, I make do with native clients.
I use Rackspace Email, over IMAP on the desktop, IMAP on my phone, and webmail when on someone else's computer. It's never slow in any way. When I sign up for things, I hear the ding of the confirmation e-mail within 2-3 seconds of submitting the form -- fast as push mail.
You should probably check out who Harald Welte is and what he does before making such accusations. I don't agree with him here, but "link bait" this is not.
I get some of the article's points, but I don't buy his solutions.
Quite frankly, I trust Gmail to keep my mail safe and secure more than I trust either myself, my friends or some NGO or other non-profit. I'd be lying to myself to think that I could do a better job of keeping a mail server secure, and I trust other small organizations even less. While I understand why the privacy issues make people uncomfortable, from a reliability perspective, Gmail is far and away the best option. So I can easily see why people might be willing to pay the privacy price in order to get better service.
When people have to choose between usability, accessibility, and reliability VS security and privacy they almost always choose the former. My response to this would be "Why do self-respecting open source and security advocates refuse to do the hard work of making security and privacy easily available to everyone?"
<IMHO>Laziness, disinterest, and fear of killing off lucrative security consulting.</IMHO>
There's no privacy in either case. Every single email passes in clear text through some ISP who may very well be storing copies of them. If you want privacy, you use PGP.
Because it's the best email system available for most people. If you value productivity and usability the most, Gmail is the way to go. It's that simple.
Gmail is the only email system that I can tolerate. It actually makes using email borderline fun, whereas even something like Exchange is a nightmare. It works great with various applications, smartphones and has by far the best Web interface around. It handles spam well and allows me to easy filter messages (and have those filters work across devices).
For most of us, email is a tool that helps us get work done and communicate with family and friends. Rolling our own solutions is not worth the extra time, headaches and lost usability.
Google doesn't care about our data individually. They make money in anonymized, aggregate data. That's why I don't care that they are making money off of my data, because it's not my data that they care about. It's our data that they really care about.
And while I'd prefer if my email didn't fall into the hands of the US government, I don't actually have anything that I care that they see in it. It's more principle than anything else. And, as a US citizen, if I rolled my own solution, I don't think it would be any safer in my hands than Google's when it comes to warrants.
I do have real fears. My real fears with email are in using a system that isn't usable, isn't reliable and has data integrity issues. At the end of the day, Google's servers and technical know-how surpasses mine, and I feel that my email is safer and less likely to be lost due to hardware failure in their hands than in mine.
It really depends on what you value. If my email information was really sensitive, I would probably care more. If I were a company that valued sensitivity a lot, I might not use Gmail. Certainly if the work you do or the industry you are in needs the utmost privacy, you should look into the most secure option as possible.
But as an individual, Gmail is as good as it gets for me.
This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.
Which is why it baffles me that so few people use S/MIME--other than the trending preference for webmail which isn't well suited for encryption. S/MIME is simple to setup on most email clients, and offers encryption of the body of the mail if the recipient is uses S/MIME as well. There are several of us at work that send encrypted emails all the time.
Until recently the GMail web interface was simply unmatched. When GMail first shipped, their conversation view was so far ahead of what anyone was doing on the web or in a fat client. I don't try out as many email platforms as I used to, but from what I have seen, it's still the best implementation of conversation view available.
Additionally, you hinted at the other main reason I use GMail in your first bullet point: "Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium."
Sure, this means Google has access. But it also means I don't have to find a way to make that data accessible to me everywhere I want it to be. I don't have to pay for the storage. It's a solved problem... and available at a great price point ($FREE).
I trust google slightly further than I can throw them, so for now this is an okay deal.
Because we care about efficiency, not least with regards to our time, and running one's own mail server is not an efficient use of such a scarce resource.
Because email sucks. Hosting email sucks. Email clients suck. (Bonus: email spam sucks). On Gmail it sucks a bit less.
I'm sorry for myself in the first place, but until I can code my dream of an email killer (or email client fwiw) that does not suck, avoid making my eyes bleed (and make it a success...) I can't avoid gmail.
- share the administrative and financial effort with friends
- use hosting form NGOs or non-profits
- use small companies and ISPs
The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?
Lastly, what do you think of a home appliance (basically a server the size of a router with a web interface) that people could install in their home to host some of their important data. Obviously it wouldn't be reliable enough for Email, but might be good enough for docs, password hosting, bookmarks, contact list, etc...
Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year ago, to relax my attachment size limit.) Between the FreeBSD handbook and the official Postfix documentation, all the info one could possibly need is provided.
A combination of Postgrey and SpamAssassin keeps my inbox spam free. You can also use mutt rather than Dovecot IMAP if you prefer to read your mail on the command line. Likewise, Debian will work just as well as FreeBSD in this role, if you're more comfortable on Linux. (Debconf even gives you a menu-driven Postfix configuration builder, it doesn't get any easier.)
Backups are handled by nightly rsync cron job on a local machine. I don't really have to think about them, aside from checking once in a while to make sure they're still running.
I have to laugh at all the self-proclaimed hackers in this thread claiming that setting up a personal email server is too difficult, takes too much time – or that they have "better things to do". No, I'm not one of those who would argue that a "real hacker" always has to do things the hardest way possible, quite the opposite. But at some point you have to ask yourself: if setting up a small mail server on a *nix system – a task extremely well documented and understood, a task that yields real technical and privacy benefits, a task that the operating system itself will hold your hand through if you're using Debian or Ubuntu – is too much of a challenge for you, then in what sense can you possibly call yourself a hacker?
Plug servers. Google it. Marvell ARM chips mostly. I have been thinking about trying to build a little turnkey linux OS to run on those things that can provide similar functionality to what you are talking about.
Alas the technology does not seem to be quite there yet and the work required to get basically a full personally hosted webapp suite is not trivial. That said, I think in the future we will see a lot more 'appliances' that run as VMs or on low cost low power all ways on hardware. Backed by a business model something like wordpress. Meaning that there is a dot com where you can get it remotely hosted for you, and there is a dot org where you can download and host the app yourself.
Plus stuff like the personal router project http://pr.lcs.mit.edu/ would make a pretty interesting paradigm change.
Just to give you an idea of how popular Gmail is, about 67% of the 7000+ subscribers for Hacker Newsletter (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) use gmail and I'm sure a good bit more are Google app accounts.
I use Gmail because I don't care about my emails. Google can know that I'm subscribed to the Haskell, FSF and school mailing lists and that I sometimes talk about school projects or work, all without affecting me much. And that is all I use email for.
Now, I could run an email server myself, but I do not have the time, experience or inclination to do this. I could also use a provider that does not use proprietary software, but that would be pointless: since they're running the server, I would not have significantly more freedom than I do with Gmail.
So really, the reason is simple: it doesn't matter much from a practical or ideological standpoint, and I'm incredibly lazy.
I used to always set up and run my own mail servers. I no longer do so, not because I'm lazy, but because I have better things to do with my time than be a sys-admin, and worry about downtime, logs, security, and backups.
Sure, Google has your mail. So use multiple accounts and keep your really private communications somewhere else, or use S/MIME or PGP Mail.
But who the hell cares about them having data for an account that is mostly subscribed to public mailing lists?
[+] [-] api|14 years ago|reply
2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice.
3. Filters mail at the server side.
4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscation and get maybe 1-2 spams per month.
Cumulative: it's one more thing I don't have to jerk around with. It just works.
[+] [-] Niten|14 years ago|reply
1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public newsgroups and forums.
2. It's a matter of preference. I too use Mail.app primarily, but I like being able to SSH to my server and read my mail in Mutt. As nice as Gmail's UI is in many regards, it's useless for threaded discussions on mailing lists.
3. Err, ever heard of procmail or maildrop, among (many) others? This is one of the major advantages of running your own mail server, actually; Gmail gives you very limited filtering options, especially when it comes to mailing lists.
4. Gmail has great spam filtering, but I find my Postgrey + SpamAssassin setup to work just as well.
[+] [-] davidw|14 years ago|reply
I think they deserve a lot of credit for creating a product that both my mother (definitely not a 'power user') and I (previous email client: Emacs' Gnus) can both be reasonably productive with.
[+] [-] Deadsunrise|14 years ago|reply
Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filters on the server, roundcube as webmail (on a new product I would pay for @mail), decent spam filter (right now we run our own system based on commtouch and spamassasin), etc. You can export the whole cyrus mail storage folder or export mail to other server with imapsync, same thing with the database that contains the account, domains and aliases, so you are not locked. Billing can be done by hard drive space or accounts. They are also good as outgoing mail servers because you are on your own ip.
I run everything by myself, right now we have 126 servers with about 12300 accounts and thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin. I've always thought that I should try to do it by myself.
[+] [-] finnw|14 years ago|reply
I don't know why this should happen with IMAP (it is possible to move messages from one folder to another atomically) but it did.
[+] [-] aiurtourist|14 years ago|reply
Because we're lazy.
you give away control over your personal data
Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
A lot more than my email is within that jurisdiction and is much more important -- like my money, family, and possessions.
Besides, I'm a hacker. If I want to send something sensitive, I'll be smarter than sending it over SMTP and logging it via Gmail.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Yep, they data-mine my email anonymously, but they try to not be evil about it. There are much more nefarious groups tracking my behavior, too. Besides, the group effort cuts down spam.
[+] [-] there|14 years ago|reply
You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to them.
[+] [-] imcqueen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeka|14 years ago|reply
Right, I'd personally be more concerned about random mailing list administrators "looking through their logs" and drawing conclusions about me than by Google scanning my email for the purpose of targeting better ads to me... hmm...
[+] [-] lrobb|14 years ago|reply
Eventually, as it happens in all public companies, the "do no evil" people are going to be out, and the "maximize the buck" people are going to be in.
[+] [-] drhowarddrfine|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukev|14 years ago|reply
2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is.
3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't have nearly as much data to work on.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
Obligatory comment pointing out an opportunity for disruption, etc., why aren't we all millionaires., etc. etc.
[+] [-] moreorless|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nupark2|14 years ago|reply
That's what IMAP is for. If these are computers you don't directly control, then I'd say any downsides of using gmail pale in comparison to the security implications inherent in your usage model.
[edit] Can't say I understand the negative downvotes. Maybe I inadvertently denigrated people's preference for webmail over mutt/mail.app/etc?
Regardless, the fact is that if you're utilizing webmail for remote e-mail access on shared computers, then there are much more significant risk scenarios at play than those of gmail.
[+] [-] bwarp|14 years ago|reply
I host my own mail server. It's not hard regardless of the platform you use. I use debian+postfix+mutt as it pretty much works out of the box. I've changed perhaps two lines of postfix configuration (to set up maildir) and added a couple of lines to my muttrc to pick up maildir and view html mail using links.
I don't get SPAM at all. I don't stick my email address anywhere on the Internet where it will get snagged into a spam database. I never have. I've not had a single SPAM message in 15 years with the same email address. I do not use any spam filtering software.
I use aliases for mailing lists which are created and destroyed on demand using a couple of 2 line scripts ("append, newalises" -and- "sed, newalises").
I can get into it quite happily from anywhere using SSH on my mobile device using MIDPSSH or another machine with PuTTY, iSSH, or good old terminal SSH.
I don't keep emails ever. I action them, then throw them away. Those who keep everything are like the crazy old people who live in rooms stacked to the ceiling with newspapers. I have nothing to backup or care for in that department. If I lose my mailbox, I have lost nothing.
I do not manage my tasks with email. I use a text file in my home directory called notes.txt.
My contacts list is a text file called contacts.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped.
My calendar is a text file called cal.txt. Works on anything. Can be grepped.
I probably spent about an hour in the last 10 years on email server configuration. That's considerably less time than some of my peers spend dredging through their 5 years of gmail junk.
Self respecting hackers don't use Gmail and Co.
[+] [-] tennineten|14 years ago|reply
Are you not self-respecting? Just a few days ago, you said:
"I've got offline gmail if i want."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3533625
[+] [-] fbuilesv|14 years ago|reply
I don't spend time configuring servers, updating packages, guaranteeing uptime. My email is [email protected], and I write it everywhere. I still don't get any spam. If I need an alias I just append characters to the email address and I don't have to fiddle with anything else.
I can get it quite happily through IMAP using Emacs or the client on my phone. I can search for past emails in seconds without worrying about the space they consume. I can share my contacts and calendar appointments with one M-x command.
I'm curious about your setup since Debian/Postfix/Mutt are not enough for POP3 or IMAP. How do you access your email from other devices (phone, table, etc)?
I hate Gmail, with passion, but Google Apps is the easiest way to keep all my email working without thinking about reliability/installation/etc.
[+] [-] Drbble|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 13rules|14 years ago|reply
2. Because maintaining your own email server (which many on HN are perfectly capable of) is a giant pain, especially when you have to deal with SpamAssassin, DKIM, and all of the other things that you need to do correctly to have your email work
3. Because I still have my data even if Google loses it — I have a backup from downloaded email through Sparrow as well as an entire backup directly from my Gmail through Backupify (https://www.backupify.com/)
4. Because I like to outsource the tools and services that I need to people that are experts at it. It's the same reason that I use Beanstalk for Subversion instead of hosting my own server, use FreshBooks for invoicing clients instead of doing it myself, and send transactional email through Postmark.
It's easier. Much easier. And they are all very good at what they do.
Bottom line: So that I don't have to worry about email. It just works, which allows me to do exactly the same thing.
[+] [-] jws|14 years ago|reply
2) Spam filtering - If you are the sort of hacker that publishes their email address in order to interact with the community, and you become popular with spammers, then it is difficult to beat Google's spam filtering on the hundreds of spam you will receive each day.
Until a few years ago I used to run my own servers and corporate servers. Nicely trained bogospam filters (this is work and involves the brain killing activity of reading borderline emails to categorize) got most of it with little risk of resource consumption failures. SpamAssassin got some of the remainder, albeit with some risk of exploding, but spam still got through.
Those same addresses now let about 4 spam per year through the Google filters. You can't beat them. Your sample size is too small.
[+] [-] erikano|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fleitz|14 years ago|reply
Why their choices don't make sense to him is because he hasn't taken the time to understand the value systems of GMail users.
[+] [-] icarus_drowning|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kc0bfv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emu|14 years ago|reply
Simply put, Gmail provides a compelling user experience:
* fast and accurate search. This is key, and I don't know of a single desktop email client that even comes close to providing a decent search feature. Decent here means "answer full-text queries accurately within a second or so". I didn't realize how useful this was until switching to Gmail; now I have it, I can't switch back. I don't even bother organizing my email more than a minimal amount any more, I just search for things when I need them.
* remote access is also key. I regularly access the internet from at least 4 different devices, on at least 3 different operating systems. Sometimes I do so while traveling. Gmail makes this convenient --- all I need is a web browser. IMAP need not apply --- I found IMAP appallingly slow last time I tried it.
[+] [-] nirvdrum|14 years ago|reply
Having said that, I rely on too many marketplace apps now to make switching a reasonable alternative. So, I make do with native clients.
[+] [-] gala8y|14 years ago|reply
I used to use Opera M2 built-in client and think it's even faster than Gmail web UI and very accurate.
[+] [-] dangrossman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nknight|14 years ago|reply
You should probably check out who Harald Welte is and what he does before making such accusations. I don't agree with him here, but "link bait" this is not.
[+] [-] eslaught|14 years ago|reply
Quite frankly, I trust Gmail to keep my mail safe and secure more than I trust either myself, my friends or some NGO or other non-profit. I'd be lying to myself to think that I could do a better job of keeping a mail server secure, and I trust other small organizations even less. While I understand why the privacy issues make people uncomfortable, from a reliability perspective, Gmail is far and away the best option. So I can easily see why people might be willing to pay the privacy price in order to get better service.
[+] [-] ary|14 years ago|reply
<IMHO>Laziness, disinterest, and fear of killing off lucrative security consulting.</IMHO>
[+] [-] icebraining|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwthornton|14 years ago|reply
Gmail is the only email system that I can tolerate. It actually makes using email borderline fun, whereas even something like Exchange is a nightmare. It works great with various applications, smartphones and has by far the best Web interface around. It handles spam well and allows me to easy filter messages (and have those filters work across devices).
For most of us, email is a tool that helps us get work done and communicate with family and friends. Rolling our own solutions is not worth the extra time, headaches and lost usability.
Google doesn't care about our data individually. They make money in anonymized, aggregate data. That's why I don't care that they are making money off of my data, because it's not my data that they care about. It's our data that they really care about.
And while I'd prefer if my email didn't fall into the hands of the US government, I don't actually have anything that I care that they see in it. It's more principle than anything else. And, as a US citizen, if I rolled my own solution, I don't think it would be any safer in my hands than Google's when it comes to warrants.
I do have real fears. My real fears with email are in using a system that isn't usable, isn't reliable and has data integrity issues. At the end of the day, Google's servers and technical know-how surpasses mine, and I feel that my email is safer and less likely to be lost due to hardware failure in their hands than in mine.
It really depends on what you value. If my email information was really sensitive, I would probably care more. If I were a company that valued sensitivity a lot, I might not use Gmail. Certainly if the work you do or the industry you are in needs the utmost privacy, you should look into the most secure option as possible.
But as an individual, Gmail is as good as it gets for me.
[+] [-] mseebach|14 years ago|reply
Assume that any government, be it your own, US or other will read your email if they so please, and encrypt anything you don't want them to read.
[+] [-] cyrus_|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abruzzi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derekprior|14 years ago|reply
Additionally, you hinted at the other main reason I use GMail in your first bullet point: "Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium."
Sure, this means Google has access. But it also means I don't have to find a way to make that data accessible to me everywhere I want it to be. I don't have to pay for the storage. It's a solved problem... and available at a great price point ($FREE).
I trust google slightly further than I can throw them, so for now this is an okay deal.
[+] [-] DanI-S|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rphlx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jroseattle|14 years ago|reply
For myself personally, it's because I value my time being spent elsewhere on things I consider more important.
I simply don't care if that approach earns me a label of "non-self-respecting hacker" (as the original author implies).
[+] [-] scotu|14 years ago|reply
I'm sorry for myself in the first place, but until I can code my dream of an email killer (or email client fwiw) that does not suck, avoid making my eyes bleed (and make it a success...) I can't avoid gmail.
[+] [-] nabilt|14 years ago|reply
Harald's suggestions boil down to
The first suggestions might work for me, but what does everyone else use? If you host your own what software?Lastly, what do you think of a home appliance (basically a server the size of a router with a web interface) that people could install in their home to host some of their important data. Obviously it wouldn't be reliable enough for Email, but might be good enough for docs, password hosting, bookmarks, contact list, etc...
[+] [-] Niten|14 years ago|reply
Dovecot and Postfix on a small FreeBSD VPS. Easy to set up, and it takes almost no effort to maintain once you've got it running. (The last time I modified my Postfix configuration was over a year ago, to relax my attachment size limit.) Between the FreeBSD handbook and the official Postfix documentation, all the info one could possibly need is provided.
A combination of Postgrey and SpamAssassin keeps my inbox spam free. You can also use mutt rather than Dovecot IMAP if you prefer to read your mail on the command line. Likewise, Debian will work just as well as FreeBSD in this role, if you're more comfortable on Linux. (Debconf even gives you a menu-driven Postfix configuration builder, it doesn't get any easier.)
Backups are handled by nightly rsync cron job on a local machine. I don't really have to think about them, aside from checking once in a while to make sure they're still running.
I have to laugh at all the self-proclaimed hackers in this thread claiming that setting up a personal email server is too difficult, takes too much time – or that they have "better things to do". No, I'm not one of those who would argue that a "real hacker" always has to do things the hardest way possible, quite the opposite. But at some point you have to ask yourself: if setting up a small mail server on a *nix system – a task extremely well documented and understood, a task that yields real technical and privacy benefits, a task that the operating system itself will hold your hand through if you're using Debian or Ubuntu – is too much of a challenge for you, then in what sense can you possibly call yourself a hacker?
[+] [-] GnarlinBrando|14 years ago|reply
Alas the technology does not seem to be quite there yet and the work required to get basically a full personally hosted webapp suite is not trivial. That said, I think in the future we will see a lot more 'appliances' that run as VMs or on low cost low power all ways on hardware. Backed by a business model something like wordpress. Meaning that there is a dot com where you can get it remotely hosted for you, and there is a dot org where you can download and host the app yourself.
Plus stuff like the personal router project http://pr.lcs.mit.edu/ would make a pretty interesting paradigm change.
[+] [-] chc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duck|14 years ago|reply
To add to this, yahoo.com is second with 3%.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
Now, I could run an email server myself, but I do not have the time, experience or inclination to do this. I could also use a provider that does not use proprietary software, but that would be pointless: since they're running the server, I would not have significantly more freedom than I do with Gmail.
So really, the reason is simple: it doesn't matter much from a practical or ideological standpoint, and I'm incredibly lazy.
[+] [-] cromwellian|14 years ago|reply
Sure, Google has your mail. So use multiple accounts and keep your really private communications somewhere else, or use S/MIME or PGP Mail.
But who the hell cares about them having data for an account that is mostly subscribed to public mailing lists?