Wednesday 6 August 2008

Knock nock ... door closed

How do you do to avoid depending too much on one-stop-shop services like google's to shield yourself against problems like this one ?

There are very very few webservices (even paying ones) that can compete with google in terms of coolness in their offering. I mean, I know no email hosting service that has a web interface as powerful and easy to use as gmail. None of those I know lets you pump your emails from another imap/pop imap server. None of them have an anti spam as poweful as the gmail one. None of them lets you tag your emails like what gmail does. None of them provides you with a Jabber chatting service that lets you connect to the server using your own jabber client etc ...

To avoid loosing my emails when google shuts my access down for whatever reason - like what happened to Nick Saber - my emails are stored on an imap server that I pay for. I then kindly ask gmail to pump the emails from there, anti-spam them, filter them, tag them, and I read the resulting emails back via imap, using Thunderbird.

I don't really want to administer my own server because I prefer hacking code in my free time instead ...

Does anyone have a better ways to handling emails nowadays ? Any webservice that can really compete with google today ?

6 comments:

Jason D. Clinton said...

Wait. He's a paying customer who apparently forgot that he had phone support. I am also a paying Google Apps customer and I *have* called Google, and they solved my issue immediately.

You want phone support for something that's free?

Andy Wingo said...

Fastmail.fm + offlineimap. Works great for me, keeps me away from the empire.

Anonymous said...

Any other hosted service you move to will have, potentially, the same problem - they may have better / quicker customer support, but they could just as easily cut you off without explanation if they want.

Ultimately (and I think eventually things will swing back this way) what you'd want is high speed fibre to your house, and an appliance with mail, IM, office, fileserver, etc (all free software naturally), all easy to setup, minimal maintenance, with offsite backup etc. Even then you'd be at the whim of whomever is providing bandwidth, power, software updates for the device, etc.

Anonymous said...

PS - moving off Blogger to wordpress.com or just about any other blogging host would be idea too :-)

Anonymous said...

I just run my own server. You say you don't want to spend time "administrating" it, but honestly, administrating my mail server consists of upgrading it to the latest release of my distro every eighteen months. I haven't needed to actually change any settings on it since I first set it up, years ago.

The advantage to this is you own your own mail. The disadvantage is that your home ISP's uptime is probably worse than Google's. *shrug* I prefer it this way.

As the others said, I don't really see any convincing solution that relies on any third party.

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