Phasing out Google: alternatives to GMail

[mike acker]

IMAP is the way to go. I use only IMAP on the CoreComm service.
and Thunderbird although you can access their e/mail with a web client

[goghard]

My favorite is a Zimbra free hosting (1 GB): www.mrmail.com/free-zimbra-hosting/
I think it's awesome.
A promising alternative: www.mykolab.com

You can also configure a Lavabit account (8 usd yearly for the whole encryption) and use Thunderbird + Enigmail

[mr john]

Yawn, another person on the Internet who is afraid of the Internet companies... If you don't like being spied on you might as well just turn your computer off and go do something else. Every internet company collects data about people. You can either accept that and be sensible about what you do online or you can put your tinfoil hat on and rant and rave all you want about how company X is evil. The rest of us are happy using whatever works best for us.

[mastablasta]

whats the problem with gmail? just encrypt messages on thunderbird before sending them out.

[lads]

Yawn, another person on the Internet who is afraid of the Internet companies... If you don't like being spied on you might as well just turn your computer off and go do something else. Every internet company collects data about people. You can either accept that and be sensible about what you do online or you can put your tinfoil hat on and rant and rave all you want about how company X is evil. The rest of us are happy using whatever works best for us.

What a useful comment! Thanks for dropping by.

[lads]

whats the problem with gmail? just encrypt messages on thunderbird before sending them out.

Had you read the initial message you'd know what is wrong with GMail and that I don't use Thunderbird.

[buzzingrobot]

You get what you pay for. If you don't pay for an email provider, the provider must find ways to make money off you. People don't do these sorts of things as charities.

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail. It's not free, just good.

[mastablasta]

Had you read the initial message you'd know what is wrong with GMail and that I don't use Thunderbird.

oh i've read it. and you said abotu gmail:

I've grown increasingly wary of their Big Brother functionalities

And i've said just encrypt the email before you send it out.

What is wrong with Thunderbird? Anyway there are other email clients that support encryption.

even if you prefer web interface to dedicated e-mail program - no one is preventing you to encrpyt the message before sending it out on gmail.

then again - you can use your own email server (as you suggested yourself). depends how good your infrasctructure is and how much your travel arround the world while using email.

[aysiu]

I wouldn't phrase it quite as bruskly as mr john has, but I agree with the principle. Pretty much anything you don't host yourself is not really that private. There are a few common sense things you can do not to overly advertise your private info. Unless you live in a cave, grow your own food, don't have a credit card, don't have a car, don't have student loans, don't have a bank account, never check out books at a library, and somehow manage to never have pictures taken by anyone you know who has a Facebook account... you're pretty much out there.

There is a reasonable middle ground between the extremes of "They can't get me" v. "Well, they know so much anyway, I might as well make everything public." Gmail is in that middle.

Even if you encrypt your messages, how do you know what the people you're sending those messages to are doing? Are you sending to a Gmail address? Well, then Google has your message anyway. Sending to Yahoo? Yahoo has it. Sending to Microsoft mail (Outlook? Hotmail? Whatever they call it?)? Microsoft has it. Not everyone you communicate is going to host her own mail server and encrypt everything and never forward your messages.

[buzzingrobot]

Not everyone you communicate is going to host her own mail server and encrypt everything and never forward your messages.

Not if they have any sense.

Unless you setup your own hardware and buy your own personal internet node, the mail server anyone sets up is very likely going to be running in a rented virtual machine on a VPS somewhere and they're going to use it with an account rented from an ISP. Encrypted ot not, that person's email is going to sit on hardware someone else owns and controls. (And encryption is no good when the person on the other side isn't prepared to deal with it.)

Running your own mail server is a first class pain. A bit like running a restaurant to make sure you eat homecooked food.

The best way to ensure your privacy is to practice privacy. The web is a publishing medium, not a commo system, so don't publish personal info.