| open source
Edit: the link in 8m4ck's comment actually went to atmail.com before he edited it. He subsequently accused me of smoking crack, instead of admitting his mistake. What a dick.
I don't know about you guys, but I've stopped using Chrome completely and gone back to Firefox.
I've bought into Google Apps for my domain (primarely for email), but I'm very much reconsidering that at this point.
I realize there's quite a bit of lock in I will need to adress though. For an alternative to be viable, it needs to be a hostable solution, so I can avoid surveilnce, I want the following things integrated and working:
Other Google services like Google docs and Music, etc are much less important to me. Google+ I will be glad to see go.
But those three services, I need to jump ship. I've looked at atmail, which looks good, but isn't fully open source and it costs money. I've investigated roundcube, which looks OKish and is open-source, but I'm not quite sold on it yet.
Looking for docs on migrating from Google Aps, I also found Zimbra, which seems to be open-source'ish and commercial at the same time. Anyone have any experience with that?
Anyone have any experience with any of these options? Any good and reasonably simple way to jump ship? And what about data-migration? Anyone have any good leads/blog-posts etc on this? And don't tell me to get Microsoft Exchange :P
Seriously though: I'd love to get out while it's still viable.
I like Owncube. It gives you email, calendars, contacts, files, gallery etc. via Roundcube and Owncloud.
These services are not nearly as hard to run as a search engine. Doesn't cost much per-user to run a mail hosting service and far easier to earn the $3/month or whatever than it is to maintain your own mailserver. But people will sell their personal communications to be datamined because default === cheapest. And $0 is infinitely cheaper than $0.01.
What's bizarre to me is that if you're going to sell your inbox for service, why sell it to the same company you're giving your search history to?
Because gmail has the best interface. Still, email is not nearly as intractable. Roundcube is pretty good. I think Atmail might be better but I've yet to see a service offering Atmail webmail with cloud storage, CardDAV etc. More people willing to pay for this stuff, the more it will improve. And there will be more variety and you'll have responsive support.
If you're interested, you should totally run your own server, helps make the code better in different ways and delays the day when "unregistered mail servers" are denied by default. But it would totally be a hobby thing, it's definitely not worth the time it takes if all you want is autonomy.
A while back when i was highly considering a open source solution for our email i considered zimbra, but decided on atmail. atmail just seemed to actually have active people supporting it, it was easy to install, had a decent web interface and everything else you would expect. it was also pretty cost effective. i would recommend checking out the demo. i didn't put it into production because i was able to pull off a last min. hail marry and got approval for a exchange server instead.
Oh, nice sneaky edit. That went to atmail.com before, and not atmail.org. It's usually a nice thing to admit you've made a mistake and say you're sorry, but pretending you never made a mistake works too, I guess.
Asshole.