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Gmail Takes Largest Webmail Service Crown
redletterdave writes "After several years of dominance, Microsoft's Web-based email service, Hotmail, has been unseated by Google's significantly younger webmail service, Gmail. Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January; since then, that number has ballooned to 425 million."
Remember when people ran their own mail servers?
Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.
Of which a sizable fraction are spambots.
Centralization of almost every service onto just a few commercial services is dangerous to the future openness and non-censored nature of the internet. We just haven't seen it yet on a big enough scale. It's too much all in one place.
The original purpose of the internet was very much the opposite of centralization, and it was that way for many years with great success... but for some reason, everyone suddenly decided to give a single company access to all their private, financial, and even medical conversations, web browsing, and more.
I do, because I still run my own, as plenty of power-users do. Of course, the masses never ran their own e-mail servers, even before webmail, they just used POP3 or IMAP.
I don't. Google Apps is free for 50 users, almost never goes down, configures itself automatically and does a better job of protecting my data than I could. I don't even use the web interface, I just hook my mail client up to it and away it goes. "Fire and forget".
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
You can set up Gmail to access your Hotmail account via POP3.
Yeah, nowadays spammers have a much easier job, they just send you "trojan.zip", and say "here's your photos from tokyo last night". People still download it and and run it.
As long as people unwilling to use their brain exists, spammers will always find a way to exploit them.
Yeah, I used to run my own email server. And I would spend hours a week dealing with spam. And I made it a rule to spend an equal amount of time trying to prevent future spam, tweaking rule sets, blacklists, whitelists, filters... After having the same email address for nearly 20 years the amount of spam was truly astounding.
Now I just pipe it through Google Apps For Your Domain. Weekly time spent dealing with spam: 5 seconds. Sure, it doesn't have all the advantages of running your own, but I get hours back in my week, which is priceless.
This is indeed true, although the moderator FAQ makes no mention of it anymore. An oversight that shall be rectified.
HAL 7000, fewer features than the HAL 9000, but just as homicidal!
The problem with this approach is that it ties you to your ISP. When you move or they get bought in ten years, you have to try to recall EVERYONE who has your email address, and convince them to update their address books.
I'm in the process of shifting our 2000 accounts from our own mail server to google apps for education.
Running your own mail server is a pain in the ass these days. With the massive torrent of spam - including pornographic spam - that gets ever harder to filter, without also blocking legitimate mail. RBLs on SMTP, greylisting, bayesian filters, image-to-text converters to then run bayesian analysis on... it's not even close to enough. Then you have virus infected laptops stealing credentials from the legit mail client and trying to send spam, finding a decent web-mail client that doesn't suck and keeping it updated (roundcube, BTW, is miles better than squirrelmail), the headmaster getting his password stolen so a spammer starts using his legit account to access our external access relay and send a bunch of spam for a few hours before we shut it down, still dealing with being on random blacklists for two weeks afterwards; but the ISP relay smtp server gets blacklisted even more often, setting up SPF and domain keys so some staff members email to a parent doesn't get randomly blocked because of yet another new anti-spam standard you have to adhere to...
Dealing with user complaints of why this was marked with spam when it shouldn't be, why this wasn't, why I can't send this 40MB powerpoint, where's this email gone that I swear was there a minute ago, making sure the VM server doesn't run out of drive space, neither does the backup server, making sure the backups don't slow the system down, making sure the backups work; keeping the system up 100% of the time and still doing maintenance, updates and changes to work around yet another 'email bounced' problem, making sure the various cluster boxes keep in sync, debugging why the logging server has choked this time...
I have a 100 other systems jobs to do. Babysitting the multiple postfix, dovecot and nginx servers to keep mail service up and running reliably spam free (ish) takes up a lot of my time that could be more profitably spent improving and add new services/software. Thank god we never met the cost/benefit pass-grade of exchange to add that too and only had to have simple IMAP support.
Instead, I can move the entire system to google apps, ad free, for free because we're education, and google have obviously learned from microsoft that catching students early means they'll end up a customers themselves later. And I'm fine with that. They have far better spam filtering than I can ever hope to achieve on my own even with my battery of different open-source tools. They have far more engineers. They have coverage round the clock, so I'll hopefully stop getting phone calls on christmas morning about the bloody email system. They can store 25GB a user without stressing me out about whether we're going to hit the limits of our budget on FC SAN storage.
They have a nice web interface; and shared docs, calendars and contact lists thrown in for free. I can clone all mail live, so I can still backup everything off site.
All in all, I'm going to be _very_ glad to see the back of running my own mail server.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
To protect your data, you keep it to yourself,
Keep it to yourself indeed. I mean, you really need to protect that data you transmitted in plaintext to someone else via smtp who is reading it right now via their own gmail account...er ... wait... you sent an email to someone using gmail? You might as well host your copy with them, they already have it anyway.
If you want to protect your data, you probably aren't emailing it.
Good set of postfix rules and a very mild tweaking of Spamassassin and I have nearly no spam reach my inbox.
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unknown_client_hostname,
reject_unauth_pipelining,
check_client_access pcre:/etc/postfix/reject-domains,
permit
smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_helo_access pcre:/etc/postfix/nomail-domains,
check_helo_access mysql:/etc/postfix/reject-helo-mydomains.cf,
reject_invalid_helo_hostname,
reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname,
permit
smtpd_sender_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
check_sender_access pcre:/etc/postfix/nomail-domains,
check_sender_access mysql:/etc/postfix/reject-sender-mydomains.cf,
reject_non_fqdn_sender,
reject_unknown_sender_domain,
permit
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
check_recipient_access pcre:/etc/postfix/reject-users,
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We are talking about accessing Hotmail via POP3, not Gmail. Hotmail doesn't support IMAP.
America Online wasn't based in and focused on America?
Indeed not. They were a reasonably significant broadband ISP in the UK too, though their decline here has paralelled that in the USA.
Yes I remember their famous "faux pas", like telling the residents of Scunthorpe that they should rename their town Sconthorpe to register, thinking people from Penistone were taking the piss - there couldn't be a town called that could there?, and telling the Welsh that they has to use English in the Welsh language forum. They even blocked emails in Welsh. Needless to say they were not the biggest ISP in the UK!
He's not entirely wrong. The Hotmail purchase was a bit of an embarrassment at the time for MS. They bought a successful service that was using FreeBSD for everything, while telling all of their customers that UNIX on the server was old and crappy while NT 4 was the new shiny. Then they tried to switch Hotmail to NT4, failed miserably, saw a load of downtime, and reverted to FreeBSD... which would have been fine if they hadn't made such a big deal about the migration. Hotmail now runs Windows Server {some year} - they learned from this experience, improved their server OS offering, and didn't tell anyone about the second migration until after it was done and working.
Hotmail was FreeBSD on the user facing services and Solaris for data storage.
We never tried NT4. We did eventually move to W2K (which was part of why I left).
-J