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?

Comments

FIFO

[Anonymous Coward]

First in, First out. Cya, hotmail.

Maybe selection bias

[hsmith]

But maybe 1:100 people I know use hotmail. Simply, no one does. Hell, there are probably more AOL active email addresses in my address book compared to Hotmail.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[hobarrera]

Actually, the main difference is that AOL is US only, while hotmail had a lot of worldwide users. I must know about 45% hotmail, 45% gmail, and 10% "all the rest". I'm guessing that's pretty much how modern distribution goes as well.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[solarissmoke]

I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of thousands of Gmail users who have an old and defunct Hotmail account that they forward to their Gmail account (just in case that high-school sweetheart tries to get back in touch). They will be pushing up the Hotmail count, despite the fact that they aren't active users in any sense.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Bieeanda]

I saw them fairly often about five years ago, when I was working at the university bookstore. They had raffles-cum-newsletter signups with old-fashioned cards, and I was the poor schmuck who got to punch them into the database. Lots of FirstnameLastYearofbirth @hotmail and @yahoo, but very few gmail accounts.

I stopped using my hotmail account before Microsoft bought it, back when frames were still considered a bright idea. At this point my Gmail address is a magnet for spam and idiots using it to sign up for services, so I've moved to using my web host's e-mail service. I'd consider running my own server, if I didn't suspect that my ISP tries to prevent that sort of thing.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

I disagree with this. I've been running a very small internet business for a few years now, and have about 1000 customers so far; out of those 1000, about 150 have hotmail.com addresses, while only about 40 have aol.com addresses. The customers aren't really computer experts either, so it's a crowd where I'm not surprised to have AOL users, but still, there's lots more hotmail users. In fact, there's actually more hotmail users than Yahoo users, of which there's about 120. Not surprisingly, Gmail tops the list, at over 230. The rest is things like comcast.net (a little over 30, close to the aol.com number in fact), roadrunner.com, etc. along with some business email addresses and various other ISPs, large and small.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[stephanruby]

I'm surprised Hotmail just lost its crown. It has millions of spam accounts on there.

Either their spam detection just got better, or the spammers themselves are leaving Hotmail because no one takes Hotmail seriously anymore.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[slashmydots]

Maybe nobody had a spare Gmail invite to send those people so they had to stay on hotmail lol.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[cheesybagel]

Perhaps when IPv6 comes out self-hosting will be more of an option again. ISPs charge a pretty penny if you want to have a static IP.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

AOL isn't US only, though I have no idea why anyone else would use it. As I said in another post here, I have a small business with about 1000 customers, and of my ~40 AOL addresses in my customer list, 2 of them are in the UK.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Idbar]

Can you forward your Hotmail to your Gmail? I haven't even tried, I know Yahoo won't let you.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[solarissmoke]

You can set up Gmail to access your Hotmail account via POP3.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Cimexus]

Nah, Hotmail was THE webmail service in the late 90s to early 2000s when the internet was growing very fast, and thus I think most people have or had a Hotmail address around here. Not in the US so 'AOL' never existed.

In the 2001-2005 period when I was at university easily 2/3rds of people used a Hotmail address (and the remainder used their ISP-provided email address). Now it's a lot lot less as Gmail has pretty much taken over. I still use my Hotmail address, but only as a 'throwaway' address for website signups and where you need to enter an email in a field to continue etc. I use Google Apps/Gmail with my own domain for my primary address.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Cimexus]

They do? Not everywhere I guess ... a static IPv4 address is a $5/month add-on for my current home DSL plan. And even without paying that, my IPv6 address is static (or rather, the /56 prefix they assign me is static).

But despite that I still don't really want to go to the trouble of self hosting - buying a cheap domain and using free Google Apps for mail works great and gives me high reliability while still letting me fully control my own mail.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[AK Marc]

America Online wasn't based in and focused on America? That's news to me. I haven't run across anyone outside the US using an AOL address, even after they left the ISG model and went to the locationless value-add model.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[TheLink]

Permanent forwarding still means the old account is active and is counted as a user.

At least in the past with Hotmail and yahoo you still had to log in every now and then or the account would be disabled (or even deleted), and the emails wiped..

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[interkin3tic]

Judging by my own defunct hotmail account, I wouldn't want to do that. So much spam.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Anonymous Coward]

yep I am sure there are, just as there will also be a ton of gmail users forwarding their email off to other providers.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[swillden]

Judging by my own defunct hotmail account, I wouldn't want to do that. So much spam.

But it'd all get run through Gmail's spam filters, so you wouldn't actually see it.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[hene]

My DHCP address stays same because my server is always up. When it doesn't, theres afraid.org.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[theArtificial]

I was shocked as well when one of my friends mentioned using AOL in Germany in the 90s. There's a brief mention of it in their history too. Pretty wild, now that I think about it I almost miss the mailers which made great give away CD holders. One of their properties (ICQ) is pretty big in Europe (mostly eastern and Russia) to this day.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[EdIII]

I don't think you need a static to run a mail server as long as you have a dynamic DNS.

Most DHCP addresses are pretty damn static anyways. I know with DynDns you can set the TTL to be very short (in seconds on a paid account) which would take care of an address that changes every 24 hours.

As long as you can control basic DNS records for your domain (GoDaddy even lets you do that) you can set the MX record for the domain to be the Dynamic DNS address and the whole thing should work just fine.

I've never actually tested it, but it sounds like it would work in theory.

In practice though, even that static IP might not help you. I use policy block lists, so if the ISP actually lists the address in a PBL, my mail server is probably going to give you a problem.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[TubeSteak]

If you don't login from time to time, hotmail (and gmail for that matter) will lock and eventually delete your account.

Fun Fact: Most people don't bother to clean up their digital refuse.
So if you're looking for ways to pass the time, check and see if anyone you know has allowed their hotmail account to lapse.
Then re-register it and do a password reset on any website you think they had an account with.
Bonus points if you get hits from dating websites or livejournal.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Patch86]

Yep. We have Kentucky Fried Chicken too, and I'm fairly sure British Petroleum supply petroleum to more than just the British.

Much of my early internet experience was dominated by AOL free trial CDs, which in my house significantly outnumbered all other disks of any sort. This was back in the days when convincing the family to *pay* for internet seemed like an outlandish luxury...

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Patch86]

Ymail is an alternate domain for Yahoo Mail, in the same way as both Gmail and Googlemail are domains used by the Gmail service.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Chrisq]

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!

Re:Maybe selection bias

[asdf7890]

If I remember rightly, they didn't even drop the country from their name initially. They operated for a short while as America Online in the UK before completing the rebranding to the shorter title AOL.

The first came to my attention due to the "decency" controls which had amusing side-effects. Their online forms wouldn't let people from Scunthorpe join for instance.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[ewanm89]

Yeah, AOL crap came to the UK, and it was such crap, most in the UK tries to stay away from it.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[LVSlushdat]

The last part will bite you. My and most large mail servers will not accept e-mails from a server running on a dynamic IP block.
A VPS at a decent provider starts at $10-15 per month for all the web and e-mail hosting you will ever need.

umm.. a bit of searching will find 512MB OpenVZ "slices" available for well under $10/mo. I currently have 3 of these, two running Debian, for a OpenSim/OSGrid region host and a Wordpress host. The third one runs Fedora and is a catch-all "play" slice.. I pay the princely sum of $5.95/mo each for these, and have been using them for well over a year, and have had zero problems with them. As as I get a bit of $$$ ahead, I'm planning on paying by the year for them. They charge $59.95/yr each for them. I'm not gonna link to the vendor as I have zero financial ties to them, just a happy customer... Google is your friend with a search for "ThrustVPS"....

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Em Adespoton]

I wonder... when they say "hotmail," do they include live.com, etc.? Microsoft has a lot of different services using the hotmail system.

I stopped using Hotmail when Microsoft bought them, but I've still got an account.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

That's a little bit different. Just look at the names: "Kentucky Fried Chicken" implies that it's fried chicken from Kentucky, or at least made in a style that originated in Kentucky (which is exactly what it is; "Colonel" Sanders was a Kentuckian and invented his famous recipe for friend chicken). "British Petroleum" implies either that it's petroleum from Britain, or it's a British company that supplies petroleum (of course, the latter is exactly what it is).

"America Online" implies that it's a service for Americans to get online, which is exactly what it started out as, and why it was named that way. When they expanded overseas, the name suddenly made no sense whatsoever. Remember, chicken and petroleum are a little different from online access: the former two are goods, whereas the latter is a service. People buy foreign-made goods all the time; if they're not doing it for cheapness (like with Chinese-made stuff), it's frequently because the foreign-made good has some extra cachet: Italian-made sports cars, for instance, have a certain reputation and certain qualities which make people want them, as do French wines and cheeses, Cuban cigars, etc. People don't normally search overseas for a service, especially one that gives them access to a global network, they look locally, just like they do for phone service, electric service, water/sewer service, etc. No one in Germany is going to contact the Tennessee Valley Authority to try to get electricity, for instance, because they think it's better than their locally-supplied electricity. Of course, internet service is a little different, but I can't imagine anyone in the USA signing up for internet service with "Germany Online", they'd probably think it's a joke or something if it were offered here. I really can't imagine why AOL didn't simple create a new division with a different name for overseas customers like that, much like T-mobile did. T-mobile is really Deutsche Telekom (German Telecom), and they rightly realized trying to set up shop in the USA and other countries with a name like that wasn't going to go over very well, so they changed their name (at least for the foreign operations) to "T-mobile", which is quite neutral.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[jonbryce]

Quite a lot of people in the UK and elsewhere get their electricity and gas from Électricité de France.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Gonoff]

Judging by my own defunct hotmail account, I wouldn't want to do that. So much spam.

But it'd all get run through Gmail's spam filters, so you wouldn't actually see it.

I have been doing this for this very reason. As an IT worker who regularly gets asked for my Hotmail address (Passport/.net account/etc) and password, I can't get rid of it. Happily Gmail gets rid of all the rubbish for me and labels/filters it nicely.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Gonoff]

I am surprised it took so long. I still see one man businesses using AOL or Hotmail as their email addresses on the side if their very battered vans but can only think of one person who still has a Hotmail address apart from people compelled to by MS requiring it for some dealings.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

Hmm.. that's rather odd. And actually, that points to a severe infrastructural problem, if a country can't even manage to supply a vital utility (electricity) to its own citizens, and has to get it from a foreign country. It wouldn't be quite as bad if the locals were getting their power from a local utility (which managed the transmission lines and substations), which in turn was buying power from generators in the foreign country, but if you have to send your monthly payments to a foreign company for your electric power, and you have to call that foreign company when a tree falls on your power line, there's something seriously wrong.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[jonbryce]

How recently have you looked? Hotmail's spam filters are pretty good these days. I used to get about 50 spams per day on my hotmail account, now I get less than one a month.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[shutdown -p now]

ICQ became popular in Russia before it was bought by AOL, though.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[theArtificial]

Greetings and thanks for pointing that out. I didn't claim otherwise, I merely stated that it remains popular there; while in the states and most of western Europe its use declined over the last decade replaced by other services. Why would AOL buy something which wasn't popular? ICQ arguably sparked instant messaging, with the only mainstream contender at the time being AOL IM which wasn't stand alone. Oddly enough one of my friends whom I learned about ICQ from (97ish?) had a UIN in the low 300s. Today most of the low digit and desirable UINs are heavily hacked and trafficed. One of my big complaints with the service was that the contact lists were stored locally so if you didn't back them up you learned quickly ;)

And now Facebook more and more is how most people IM and email... *sigh*

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Smauler]

It's because Labour (for those who don't know, they're the most left-wing of our parties) in their infinite wisdom decided to privatise everything they could in the 90's, and the EU rules mandate fair exchange of goods and competition. So we have to allow foreign countries access to our markets, now we've privatised them.

Note that we have the infrastructure and resources to supply ourselves with fossil fuels, energy, etc, for quite a while longer (except for coal - it would take a while to get our coal mines up and running again, thanks to the Conservatives, in their infinite wisdom). Our production of oil for example, is about the same as the demand. However, we export about 25% of it, and import other oil to make up the shortfall. Trade is good, right?

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

I'm a little confused; why would your most left-wing party want to privatize everything? Usually, it's the right-wingers that want to privatize everything.

The far extreme of the left-wing is socialism, where basically the government is as big as possible, and provides as many services as possible, and nothing is privatized. The government is supposed to take care of everyone. The far extreme of the right-wing is fascism, also called "crony capitalism", where the government and corporations are tied together so that the corporations control the government and drain money from the public through taxes which are then given to the corporations with things like no-bid contracts, bailouts, etc.

The right-wingers here in the USA (which are the Democrats and the Republicans; the Rs are slightly more right-wing than the Ds) are always trying to privatize everything; they want to get rid of the postal system so private companies don't have to compete with it, they've been privatizing the prisons (they're run by corporations like Wackenhut and Corrections Corp. of America), they've even been privatizing the military by hiring mercenaries (they call them "private security contractors").

Re:Maybe selection bias

[seigniory]

As long as you can control basic DNS records for your domain (GoDaddy even lets you do that) you can set the MX record for the domain to be the Dynamic DNS address and the whole thing should work just fine.

I've never actually tested it, but it sounds like it would work in theory.

DNS RFCs **require** that your MX records refer to IP addresses, not A or CNAME, which you'd get via a Dynamic DNS service.

I don't recall which RFC(s) at the moment, sorry.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[EdIII]

I don't think there is a strict adherence to that rule. I've been setting up MX records for 15 years with A recs, and not IP addresses. More than a couple of DNS interfaces I have used in that time period have wizards and templates that set it up that way too.

In fact, that is how I learned to set it up that way in the first place.

Currently using Poweradmin and it has those default templates.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Cimexus]

Interesting because several fairly major email providers (e.g. Google Apps!) explicitly tell you what to put as your MX records to get it working, and they are A records, not IP addresses.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Patch86]

I think you're a little confused. Or making a very deadpan joke.

Labour weren't in power for most of the 90s- the Tories were. British Coal and the CEGB (later to be Powergen & NPower) were privatised in 1990, with the process finishing up in 1995- entirely under John Major's Tory government (which came immediately after Thatcher's Tory government). I believe British Rail was privatised under Major too. Under Thatcher in the 80s, the following were privatised: British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, Jaguar, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless, British Aerospace, Britoil, British Gas and the water utilities.

By the time Labour entered power under Tony Blair in 1997, there was nothing much left to privatise- it had all already been done. The only major thing they privatised was the Air Traffic Control.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Patch86]

Short answer- they didn't; the GP is just confused.

See my reply in the sibling post.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Patch86]

We still generate most of the power domestically (and still extract a fair amount of oil, gas and coal). It's just under the neo-conservative ravages of the Tory Party in the 80s and 90s, most of that infrastructure was sold to the highest bidder. Mostly, the highest bidders were nationalised foreign companies, such as the French EDF or German RWE.

For some reason, it was decided that the best thing for our economy would be to keep exactly the same infrastructure as before, but allow any profits to go to neighbouring foreign governments instead of our own Treasury. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I understand the logic.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

The funny thing is, I can see why many of those really should be privatized (or shouldn't have even been government-controlled to begin with). Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.) Or an airline, or a steel company, or an aerospace company? However, gas (assuming this is the company that supplies natural gas for home heating) and water utilities IMO absolutely should be government-run, because those are essential utility services that citizens in a civilization need to survive in modern times, and they're not something where you can easily have competition (what are you going to do, install 10 independent sewer systems under the city so people can choose amongst them?). I can also see a good case for the telecom company being nationalized, or at least the company that owns and operates the "last mile" infrastructure that connects to everyone's homes.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Patch86]

Why on earth does the government need to be running not one, but two luxury car companies, for instance? (And one of those isn't just any luxury car company, it's probably one of the two most outrageously expensive makes on earth.)

Rolls Royce were a company that made both luxury cars and military-grade aircraft parts. They were nationalised as a whole when they went bust in the 70s due to the need to keep the military gear flowing; the car brand was immediately separated off and sold. The aircraft-part manufacturer stayed on the public books for a couple of decades before being sold off again. The two are still separate to this day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_plc

My view on nationalisation versus privatisation has always been: if it's too big or important to fail, it has to be state owned. Otherwise the state is only underwriting the company anyway. The current Tory government is looking to sell off the Royal Mail; this would mean that in any year where they make a profit, some shareholders will get to keep that money as a dividend. But if the Royal Mail makes huge losses and heads towards bankruptcy, you can be damned sure the government will bail them out; the country without a postal system is unimaginable. So all they'll have done is privatise the profits, nationalised the losses. Ridiculous.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[Grishnakh]

Ok, the explanation about RR makes perfect sense; I didn't realize they were separated but with the same name, much like Volvo (the car company is owned by Gealy of China, the heavy equipment company is entirely separate and still Swedish).

However, this still doesn't explain Jaguar.

I totally agree about privatization. We have the same problem here in the US; there's a handful of "too big to fail" banks, and when they were on the verge of failing, the government rushed in and bailed them out, but they get to keep all their profits. So in my view, the government has two responsibilities: 1) to own and manage any service that's essential and too important to fail, and which can't be reasonably done with competitive private companies (e.g., municipal water and sewer is a prime example of this, as are roads), and 2) for anything that's essential but can be done well with competing companies, the government needs to regulate them and make sure they don't merge into too few, too large companies which are then "too big to fail". If a private company is too important to fail, it shouldn't exist in the first place, that function should be done by a much larger number of smaller companies. Banking (not central banking, just the rest of it) is a good example of this; there should be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of banks, not a small handful that constitute a cartel.

Unfortunately, my views on this are extremely unpopular in the USA these days.

Re:Maybe selection bias

[peawormsworth]

Everyone I knew who used msn/hotmail or yahoo, now uses gmail. This has been true for more then a year. The only alternative I ever see anymore is someone who uses the domain name of their ISP. I think these are just people who use the first email address handed to them.

Own email server

[hobarrera]

Remember when people ran their own mail servers?

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.

Re:Own email server

[Mashiki]

Oh lots of people probably would still run their own, even on their home internet connections if they could. Unfortunately, most ISP's no longer allow people to run servers.

Re:Own email server

[i286NiNJA]

Just sign up for a vpn account with prq, they give you straight unfirewalled vpn with it's own static IP address.

Re:Own email server

[hawguy]

Remember when people ran their own mail servers?

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 run my own mail server, but I still dump most of my mail into a Gmail account since their spam filtering works better than any open source alternatives I've found. I spent a lot of time training Spamassassin's bayesian filter, and though it was pretty good, I finally figured out that Gmail is just easier. Thousands of other users are training their filters and I've found that few spams make it through, and few hams are flagged as spams.

But I have a few email addresses only known to family and close friends that I don't forward on to Gmail - I don't think Google needs to know *everything* about my life.

Re:Own email server

[Grishnakh]

$20/month isn't exactly cheap. A Netflix membership costs less than half of that, and most people probably don't pay more than 2.5 times that ($50) for internet service. Heck, you can get web hosting for $4/month these days easily. With the crappy economy, everyone's looking to cut costs, and $20/month really isn't pocket change, for something that you really don't need to do when free email accounts are so easy to get.

Re:Own email server

[qxcv]

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".

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

Actually, ISP don't allow nor disallow it. The issue is you need a static IP (to receive mail). Even if you manage to get around that (low TTL on DNS, constantly updating data), and most large e-mail providers (google/hotmail/yahoo) will bounce emails from dynamically-allocated IP addresses. The issue is still not ISP side, but rather large-email-host-side.

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

I pay 15USD for a VPS in USA. Meanwhile, internet here (Argentina, third-world-ish), costs me about 100USD a month.

Internet actually gets expensiver as you distance yourself from first-world countries.

Re:Own email server

[Zadaz]

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.

Re:Own email server

[siliconx]

Actually, many ISP's do not allow it:

Optimum Online:

        Users may not run any type of server on the system. This includes but is not limited to FTP, IRC, SMTP, POP, HTTP, SOCKS, SQUID, DNS or any multi-user forums;

Verizon:

You also may not exceed the bandwidth usage limitations that Verizon may establish from time to time for the Service, or use the Service to host any type of server.

Comcast:

use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network
content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises
LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited
equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, Web hosting, file sharing, and proxy
services and servers;

Re:Own email server

[Rene S. Hollan]

I run my own. Always did. There, in the living room rack, under the TV. As natural as a mailbox streetside.

Re:Own email server

[le.zap]

Remember when people ran their own mail servers?

I do too. Been running my own since 1987.

Re:Own email server

[rev0lt]

Have you tried greylisting? Another good approach is to have "dummy" easy-to-guess email accounts (such as anna@yourdomain.com) and use whatever you receive on it to train your bayesian filter or blacklist settings.

Re:Own email server

[EdIII]

I don't think the static IP makes any difference. It probably is still listed in the PBLs.

Only need I ever came across for one was site-to-site VPN tunnels.

Most static IP addresses are on business accounts, and you are allowed to run servers on those.

Re:Own email server

[Nursie]

I did for a few years.

It was fun, I learned about postfix and dovecot, spamassassin, milters, filters, blacklists and greylists and the like. I had the spam down to a reasonable level too. I also learned about SPF records and rDNS, so the big boys would accept mail from my system. It was all done on a linksys NSLU2 that I'd hacked to run debian off an old USB stick.

But then I had to move house, DSL was going to be down for a few days and I figured out I could get google apps for domains to do the work for me.

Re:Own email server

[EdIII]

I just don't get that. You lose so much going to Google in terms of control and privacy. Sure, it's the path of least resistance, but the loss of privacy with a company where you are the product is way too distasteful to me.

SPAM is practically a non issue anyways. SpamCop and Spamhaus solve 99% of my spam issues before I even accept a connection along with a good malicious URL block list to scan accepted messages and delete them outright.

I don't buy that it is too hard to run a mail server. I'm running one right now for almost a thousand users and several dozen domains and I spend a few hours a month, if that.

Most of that time is tracking down why somebody's email did not go out, or why an email was not received.

Can Google show you full mail server logs to diagnose why something might not be coming through/getting out?

Re:Own email server

[jopsen]

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.

True, so true, there's no way you could configure a mail server better than gmail ;)
Okay, joke aside, being a slashdot reader you probably could :) But to get the same level of availability and redundancy one would have to spend many hours configuring and setting up servers all over the world.

Re:Own email server

[martin-boundary]

Not at all. ISPs don't allow SMTP servers because they're afraid spammers will use them to relay messages, and viruses will propagate unchecked on their networks.

If you look at your T&Cs, chances are they point you to a bunch of ISP owned SMTP servers that you are allowed to use for email, and they don't allow you to run your own servers. Static IPs are a red herring.

Re:Own email server

[martin-boundary]

and does a better job of protecting my data than I could.

LOL. The one thing Google does NOT do is protect your data. To protect your data, you keep it to yourself, you don't let Google/FBI/CIA/TSA/MAFIAA/Obama snoop it up and either censor it or take it hostage etc.

American corporations are a terrible place to store your data, unless "you have nothing to hide".

Re:Own email server

[arkhan_jg]

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.

Re:Own email server

[The Good Reverend]

That would only be true if you send all encrypted email to only people using private, encrypted servers. Since the rest of us live in the real world where our friends and family use large webmail services, it really doesn't make a difference.

Re:Own email server

[The Good Reverend]

Neither of those approaches is easier than (or necessarily better than) letting Gmail's spam filter handle your mail.

Re:Own email server

[vux984]

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.

Re:Own email server

[dejanc]

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.

Be prepared for dealing with such stuff on Google Apps too. A couple of years ago I moved an institution to Google Apps. Overall, it has been a positive experience, but it took them awhile to understand that I can't do much if "this email is gone that I swear was there a minute ago" or stuff like that.

Also, you will notice Google has some issues too. About a year ago, one of their SMTP servers was misconfigured and all mail sent from that server was marked as spam by receivers. Outlook doesn't like their POP server (or it doesn't like any POP servers?) so make sure you only use IMAP for local clients.

There are other issues too. E.g. I just learned a week ago that Hotmail is so improperly configured that they don't check for MX records on your domain: if there is a port 25 open on your domain, they will try to deliver the email to it! In subsequent attempts they get it right, but the first email from Hotmail to Google Apps from a particular user will always fail. Of course, this is neither your fault, nor is it Google's fault, but it's still something that you will have to explain to your users.

Finally, make sure you enable two-step authentication, both for yourself, and try to force all users to do it to. Two-step authentication means they will send you an SMS with a verification code whenever your IP changes.

Google's passwords are thrown around a lot and I had bad experience with Chinese "hackers" getting into people's mail. E.g. some sites may claim they support OpenID or will log you in with your Google account. Instead, they just harvest your email / password. Also, many people will sign up for a random website using user@gmail.com and then giving the website the same password they use on Google. That's just too easy to exploit!

Resetting user passwords every once in a while may not be such a terrible idea (Google allows you to force password change on login), though I try to resolve it with education instead.

Anyway, good luck with it. I am happy with Google Apps overall, but I still keep my own email on my own server...

Re:Own email server

[Mashiki]

Actually, ISP don't allow nor disallow it.

Wrong. So very wrong. The contract that you sign with most ISP's will specifically disallow you from running pop/smtp/telnet/irc/http/socks/proxy, etc, etc,etc, and so on. Or even DNS. It's very rare to even find a ISP that will allow it these days. Simply because the average person doesn't know how to secure a server from attacks, and in turn it becomes a liability.

Re:Own email server

[martin-boundary]

If you want to protect your data, you probably aren't emailing it.

You're barking up the wrong tree. Most companies use email as one means of communicating among employees, and most companies use email to communicate with recipients at *other* companies. That's a whole lot of traffic that Google et al don't need to snoop on, unless said company's CTO is braindead.

And in fact, there's little reason for even your grandma to be on gmail. An inhouse Linux router/mail server combo would be perfect for intra-family messaging. If the GNU freedom box project can get off the ground, we'll begin to have a real alternative to the corporate overlords.

Re:Own email server

[profplump]

But most users have no need for Google's level of availability and redundancy, particularly for the store-and-forward protocol used in mail delivery. Yes, it's annoying if email is down, but spending 3 hours migrating your mail host image from provider A to provider B every couple of years is probably not a big problem for the average mail user, nor is are the few hours a year of downtime from the then-current VPS host.

The electrical system in my house has a hard time replicating the availability and redundancy of Google's data centers, but I sure wouldn't let Google monitor my power usage just to avoid 7 minutes of downtime a year.

Re:Own email server

[Nursie]

In the UK I had several (consumer) ISPs that were happy to sell me (for around 1 GBP per month) a static IP address, unblock incoming and outgoing port 25 and when requested politely even set up rDNS records for me.

YMMV as they say.

Re:Own email server

[Dr_Barnowl]

But you might let them monitor your usage in exchange for paying for your electricity - which is really what the deal is. They provide a service, which they have used their vast economies of scale to make so incredibly cheap that they can pay for it out of the almost-zero chance that someone might sell you something.

This is a much smaller cost for most people than the cost of setting up their own server, paying for the hardware, the electricity, and most of all, paying with their time to configure and maintain it.

If you really value your privacy that much, you should be encrypting all your mail anyway. Given that email is a store-and-forward protocol you have no assurance of the route it takes to be delivered to you, and the vast majority of email is currently plaintext. Google is just doing something that's been technically possible for decades - snooping on email - but they figured out a way to make it legal and profitable on a mass scale.

Re:Own email server

[heypete]

You're barking up the wrong tree. Most companies use email as one means of communicating among employees, and most companies use email to communicate with recipients at *other* companies. That's a whole lot of traffic that Google et al don't need to snoop on, unless said company's CTO is braindead.

Does Google use their "snooping" for anything other than delivering more targeted ads? It's not like they're reading users email and stealing corporate secrets or anything.

Sure, there's plenty of reasons to run internal mail servers, but Gmail provides a great service that meets the needs of a large number of users, businesses, universities, etc. If they didn't, they wouldn't be as big as they are.

The university I used to work for moved ~30,000 student email accounts to Google Apps for Universities. It authenticates using the university's locally hosted authentication system. Saved them a huge amount of support hassles, servers, storage, electricity, bandwidth, etc. and those resources could then be used on other useful projects.

And in fact, there's little reason for even your grandma to be on gmail. An inhouse Linux router/mail server combo would be perfect for intra-family messaging. If the GNU freedom box project can get off the ground, we'll begin to have a real alternative to the corporate overlords.

My parents like Gmail because it provides tons of space, good searching facilities, excellent spam filtering, and a built-in web-based chat/voice/video client so they can easily click two buttons and be chatting with my sister or me. Yes, it's possible to setup something similar on one's own, but it's (a) a hassle and (b) likely to be not as cleanly integrated as Gmail, which is a big turn-off for non-technical users.

Re:Own email server

[hairyfish]

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.

It always amuses me when people blame the product when they aren't using it properly. Running a mail server these days (assuming your using the best of breed solution which everyone in here seems to have a religious hatred for) requires next to no maintenance. This is why people buy commercial solutions, because spending money upfront generally saves a lot of money later on by not having to patch together a whole bunch of 'free' tools which you spend the rest of you life tweaking to keep it working. It's no surprise you'r having issues managing spam, I never seen it done effectively in-house, I wonder why anyone even tries to do this, which is why I outsource this to the best of breed mail filtering companies. Again, I've never had any issues and maintenance is next to nil. Cost/Benefit sells itself if you done your analysis properly. All of your issues seem to stem from poor design and religious choice rather than anything technical. And don't try to sell Google Docs as a solution. It may work in mum and dad shops or education where your users are kids who have no productivity requirement, but in the real world where time is money, there is a reason the #1 corporate email server is #1. And this whole article seems to have missed the driver behind these numbers. Android is the top cell phone OS and it uses gmail accounts natively, hence the popularity of gmail accounts right now. Nothing more nothing less. If WP8 kicks off as all the experts are claiming, then you will see hotmail come back.

Re:Own email server

[tftp]

My parents like Gmail because it provides tons of space, good searching facilities, excellent spam filtering, and a built-in web-based chat/voice/video client so they can easily click two buttons and be chatting with my sister or me. Yes, it's possible to setup something similar on one's own, but it's (a) a hassle and (b) likely to be not as cleanly integrated as Gmail, which is a big turn-off for non-technical users.

My first alarm bell about Google rang when they added chat to the GMail window. I was able to quickly extinguish that problem.

The next alarm bell rang when they added Buzz, I think. I had to spend time searching and then disabling that Buzz.

Then they made yet another change - some GUI change, I think - that made me mad. I connected with POP and moved all my messages onto my own server. Since then I haven't connected to GMail over the Web even once. I'm pulling email out that is occasionally sent by someone who has my old email address, but in last months I haven't seen even one valid email coming from there. I can safely terminate the Google account now.

With regard to UI changes, this is extremely annoying. Those busybodies keep changing things for reasons unknown - I guess just because they have to do something, and this is just as good as anything else. But this bothers me because once I get used to something I see no reason to fiddle with it. I have many other things that need change, and I'm busy working on those. Leave things that work alone.

By the way, now I recall what made me so mad that I stopped using GMail completely. It was a new feature called "Also copy $someone". When I sent an email a note appeared with these words, initially suggesting that the other recipient WILL be copied on the email. Later Google was kicked so hard they had to change the words to "Suggesting to also copy $someone". This was all calculated from previous email history and it was as bat$hit crazy as it gets. I haven't sent a single email through GMail interface from that day. I simply do not want to risk emailing stuff if I am not in 100% control of who gets what. (The suggestions were all wrong, by the way.) I do not know what they are doing now because I'm done with their "free" service.

Re:Own email server

[paskie]

Seriously, you must be doing something wrong. I run my personal mail server where I receive 1100 mails per day on average, of which about 200 are legitimate and 900 are spam. Number of false negatives going to my mailbox is on average 1.1 per day. The *only* tool I use for spam filtering is dspam, with pretty much the default settings, trained on my past mails. It's running like this for about 8 years now, in the past non-trivial amount of false positives (maybe 1 per week) was an issue but with newer versions of dspam this is not a problem for me anymore, there are no false positives. No greylisting or whatever, just plain postfix + dspam. No spam.

At our university department, the mail traffic is much higher, as well as the number of users, though usually the amount of spam per user is smaller. There, we also include ClamAV and SpamAssassin in the mail pipeline (+ dspam with most people opting for shared database, and auto-training from few spam trap emails). It's slightly more complicated, but again fairly straightforward to set up as we use no special configuration, just the defaults. The average amount of false negatives (spams going through) are much under 1 per day. (Usually none, but few times a month, few yet unknown spams go through in a burst.)

Greylisting is so inconvenient when using email-based registration etc., just don't use it, there's no need. And most of the blacklists are run in a very shady way and with too many legitimate sites ending up on them, so avoid them too. Just use dspam, throw in ClamAV and SpamAssassin to improve things if you are willing to spend few more minutes on it.

Re:Own email server

[darrylo]

It used to be free for 50 users. Some years back, google lowered the limit to 10. People who had accounts before this change were grandfathered and can still have 50 users, but new accounts are limited to 10 free users.

Re:Own email server

[TheRaven64]

A $20/month VPS will easily serve a dozen users though. The biggest issue is mail storage space - 1GB/user of space becomes expensive quite quickly. If you and a few friends want email that isn't controlled by a third party, get a VPS together. If there are more than a few, a colocated server can be even cheaper: a machine with a couple of 2TB disks in RAID-1 will happily serve 100 users and give them a lot of space, and if you shop around a bit you can get it for $1-2/month/person. And a server that you control isn't limited to just mail: you can also use it for web hosting and anything else you want. Mine runs a mail server, an XMPP server, a few web sites, and a couple of mailing lists, for example, and the load is low enough that it fits in most VPS providers' cheapest tier. All IM and email goes to domains I own, so I can easily switch.

A lot of VPS providers now provide turn-key VMs with a web control panel, so you don't even need to know very much about system administration to do it, just pick the services you want and tick the relevant checkboxes.

Re:Own email server

[TheRaven64]

almost never goes down

I have a Google Apps account provided by a customer for when they want me to represent them in a semi-official way. I also have email accounts provided by two universities, a university computer club run by volunteers, and one hosted on a VPS that I admin myself. Of these, the one I have been unable to access for the longest in the last year has been the Google-hosted one, followed by mine (server downtime at my old VPS host, I've now moved to another provider), then the computer society.

Re:Own email server

[TheRaven64]

I'd also recommend OpenBSD's spamd. If you're not using OpenBSD, it's also in ports for FreeBSD, and probably available for other platforms. Between it and SpamHaus you catch most spam.

Re:Own email server

[icebraining]

I use a different address for each service/website and a catch-all to a single maildir. When some service leaks the address (on purpose or not), I just need to route it to /dev/null. I even give different addresses to different people IRL.

No need for spam filters, greylisting and all that stuff, and I still don't spend more time with it than I did on Gmail.

Re:Own email server

[tepples]

Heck, you can get web hosting for $4/month these days easily.

Is that with or without SSL support? Because without, anybody who logs in runs the risk of being Firesheeped.

Re:Own email server

[at_slashdot]

If you want to hide something you encrypt, otherwise is madness anyway.

Re:Own email server

[Quirkz]

It may just be a coincidence, but has anyone else noticed Gmail's spam filtering fall apart in the last couple of days? I normally get at most one spam per month, and in the past 24 hours I've had eight or nine pieces of spam slip through. It's a little disconcerting.

Re:Own email server

[AbRASiON]

Yeap, I just moved a small business of about 25 users on to it because I don't have the time or the desire to learn more shit about MS Exchange. Unless you're reading constantly and on the absoloute cutting edge of news and security information, sooner or later you're gonna get done.

My only issue is with latency to Australia. My users insist on using Outlook (and to be honest, considering their needs, I support this) so dragging / dropping mail is a bit tedious compared to a local server.

Re:Own email server

[Grishnakh]

Honestly, I don't know. I have a plan for about $3/month for a small website I own, but it doesn't have or need secure logins (other than sftp for file transfer of course) so it's not really a factor for me. Seems to me I remember seeing they supported SSL but maybe there was an additional fee for the certificate or something.

Re:Own email server

[antdude]

Can't you add encryption like PGP or is that not allowed? :(

Re:Own email server

[arkhan_jg]

Be prepared for dealing with such stuff on Google Apps too. A couple of years ago I moved an institution to Google Apps. Overall, it has been a positive experience, but it took them awhile to understand that I can't do much if "this email is gone that I swear was there a minute ago" or stuff like that.

Heh, that's true. But on the bright side, the trial period we've been running with a small subset of users went very well, and they were positive about the significant reduction in spam. Google have a much wider net for bayesian filtering and spotting bulk email runs as they happen, so that probably helps. We are also going to be cloning all incoming email into my own dump server for a while at least, so I'll have an independent copy of mail for emergency recovery. Given it's not going to be hooked up to 'live' use, I can use our much cheaper storage and infrastructure for it. It's not perfect, but it's a better solution than I can manage entirely inhouse.

Outlook doesn't like their POP server (or it doesn't like any POP servers?) so make sure you only use IMAP for local clients.

Far as I can tell, outlook doesn't really like any mail server that isn't Exchange, but yeah, POP is especially bad. We've been using IMAP exclusively mainly for that reason for years, though most users will carry on using webmail so shouldn't be an issue.

Google's passwords are thrown around a lot and I had bad experience with Chinese "hackers" getting into people's mail. E.g. some sites may claim they support OpenID or will log you in with your Google account. Instead, they just harvest your email / password. Also, many people will sign up for a random website using user@gmail.com and then giving the website the same password they use on Google. That's just too easy to exploit!

I'm pretty sure that's how we've had some of our spammer break-ins on our own smtp relay server with legit accounts; it is a problem. We'll just have to cross our fingers and stick to user education as we've already been doing. That and change passwords every so often; we'll be syncing google apps to our AD accounts, so our existing periodic change on the school systems should cover it.

Cheers for the tips. That hotmail one is an odd one!

Re:Own email server

[rev0lt]

For me, it is easier - I roll my own infrastructure. And the notion of "better" varies wildly acording to your requirements. Shure, gmail may be a good fit for some workloads, but not for all of them - specially if you need to know why/where some specific email was filtered or discarded.

Re:Own email server

[arkhan_jg]

All of your issues seem to stem from poor design and religious choice rather than anything technical.

Well thanks for the insight into my setup and that we made the choices we did due to zealotry. That must have been easy since you don't know me, or my network, or the numerous discussions I've had with management and trials we've run over the last year to pick a new solution. But obviously it's because I'm allergic to 'best-of-breed' commercial solutions, by which I assume you mean Exchange.

We do run AD, Windows, and windows servers where it makes sense. We also run linux servers where it makes sense. We even have osx clients and ipads - where it makes sense. All solutions are considered on my end for technical merit, and management for cost if I can make the case for it.

What we don't have is a large budget - because we're a school. Any licencing costs come out of something else. Let's say I pay $10 a year per user for spam filtering via a commercial externally-hosted mail filter, which is on the cheaper end from what I've seen. That's $20,000 a year. That's a new suite of computers. A year. Or almost our entire microsoft budget. Hell, that's more than my annual server budget. We did consider it, but it was quickly dismissed as not value for money.

Yes, it might save my time, but my time is 'free' because I'm already paid for and on site as far as management is concerned.

It's no surprise you'r having issues managing spam, I never seen it done effectively in-house, I wonder why anyone even tries to do this

Money. In house is cheaper than out of house in visible costing. You know how much we were quoted for exchange hosting, another option we looked at? Around £5 a user a month was the cheapest from one of our existing suppliers, with a bulk discount that took us to just over £100,000 a year. I think my bursar nearly had a heart attack when he saw that - he tried to get them down to £2000 a year!! They struggled very hard not to laugh in his face when he said that in the meeting.

So instead, I can get the whole thing hosted on a commercial-grade service for free via google apps for education. That IS the best of breed cost/benefit as far as I'm concerned. It's not a panacea, there will still be end-user issues, and other headaches. But it's a hell of a lot better - and cheaper - option than outsourcing to a hosted exchange service.

And don't try to sell Google Docs as a solution. It may work in mum and dad shops or education where your users are kids who have no productivity requirement,

Well, good thing we ARE in education then! And the main thing the members of senior management that were part of the trial group leapt on? Google calendars. Loved it. Loved that it was sharable outside the school, and trivial to embed into a website, as well as personal ones and in-house private ones. Go figure.
We already have a commercial VLE for document sharing etc, so I don't see google docs getting much use to be honest. But staff managed publishable calendars? Best thing since sliced bread apparently.

Personally, I'm quite fond of shared Google Docs editing; simultaneous live editing is surprisingly useful when you have the team bashing away on a piece of documentation and we can all tune it at once without conflict.

Re:Own email server

[vux984]

Most companies use email as one means of communicating among employees, and most companies use email to communicate with recipients at *other* companies.

The context however was people running their own personal mail servers, not companies.

Re:Own email server

[Gonoff]

> Google Apps is free
> does a better job of protecting my data

Are you astroturfing, or really that naive? Just because you don't pay in a currency you recognize, does not mean that any of the web-mail services (or other "cloud services") are for free.

It depends on what you mean by free. I think the GP is using the normal meaning of the word "free". This is "I don't have to pay money for it". You might use the same meaning as I do but we are in a minority.

Re:Own email server

[Gonoff]

American corporations are a terrible place to store your data, unless "you have nothing to hide".

I have nothing to hide and I still consider them unsuitable for anything important. I use Gmail only for what I consider trivia and I remember that it could still be accessed by US spooks and my own. The fact that an algorithm will put a few adverts on the screen is irrelevant.

Re:Own email server

[Gonoff]

And in fact, there's little reason for even your grandma to be on gmail. An inhouse Linux router/mail server combo would be perfect for intra-family messaging.

For my grandma!?
Unless your granny lives with you, that is something most people really would be well advised to run from. Webmail is the most suitable thing for all non-IT people nowadays. It requires no configuration, no special software, nothing to remember other than a name and password which you can probably persuade grandmas browser to remember for her.

Re:Own email server

[fak3r]

Yes, this is also my reason. Spam was killing me 4 years ago when I still ran my own mailserver, and those addys were 5 years old then, now, I look at my Spam folder every now and then and can't believe the traffic.

Re:Own email server

[allo]

there are some with 15 Eur per year.
for a mailserver with a lot of mails, the disk-space may be the limiting factor. traffic is pretty much okay on most vps, RAM might be short on the cheaper ones, but thats no issue for mail, except you need virus-filtering, which might need more ram/cpu. But Post + Spamassassin is okay even on 128 MB RAM (the minimum of most current vps offers)

Re:Own email server

[martin-boundary]

That's why I mentioned the freedom box. The idea is to build a wall plug appliance that just works(tm) and can be left alone unsupervised. Once the internal storage fills up with emails etc, you would either do some maintenance or(more likely) just replace the plug with a new one.

Do you trust your granny to have a TV in her house? This would be similar, but for email/video/social/whatever.

Re:Own email server

[allo]

you can get a certificate for free, check out cacert or startssl.

Re:Own email server

[allo]

the pbl is only an issue for sending. receiving should not be a problem with RBLs. And for sending you could use a smarthost (i.e. gmail :) )

Re:Own email server

[allo]

define protection.
it does protect it from faulty disks, and such things quite good, afaik.

Re:Own email server

[vux984]

The idea is to build a wall plug appliance that just works(tm) and can be left alone unsupervised.

So ... your going to just plug in a mail server behind a dynamic ip address in some grandma's house... and its going to just work?

BWAHAHAHAHAHA

So lets see... zero configuration it registers a domain name, sets up dynamic dns forwarding, automatigically gets around the fact that the ISP is blocking port 25 on the outbound channel... and the fact that half the internet has your ip address on a spam black hole list simply for being known to be in a block of addresses used for dynamic consumer IPs so it copes with that by auotomagically detecting the ISPs smtp server and relays outgoing mail through it... no wait... it can't do that... there goes your freedom. So uh... its a receive only box that can't send email.

And when it fills up... just toss and replace it? No data migration from the old one to the new one? Granny just starts over?

Re:Own email server

[martin-boundary]

So ... your going to just plug in a mail server behind a dynamic ip address in some grandma's house... and its going to just work?

Pretty much... We have all the technology already, we can build such a system.

So lets see... zero configuration it registers a domain name, sets up dynamic dns forwarding, automatigically gets around the fact that the ISP is blocking port 25 on the outbound channel... and the fact that half the internet has

Yup. There's no reason why customers who buy the box can't fill out a form with the domain name they want, and it gets configured for them.

And you seem to forget that it's trivial to send mail outbound on a different port to a relay host, in case the box checks and sees that port 25 is blocked. Same solution applies to get around the blocklists.

The difficulty has never been setting up or using a network of relay hosts, nonstandard port numbets, etc, the difficulty has always been that _ordinary_ people can't do any of that because it takes skill and their Windoze boxes don't do it automatically for them. What they need is an appliance which is set up to bust them out of their ISP cage automatically.

And when it fills up... just toss and replace it? No data migration from the old one to the new one? Granny just starts over?

Of course. Why not? If she needs to read her old mail, she can plug in the old box into the wall. What do you think she does when her photo album fills up?

Do you think she does a data migration plan, cleans out unwanted photos and rearranges everything to make room for more pictures in the same album? No. She buys another album and starts filling it. Same principle.

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

Actually, Google is a lot better at protecting your data than you are. Google has no connection to FBI/CIA/TSA/MAFIAA/Obama. If those entities want your data, they need a warrant, and Google lawyers fight them every step to make sure there is just cause. If the data is in your house, they will just go there instead and take it. Who do you think is better at fighting legal battles, you or the Google law team?

Are for any other sort of unauthorized access to your email, good luck even getting into a Google datacenter parking lot, let alone the many many layers of physical security at the site. Even if you somehow managed to make it onto the datacenter floor, and somehow managed to figure out which of the millions of constantly shifting disk drives held the data you want, it wouldn't do you any good, since the data is encrypted and the keys are stored in a completely different, secure location. To steal the data from your home, one need only wait until you leave, then kick in the door and walk off with your PC.

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

Yeah, no, this never happened. Gmail never started randomly adding "suggested" recipients to your emails. The most gmail will do is put a little comment on the side that says, "Consider CCing the following people." Gmail has never added recipients automatically.

What probably happened was that some people got confused about reply-all versus reply-sender, or they mis-clicked on something, or they got confused about how groups worked, so they complained about their misunderstanding publicly and it became a banner for the paranoid to pick up and run with.

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

But if you have such a big problem with the UI, why not just point your own mail program at Google's IMAP interface?

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

If WP8 kicks off as all the experts are claiming, then you will see hotmail come back.

If I had mod points, I would mod this as "funny". Is that really what ALL the "experts" are claiming these days? I even went over to bing.com and asked about this. I am not seeing this overwhelming regard for WP8 that you speak of.

Re:Own email server

[The Good Reverend]

Or, you know, they could use a webmail service.

Re:Own email server

[tftp]

Gmail never started randomly adding "suggested" recipients to your emails.

As I said, they implemented a previously Google Labs plugin that "suggested" to add those. The initial wording of that suggestion was much more harsh. It was not "Consider including..." - it was "Also include", IIRC. Here is a link that explains people's fear of this new feature. A quote:

Is there any way to disable the 'Consider including' feature that has just appeared on my gmail??? I do not need Google to suggest people for me to send emails to, and now i am terrified I add someone accidentally. It's absolutely mind-boggling why they would add it and not give their users the ability to disable it.

I also hate the 'consider including' feature. Sometimes companies grow so large that employees resort to adding more and more useless features in order to get recognition by management.

Serious. I got fired because of a mistake I made due to this feature.

There is much more at that link. The feature is ill-conceived. I suspect that it was a brainchild of young Google developers who cannot understand that most people do not send stuff to every contact they can get hold of. This feature cannot be turned off.

There are more complaints here and here - and probably millions more. This feature is truly a GMail killer; misdirected emails are known to cause all kinds of grief, from being red in the face to losing a contract to being fired.

In the end, nobody asks for execution of the developer of this feature. (Almost nobody, that is.) All that the people ask is a way to opt out of this disaster. Google, in its infinite arrogance, refused - and made this "feature" permanent. What choice did the people have, with regard to a free service? Only to pack up and leave.

But if you have such a big problem with the UI, why not just point your own mail program at Google's IMAP interface?

I am not a battered wife. When someone tries to fsck with me I fsck them back.

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

Let me get this straight now. Google is not actually adding any unwanted recipients, as you stated in your original post, but they are just suggesting, on the side, that you may have forgotten to include someone. Did I get this right?

And you are also suggesting that people will blindly take these suggestions, include the suggested recipients, and complain that they never wanted those recipients in the first place. Did I get that right?

And you are calling this a gmail killer.

Wow.

As far as why it is useful, it comes in handy when I hit Reply instead of Reply-All.

Or when an email thread drifts to a new topic and gmail reminds you of a coworker who also worked on that project with the rest of the people in the thread.

Or, I can just ignore it. I'm sorry that you lack the self-discipline to do this.

Re:Own email server

[martin-boundary]

Yes, accessing a Freedom box through a webmail interface is a great idea too.

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

Most ISPs don't. Optimum Online's isn't even enforceable, most routers run a local DNS server for caching. Plenty of OSs do that locally as well.
Verizon's is even worse. NO sort of server, AT ALL? so you can't host a game (those that use client/server, not MMOs) while gaming with your friends? Ridiculous.

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

Yes, those PBLs are what I was refering to, though I didn't know the exact name.

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

If you use gmail, then you're not really using your own e-mail server, just relaying.

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

I just looked through the terms of use for ISPs I've previously had. None of them forbid that. They only forbid for-profit service hosting, but nothing else.

Re:Own email server

[allo]

for sending. for receiving, i am using my own server then.

Re:Own email server

[tftp]

Did I get this right?

Yes, you got it right. Still. many people are unhappy about those features regardless of your personal opinion about them. Those people wanted to have nothing to do with this feature - even if it could have been advantageous to them. Exercise is good for people, but would you want an Exercise Police waking you up at 6am and forcing you to run a mile or two whether you like it or not?

Or when an email thread drifts to a new topic and gmail reminds you of a coworker who also worked on that project with the rest of the people in the thread.

I do not lack awareness of who should be included into the thread or excluded from it. The subject often wanders in and out of different areas, requiring to include sometimes accounting, sometimes the boss, sometimes the customer. I do not need a suggestion to include customer A into a mail thread about product B that the customer A has no awareness of.

I'm sorry that you lack the self-discipline to do this.

Everyone makes mistakes, it's just a question of when. A wise man knows that and builds safeties into dangerous mechanisms; a fool removes them because he is always sure of himself.

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

Did I get this right?

Yes, you got it right. Still. many people are unhappy about those features regardless of your personal opinion about them. Those people wanted to have nothing to do with this feature - even if it could have been advantageous to them. Exercise is good for people, but would you want an Exercise Police waking you up at 6am and forcing you to run a mile or two whether you like it or not?

Except this is more like a little message off to the side that says, "Were you going to exercise today?"

I understand that you object to it, but I am having a lot of trouble understanding the magnitude of your reaction.

When you start typing a name in the To: field, and gmail offers to autocomplete it, are you offended that gmail thought you forgot the name of the person you are sending email to?

Re:Own email server

[tftp]

When you start typing a name in the To: field, and gmail offers to autocomplete it, are you offended that gmail thought you forgot the name of the person you are sending email to?

There are two parts in my rejection of this misfeature.

One part is that it makes it simpler to make mistakes. It is harmless to forget someone on an email. You can always copy this person separately - or one of recipients of your email can forward. There is no penalty.

On the other hand, including someone who should not be included is sometimes disastrous. My example of different customers is very indicative of that. You can also be in negotiations with different employers, different contractors, and so on. Google cannot understand why you include some people and not the other. From Google's point of view if you copied someone just once then you should copy him always. This is obviously not so. You can email your GF and her mom when you discuss "official" matters, but you probably should not include the mom when you discuss far more personal things.

Suggesting to copy makes such mistakes more likely. As you say, it doesn't take a superhuman effort to type a few characters of the name and get it autocompleted. You are looking at the field at this time so you can confirm that the autocompletion is correct. If you don't like it you can delete autocompletion entries (though in GMail you have to delete the whole contact, IIRC.) Clicking is much simpler and can lead to errors.

Another reason to be unhappy is that I don't want to take these advices from computers. I don't want to personify a machine, but such an advice is a pretty arrogant thing. Would you like a robot to advice you on lovemaking? Worst of all, you know that this advice is not based on any good reasons (such as the content of the email) - it is only based on groupings of recipients that were seen before. You, as a sentient being, understand that those groupings mean nothing. A persistent and stupid advice is annoying.

Not all advices from computers are like that. For example, spell checkers and grammar checkers are usually well received. First of all, they are smarter than most people in this narrow area of expertise. Second, they can be turned off entirely, or they can be told to ignore this specific instance, or they can be told to learn the new word. They are not confrontational, they are not trying to teach you how to live your life. And if you still have a problem with that, go ahead and turn them off - it is easy.

Google's advisor cannot be turned off. If it were, nobody would rail against this feature. They'd simply disable it and continue; this feature would be never seen again. But Google, in its infinite arrogance, decided that everyone must have this thing because Google knows best. You can be unhappy that a robot gives you Clippy-like stupid advices, but in the end you are far more unhappy about humans at Google that foisted this upon you. Slashdot audience used to advocate variety; it is strange that now "one size fits all" applications are lauded here by so many. Apple-like reduction of choice is now a new virtue. Wouldn't you be a tad upset that a company thinks that you are unable to use a computer with choices?

By the way, I just mentioned MS Office Assistant - the beloved Clippy. The analogy is very close. Clippy was universally hated because it was an idiot giving stupid advices to people. But at lease Clippy could be uninstalled. Microsoft was not *that* full of themselves to make Clippy a mandatory part of the Office experience. Google is, obviously.

There is yet another, third now, part that contributes to rejection of this feature. You never know if GMail is going to send the email to those guys or not. You know that it can. You also know that it says it won't unless you click there. But you cannot be sure; there is no way for you to see the JavaScript source, there is no way for you to make sure that a mistake will not happen. Google employs young coders who may not sha

Re:Own email server

[vux984]

And you seem to forget that it's trivial to send mail outbound on a different port to a relay host

I didn't forget it was trivial, i just didn't think there was much point of a freedom box if i was going to relay all my mail through the ISPs servers anyway.

And it is not so trivial to configure inbound mail. Granny has an arbitrary consumer NAT box... so you've got to do some port forwarding on that.

If she needs to read her old mail, she can plug in the old box into the wall.

Which one gets the new mail? They can't both be receiving mail at the same time.

Also, what happens when two different people with freedom boxes move in together, and you've got a few of them behind one NAT'd dynamic ip address.

She buys another album and starts filling it.

Er... so she gets a new domain name and a new email address, what a clusterfuck that would be. Or does the form have options like "I already have a domain... its registered with godaddy using these credentials... at which point granny turns it off and signs into gmail."

Plus when something inevitably goes... she loses everything on the device? No backups. How is that acceptable?

This whole freedom box system would be so flaky only a geek could love it.

Re:Own email server

[Branciforte]

I appreciate how much effort you put into this response. And I see your point. I can offer you only speculation on why this feature was implemented the way it was.

First of all, this is not a Facebook product. To get anything, even just a mundane internal change, into the source tree requires stringent code reviews. To get a change into a customer-facing produce with a profile as large as gmail, that takes a huge amount of work and effort. There would have been many meetings, arguing about how many pixels and what color and every possible thing that could go wrong. All focused one this one feature. So, rest assured, it was endlessly debated before it was added. This is definitely not a case of some solitary young programmer throwing a hack into the code.

I would also guess that it seemed pretty innocuous at the time. The thinking was probably, "Well, obviously we are not going to change the recipient fields without a positive action from the user, but what could it hurt to offer some suggestions one the side?" It's not like it was some active animation that grabbed your attention. It is just a Div that you can easily ignore. I, personally, have found it useful on many occasions, and I simply ignore it the rest of the time.

I concede your point that when it doesn't work, it can come across as an unwelcome encroachment on your intelligence by what should be a dumb tool.

It seems to come down to a fear that the simple tool will act on its own, and send things to people you did not expect because it is trying to be "helpful". In a world where AI is becoming evermore common, that fear is not so unexpected.

I can say, with a high degree of certainty, that automatically adding a recipient without direct action from the user is something that would NEVER EVER EVER intentionally happen in a Google product. Rest assured of that. But I certainly see how displaying a name that you definitely would not want in the recipient list is something that might make people anxious. I can only say that such an idea was so counter to the intentions of the programmers, that they assumed the users wouldn't think it likely either.

Re:Own email server

[tftp]

I can only say that such an idea was so counter to the intentions of the programmers, that they assumed the users wouldn't think it likely either.

Perhaps. I'm really surprised that Google, with all its size, did not consider calling for a psychological study. As you point out, customer-facing products can make us happy or angry. If only we were all robots this wouldn't be a problem. Logically, there is nothing wrong with dangerous designs - as long as you never make a mistake. But people don't work like that. We may look at one thing and perceive it as something completely different because it triggered some association and activated our fears.

Imagine a device that says "if you press this button you will have a 20% chance of dying before you reach 65 years of age." How many people will press that button? But the button does nothing (let's assume that the 20% figure is a naturally occurring probability of death in this range of age.) It's Pascal's Wager all over again.

This debacle is not an uncommon occurrence at Google, though. The company has issues. The list of their stupid decisions is long and it is growing fast. I think they just don't have capable management in place. They can have endless meetings that discuss placement of individual pixels, but - as the facts illustrate - they never bothered to ask if the users want those pixels in the first place. Numerous management and good management are not one and the same.

This is not unique to Google. Do I need to say more than Windows 8 and its Metro? Same issues, same non-solutions, same cramming of unwanted features down the throat of some customers. Is it some sort of a corporate senility? I'm amazed that so many businesses (hey, Cisco!) choose to shoot themselves in the foot without even a second thought. This is not rocket science by any means; a 5 y/o child would have told you that. Perhaps they need to hire a 5 y/o child as an advisor?

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

If laptops get infected, it's because someone executed something, that's not the e-mail server's fault. The email server should deliver email, period. Users need to be educated not to run photo.bin/photo.exe/etc.

Sure, google has plenty of things "that work", but that's it. You get zero flexibilty, if something's broken, you can't fix it, etc. The only real plus for google, is spam filtering. The rest can easily be replicated. Their broken-ish IMAP interface, lack of sieve support, etc, make them useless if you want to use any other mail client that isn't their website.

Re:Own email server

[hobarrera]

Why is this downvoted? Did the person who decided using activex ten years ago decide google can't turn evil either?

Spam good for big business

[Anonymous Coward]

The main thing services like Gmail bring to email is well-maintained spam filtering, in exchange for general loss of control, privacy invasion, and advertising spewing into email. The unthrottled torrent of spam is great for keeping those services in business. Otherwise running something like Postfix is relatively low hassle, not especially worse than a web server (people still do run those). Spammers of the world, Google and Microsoft thank you for those billions in spam advertising revenue.

Re:Spam good for big business

[jtownatpunk.net]

Your provider still filters even though you turned it off. There are multiple levels of filtering at major providers with the most basic filtering happening before it hits the controls to which you have access. They're filtering out viruses, mail from known spam sources, etc. before it goes through any heuristic analysis, white/black lists, customer preferences, etc. The last big provider I worked with called the first level of filtering "the gateway filter".

You may think you're raw-dogging it but the only way to do that for sure is to run your own mail server.

POP3 access.

[zippo01]

I just remember back in the day how hard it was to POP3 Hotmail. So I never used it. I have several GMAIL accounts for several years, that I use fetchmail on and then host on a private IMAP server. But to be honest i can't remember the last time I received or sent ligitament email to a hotmail address.

Re:POP3 access.

[zippo01]

Indeed I did mean legitimate... Thanks for pointing out my only weakness, for all to laugh and giggle at. My self confidence is like -1 right now. Thinks... :-p

Re:POP3 access.

[Osgeld]

"But to be honest i can't remember the last time I received or sent ligitament email to a hotmail address."

But to be honest i can't remember the last time I received or sent legitimate email to a gmail address, or yahoo. the magic trick is anyone serious about it uses those services as the service, but have it go though their own domain, so you dont have "johnnyjackoff123@hotmail.com" emailing you. Instead you have Customer service Representative JohnJack@bigbiz.corp

never mind that its running though yahoo/hotmail/gmail and is being associated though "johnnyjackoff123@hotmail.com", hell I have 3 of these, 2 for my 2 jobs and another for personal use all on yahoo.com

Re:POP3 access.

[enrevanche]

git a browzer wit a spel chekur

Re:POP3 access.

[Tadu]

Thinks... :-p

... you're willcom. ;-)

Re:POP3 access.

[Gonoff]

I think he used a medical term I think it means to sue someone for damaging your Achilles tendon

Hotmail was great...

[Zemran]

... before Microsoft bought it. It used to run on Unix and was a good reliable service. Then it was bought up and run down and now it is rubbish. Gmail is getting better every week. I use docs to collaborate with people on things and even though I know most of them copy and paste the finished article into Word before they print it, that facility is fantastic. My calendar etc. and spreadsheets, I could go on (POP3 etc.) but my point is that while one keeps getting more useful the other is stagnant. Why would anyone choose to use Hotmail unless they are already known to be there?

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Grishnakh]

Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Gmail is NOT "getting better every week". It hit its peak about a year or so ago, before they forced this idiotic new UI change on us.

Just wanted to second this. If I could go back to the way it was a year ago I'd be happy. I'm also tired of the Gmail Labs kludges that add functionality and break something somewhere else. (like the preview pane that makes it so I can no longer see the 'recent activity' at the bottom of the screen.)

I wouldn't be offended if they took what they know about it now and did a rewrite, thoughtfully including a number of the features from Labs. Do a little streamlining, reduce some of the bloat, all that jazz. Oh well, I can dream.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[jmerlin]

It was Larry Page's decision, and his alone. He demanded they completely re-design everything. I think it's akin to a dog spraying everything he comes across with the scent of any other animal on it; he's gotta put his mark on it somehow, even though he has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[The Great Pretender]

So you're dinging Hotmail because it doesn't have a decent Office suite, not because it's a shitty webmail service? Then you skip the actual POP3 etc. argument. Weak

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Hotmail was great... before Microsoft bought it.

Hotmail was terrible before Microsoft took over. It could take several days for an email from one Hotmail address to reach the inbox of another Hotmail address.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Zemran]

Did you even read what I wrote? "my point is that while one keeps getting more useful the other is stagnant" !!!

Re:Hotmail was great...

[metrix007]

What anti MS FUD. When was the last time Hotmail was down? It may have issues, but reliability is not one of them. Never was.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[The Great Pretender]

Yeah I read it. Your argument should be that Google email use increased due to the added value of the productivity package, not because the hotmail EMAIL CLIENT is so shitty it drove people to GMail. The hotmail productivity package is not as good as the Google one, so why use it when they're both free?

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Vekseid]

I routinely get 55x bounce messages from Hotmail on accounts with active users.

Better than Yahoo's 45x permabounces, but still annoying.

Gmail, GMX and AOL, on the other hand, are very pleasant to work with. I can even talk to humans at AOL.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I learned that MS had bought HoTMaiL, I immediately stopped using it as my primary email, because I just don't trust MS. At the time I don't think there was any way to forward email out of HoTMaiL or to download all of your email. I kept the account for as long as possible just in case somebody would still send email to it or in case I needed to go and find some older email.

Eventually MS changed the way logins were handled such that it was impossible to login from any of the computers with an internet connection that I had access to at the time (those happened to be all Unix systems). At the same time they deleted all accounts of people who had not been logged in for a few months.

So just because I wasn't using Windows, my account was eventually deleted. That certainly proved that not trusting MS had been the right choice. I was glad I had stopped using it as my primary email.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Anonymous Coward]

... before Microsoft bought it. It used to run on Unix and was a good reliable service. Then it was bought up and run down and now it is rubbish. Gmail is getting better every week. I use docs to collaborate with people on things and even though I know most of them copy and paste the finished article into Word before they print it, that facility is fantastic. My calendar etc. and spreadsheets, I could go on (POP3 etc.) but my point is that while one keeps getting more useful the other is stagnant. Why would anyone choose to use Hotmail unless they are already known to be there?

Sounds like you haven't checked it in a couple of years, because of all things you could call Hotmail, stagnant would be the least accurate over the last couple of years. It has changed very significantly, much more than Gmail I would argue. Re-discovering this on an old Hotmail account I've become the contrarian geek Hotmail users, and when someone always ask me WTF? and try to tell me why Gmail is soo much better they are almost always factual wrong.

It has built in web-Office with collaboration, that unlike Google Docs actually preserves Office document formattting fully. It has SkyDrive integration that autmatically uploads and lets you send links to documents and photos instead of pushing large email attachments (and avoiding the size limits some recipents, including Gmail users, have on attachments). It has a modern and fast HTML5/AJAX interface with fast one-click and right-click options for most common functions. And some useful new 'power user' functions (like how you can automatically prioritize mail to have the latest version from important senders on top, automatic treatment of newsletters , aliases - better solution that Gmails + because they are real aliases so you don't reveal your real email and can discontinue them, etc.). And they have addressed the old painpoints of storage size (7GB+ growing) and spam (was a story recently that Hotmail has reduced spam to lower level than Gmail, but of course always depends, if you are checking your old spam trap account it might still have some. My old (15 years or so) Hotmail account has almost no spam now). And yeah, it has pop3.

If it had had a different name than Hotmail, I'm convinced many more geeks would have recognized it as the best email system currently.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Ash-Fox]

Gmail is still the best online email application there is.

I disagree, I personally prefer Zimbra's system.

Its labeling system is second to none and has been VERY useful in keeping track of all the various projects I'm working on at any time, particularly if you turn on nested labels.

Zimbra takes this a step further by supporting folders and tags.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[I'm just joshin]

Hotmail was great... before Microsoft bought it.

Hotmail was terrible before Microsoft took over. It could take several days for an email from one Hotmail address to reach the inbox of another Hotmail address.

Um, no. Hotmail to Hotmail email was directly delivered. It never touched a SMTP server. The process was to query the user database server, check the recipient's mailbox size, and then deliver directly to their mailbox.

I still have some of the original Perl source code on tape.

-J

Re:Hotmail was great...

[I'm just joshin]

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

Re:Hotmail was great...

[allo]

why are you defining a e-mail service which provides imap by its webinterface? you could just install your own roundcube and let it use google's imap server, if you like to. or just use thunderbird or another real email-client.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[Grishnakh]

Well for starters, when you say "use Gmail", that generally implies using the web interface, since that's what 99.9% of Gmail users do.

But secondly, I see some problems with using another email client, namely Gmail's use of tags (and also nested tags) and conversation views, which other clients may not support. The tags and the conversation views are two giant reasons to use Gmail in the first place, at least IMO.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[pepsikid]

I distinctly remember reading in the major tech blogs about how, shortly after microsoft announced that they'd *finished* converting hotmail to windows server, someone detected that they had really just placed a wall of windows servers on the public facing side, and that everything important was still running linux. Linux that had been imperfectly configured to pretend that they were windows servers. Microsoft briefly tried to claim that there were simply a handful of legacy linux servers that were being seen, but this didn't adequately explain why these 'legacy' servers were lying about their os and httpd. All of the servers were successfully converted to windows server in later months, and the whole thing's been forgotten.

Re:Hotmail was great...

[I'm just joshin]

Hotmail absolutely -NEVER- ran Linux. We gave it a test at the end of '96 but it didn't do SMP as well as FreeBSD did and we never really tried again.

-J

Re:Hotmail was great...

[pepsikid]

Fine. We agree that Hotmail originally used an *nix-like operating system and not a microsoft product. Can you confirm microsoft's deception that I spoke of? What was the reasoning for it?

Re:Hotmail was great...

[I'm just joshin]

Dude, give me at least a link to the "deception" you think happened. Your paranoia and conspiracy mindedness is just plain silly.

-J

Re:Hotmail was great...

[pepsikid]

Oh yeah, "dude", I *really* want to do your Googling for you. Start by studying the revelations that came to light after what Wired Magazine calls "the most widespread security incident in the history of the Web."

Re:Hotmail was great...

[I'm just joshin]

Aah yeah. That was an awesome bug, totally "The Daily WTF" worthy.

One of the QA interns on the Dev side got tired of entering a password as he was testing and changed the code so any password would pass the check. He of course forgot to undo his change. I personally managed that incident since all the other adult supervision on both the Dev and Ops side was at an offsite. It was one of the most fun days in my time at Hotmail.

I thought it was lame of his manager (DB) to not renew his internship. Smart kid, rookie mistake. Wonder where he's at now.

I left in 2000 so missed the 2001 incident. (There was also an incident in '97 where a friendly hacker figured out how to see any file in the filesystem. The site was still Perl based at the time. My boss wanted to call the FBI, I convinced him to let me send him a computer as a "Thank you for telling us" present instead.)

Meanwhile, seeing you flail about as you're trying to prove God knows what is kinda cute. Hopefully everyone else is enjoying me share some of those memories.

-J

Re:Hotmail was great...

[pepsikid]

I always knew it was a bunch of bitter old attention seeking jackasses that ran hotmail. Thanks for the lulz!

Re:Hotmail was great...

[I'm just joshin]

That's the best you got? *pinches cheeks* You're so cute.

-J

Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[bmo]

Remember when people ran their own mail servers?

Yeah, I do. I also remember relay rape and all that fun stuff when you didn't have your mail server configured just right and a spammer would take it over and you'd get a nastygram from your provider.

--
BMO - Lumber Cartel member #2501

android

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, maybe the fact of requiring a gmail account to setup an android phone has something to do with it maybe?

Re:android

[93 Escort Wagon]

I dunno, maybe the fact of requiring a gmail account to setup an android phone has something to do with it maybe?

Same deal with Hotmail and MSN chat, isn't it?

I know a lot of people that still use MSN chat for some reason.

Re:android

[Cimexus]

Having never used an Android phone, I am interested in this statement - do you actually need a Gmail account to setup an Android phone? Or do you just need a Google ID (which is understandable - but my understanding was a Google ID can be tied to any old email address and doesn't necessarily have to have a Gmail account attached)...

Re:android

[Vylen]

It used to be that way, but now you just need a Windows Live ID to use MSN Messenger.

A Live ID can be attached to any email - doesn't need to be Hotmail.

That said, I still use my Hotmail address for Messenger... just legacy purposes ;)

Re:android

[Anubis IV]

I signed up for an MSN Messenger account back in 2002 or early 2003 using my .edu address at the college I had just started at. Admittedly, it wasn't an obvious process to set it up, as I recall, since they did try to make it as difficult as possible to use an outside e-mail address, but the option has been there for probably a decade or more.

Re:android

[Nerdfest]

You need neither. You can set up an Android phone without any ties to Google whatsoever.

Re:android

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

do you actually need a Gmail account to setup an Android phone?

A basic Google Account can be used to configure the phone but will fail if the user then tries to use the Android Market functionality; the Market requires a Gmail account.

There is a long, long thread on Google's "support" forum about this dating back to somewhere in 2009, but still no fix!

On a basic level the phone will work fine without any form of Google account, you just won't be able to use features such as sync or the Market. I do find the latter to be quite limiting, particularly when some vendors ( such as Amazon ) don't even provide a download of their own app from their own site but insist on directing the user to the Market. I had to ask a friend to send me a copy of the Kindle APK!

Re:android

[swillden]

My son's phone (Nexus S running ICS) is configured and working fine with a non-Google account. He can use Google Play to get apps, books, and stuff. Works fine. Is this an Android version issue?

Re:android

[Nerdfest]

You're also not limited to just Google's market anyway. You can use Amazon or others, as well as installing applicatiions directly using APK files.

Re:android

[ignavusincognitus]

Except that the calendar program won't work. I don't mean "will work in local mode but will not sync". I mean "will completely block you out from doing anything". Which means that if you get a tablet for a kid, for example, and don't want to link it to google but want to show them the habit of setting deadlines for their homework assignments, then you can't. This is on ICS.

Re:android

[Nerdfest]

There are many other calendar applications, of which the Google one is only one. Most of the others are just re-works of the Google Apps one, but I think there a few that are not. In any case, you should be able to find one that not only works, but will allow syncing to other sources if you like, such as HotMail. (Note that I haven't actually done this, but I'm fairly confident it will work. Business Calendar maybe?) .

Re:android

[AbRASiON]

No it doesn't
Android phones require a "Google" account - not a gmail account.
Although unlike Microsoft passport (Live) accounts created for MSN messenger, for the most part - I'd speculate most people do end up getting a full Gmail account.

Hotmail? They're still around?

[gishzida]

Haven't used Hotmail since '98 or '99... after they made some funky rules about usage... I got tired of having to re-enable my account [and kill the viruses]... For a while I had my own mail server but when I got the invite to gmail in '01 I put my request in on the domain beta and moved my domain. Smooth sailin' ever since. Who needs Hotmail?

I -still- run my own mailserver

[sanermind]

I still run my own mail server... Don't forget that under the stored communications act the government can get any emails stored by a third party for more than 6 months with no need for a warrant.

Re:I -still- run my own mailserver

[gishzida]

Your point being? If "They" want you "They" will have you... boiled, fried, stewed, with or without a warrant...

Or have you forgotten The little rooms the NSA keeps on the backbones sniffing and sorting all the traffic. They don't need your server -- they already have it.

  noia + noia = paranoia.

Re:I -still- run my own mailserver

[sco08y]

Your point being? If "They" want you "They" will have you... boiled, fried, stewed, with or without a warrant...

Or have you forgotten The little rooms the NSA keeps on the backbones sniffing and sorting all the traffic. They don't need your server -- they already have it.

  noia + noia = paranoia.

It's unlikely, just from an engineering standpoint, that the NSA hangs on to any significant volume of data for hours, let alone months, and it's unlikely from a legal / political standpoint that they share it with LE. And what we've seen from reports by the companies being asked for data is that if law enforcement wants to do an investigation, they actually do call up those companies and serve them with a warrant.

If you run your own server, they can't do that. For the types of trouble that are within the realm of practical concern (lawsuit, jealous ex stalking you, IP disputes, etc) you're a lot better off with a private server than a Gmail account.

Re:Classic interface?

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately, not many entities are better than that these days. Royally fucking up perfectly-good UIs is all the rage right now.

Still run my own...

[BobandMax]

...but have two Gmail accounts for other purposes. I have a TW Business Class account for QOS and trading response. It comes with a static IP and no server restrictions. When my neighbors complain about slow evening and weekend speed, I bob my head up and down and make sympathetic noises. I never see any problem but certainly do pay for it.

Several acquaintances still have Hotmail addresses but a quick scan of my address book only found three. I guess it is diminishing. It seems like they were a lot more common a few year ago.

Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail

[Antique Geekmeister]

Hotmail didn't even deserve the level of use it had: it was competing with AOL, and had the kind of ubiquitous "auto-installed with your computer as as default, and we'll keep trying to re-install it" that AOL used to have. Both services attempted to replace the rest of your desktop and were unusable without very specific clients.

Google's approach of working well, inside your normal web browsers, has been extremely effective. They've also been vastly more reliable than almost any in-house mail server for a lot of reasons: they were able to effectively implement basic spam filtering, they're big enough to survive denial of service attacks, and their distributed and well scaled architectures survive disasters most mail servers can only imagine being able to cope with. Also, they've avoided the religious wars about supported clients and usage models by keeping their systems off-site and their services well defined. The Exchange OWA, and the dozens of "plug-ins" connected to it to support other email clients, have driven people directly to GMail.

Hotmail, and Exchange, _never_ worked well with non-Microsoft clients, whether browsers or IMAP access. Google always did, Google always actually published and followed their API's so other people could integrate with it, and Microsoft _never_ published or followed their own API's. What little Microsoft published was always incomplete when it was not a blatant lie.

Google's use of and investment in open standards paid off.

Re:Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail

[darrylo]

While I think hotmail is pretty awful, the non-free microsoft office365 seems to be pretty decent. Not only does it work with iOS (iPhone/iPad) and MS outlook, but Thunderbird, too (and, yes, IMAP IDLE works, too). A basic email-only account is $4/month/account, and adding web access to office files (e.g., excel, word, etc.) bumps that up to $6/month/account. You get 25GB of mail storage, and you can optionally use your own domain name.

Yes, it's a bit more expensive than google, but (1) contact groups actually work with iOS (google contact groups only work with android and not iOS), (2) it gives me an out if google ever decides to inexplicably nuke my account from orbit, and (3) it's not google.

Re:Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail

[rastoboy29]

Sucks that they're starting to drive people off browsers other than Chrome now, though.

I blog on Blogger and it harasses me every day to tell me my browser is no longer supported (opera) and I should really try Chrome.  Gmail is similar--and some stuff doesn't indeed work in Opera.

Color me unimpressed--Google is turning evil at a rapid clip.

Re:Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail

[allo]

people are saying "look, now google is getting evil" since years ... each time google does something new, people say "thats the point google turns to evil". Hey, if its true, google is now evil since a loooong time. But maybe they are just a company doing what a company does ...

Re:Gmail defeated Exchange, not Hotmail

[Branciforte]

Google is pushing the envelope on browser functionality, and openly publishing all their findings. Some browsers cannot or will not keep up.

How many are 'bots?

[Animats]

Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.

Of which a sizable fraction are spambots.

Re:How many are 'bots?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that bulk Gmail accounts are 18X as expensive as bulk Hotmail or Yahoo accounts.

Re:How many are 'bots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google announced it had about 350 million monthly active users in January.

Of which a sizable fraction are spambots.

Notice how you have to pay 19 times as much per account for the gmail accounts compared to all the other accounts. Notice how they don't give the same guarantee about the lifetime of the accounts.

It appears they are not able to open bulk accounts with Gmail like they do with the other providers. And apparently Gmail shuts the accounts down within a few days. Xgcmedia will only guarantee that you are able to use the accounts for 48 hours before they are shut down.

1000 out of 350000000 is not a sizable fraction.

Re:How many are 'bots?

[sticky.pirate]

But did you notice that gmail addresses are significantly more expensive?

Re:How many are 'bots?

[IamTheRealMike]

I sit next to the team that handles bulk account signups at Google. We are quite familiar with sellers like xgcmedia, buyaccs, vebxperts etc. As pointed out by others, Gmail accounts are significantly more expensive than other types of account. The reason is that we are very good at catching bulk attempts and requiring phone verification. This doesn't stop all bulk signup, but it does mean you have to buy a lot of SIM cards and swap them in/out all day, which is a lot of manual effort. Most of these guys are running account sweatshops in places like Pakistan or Bangladesh and just use a lot of manual labour.

The massive price difference means that bulk spam from @gmail.com is not a big problem like it used to be. Small amounts still go out occasionally, but it's rare. I gave a public talk on the topic of account abuse at Google back in April.

Re:How many are 'bots?

[Anonymous Coward]

We are quite familiar with sellers like xgcmedia, buyaccs, vebxperts etc.

I don't understand how they can do it in such an obvious way and not get into any legal trouble. Why couldn't Google simply pretend to be an interested buyer and then report it as fraud? Even if it might seem Google would be moving into a greyzone by performing such actions, that should be easy to get around by an appropriate clause in the usage terms for Gmail.

centralization = danger

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I moved my mail to Google

[Grishnakh]

You won't have better service with Hover. I haven't tried their domain services, but I have used their email services, and they're famous for having week-long outages.

Gmail's labels are easy; think of them like folders, except that you can put a single email into multiple folders. They even have hierarchies set up now, so your labels can be nested like: Work, Work/CompanyA, Work/CompanyB, Work/CompanyA/CustomerA, etc.

there's a middle ground too

[Anonymous Coward]

On one end is running your own mail server. On the other is using gmail.

In the middle, there's using the email you ISP gives you (damn near every single ISP, big or small, supplies POP3) and running a local mail client. This works really well, and it avoids the problems of Gmail snooping all your mail and selling keywords to the ad men. Also avoids the trubbs of the "all eggs in one basket" type.

Re:there's a middle ground too

[Sorthum]

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.

Re:there's a middle ground too

[heypete]

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.

This. ISP-provided email is a form of vendor lock-in.

Personally, I avoided the issue by buying my own domain years ago and using it for my email. Google Apps provides the backend for it now, but I can switch off them to a different provider (including my own server) within the time it takes for DNS TTLs to expire (24 hours or so) without needing to change my address. Very convenient.

Re:there's a middle ground too

[mrmeval]

If I could have paid a reasonable annual cost for email-only when I left their service area I would have but the ISP did not offer and would not accept a contract for one. They wanted the standard rate and they'd leave remote mail up.

I was able to keep using it but fortunately had switched all recovery emails to one of my few remaining 'eternal' email addresses. It didn't go dark until they were absorbed by some megacorp a year or so later.

Many places but not all let you enter two email addresses which helps if one of the 'eternal' ones die.

Google wants my phone but that's not any more eternal and it's privacy invading.

Gmail is getting better every week?

[intellitech]

Gmail is getting better every week.

Too bad I still have a freaking 25MB attachment size limit, which makes that ~10GB allotment fairly insignificant.

I'm not sure if this is a Gmail-specific issue, but I'd like to be able to send more than just PDF documents, ya know?

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[jmerlin]

And Larry Page letting the Google UX guys (the 18-20 year olds with 0 years experience and just a bunch of grand art classes and prototype drawings under their belts) redesign GMail (while completely ignoring 20 years of UX best practices). That didn't help either.

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[jmerlin]

Design is not UX. Making something look cool and flashy and hip does not mean it's usable nor useful. In the world of software, function > form, almost always. I use some of the ugliest shit I've ever seen daily, but because the software is feature-complete and reliable, it doesn't matter. If tomorrow 90% of its screen elements were abstracted away into hidden bins and hovers and it had animations, rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, and tons of white space in lieu of that, I'd spend 90% of my time trying to find things, not doing my job. I mean really, stop and think, trying to make the screen as clean as possible is literally playing hide-and-seek with your features; no self-respecting UX designer would ever get caught doing that. Making something look good and making something usable are two VERY hard things to reconcile. The "UX designers" at Google are good at making something pretty, but terrible at designing usable interfaces.

To give a good and apt analogy, the equivalent in the world of APIs would be abstracting your entire API down to a single function, so all you need to know is 1 function, ever again. Yes, it has 40,000 arguments, but there's only 1 function! Look how clean it is.

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[TheRaven64]

While I agree with your general point, neither you nor the grandparent has actually given any concrete evidence to support your assertions. For those of us who didn't use the before or after GMail interface, what have they changed and how did it affect usability?

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[dagelf]

You can just upload your big attachments to Docs or Dropbox and send a link... many recipients' mailboxes still drop big mails (some as small as 5MB) because they simply can't handle the bandwidth.

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[dagelf]

While it loads quicker, the UI is slower. The picture buttons are ugly and not self explanatory, and there's no way to add help text for the elderly, or to switch back to the way it was before. My Google Apps Gmail looks different from my Gmail - the settings buttons are in different places. There's too much white space, even the compact layout does not compare to the elegance of the previous UI. Long story short, I feel unconsulted, unempowered and less in control. As a result, my mail experience has become ever so slightly more frustrating and my unread mails are increasing daily and I've committed to developing an open source Gmail alternative I can host locally.

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[TheRaven64]

I've committed to developing an open source Gmail alternative I can host locally

Why not contribute to improving something like SOGo instead of starting from scratch?

Re:Gmail is getting better every week?

[Ash-Fox]

I personally prefer Zimbra.

Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[hobarrera]

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.

Re:Classic interface?

[wmbetts]

Because there isn't a -1 I disagree with you.

I pay for hotmail

[Anonymous Coward]

and I'm not ashamed to say it. The pay service ( I think its still 20 a year) has very good spam detection and its online gui is quite similar to a desktop client. I primarily use gmail, but I still do hop back into hotmail for password resets or to look up old receipts.

Not surprised about Google - Yahoo is made of fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, the Yahoo! webmail service has sunk to the depths of of the abyss.

From an email administrator's perspective, Yahoo has become one of the more prolific spam sources once you subtract the big spam-friendly hosting services (and you know the ones I'm talking about if you run an SMTP server). Years ago Yahoo seemed indifferent to spammers on its already pretty terrible commercial hosting services, but at least you could report the spam to Yahoo's abuse address. Meanwhile only a moderate amount originated from its free email services, certainly not much more than from other free email providers.

Oh how times have changed! As far as I can tell, the only users of Yahoo's email service are Nigerian scammers, officials of the UN/Microsoft lottery, spambots, and your great aunt Ethel who grudgingly switched to Yahoo eight years ago after you took away her modem and she muttered something about AOL and her "cold dead hands." Unfortunately, your great aunt Ethel only sends email three times a month, and the others send about 500 messages/day, which has had a predictable effect on the ratio of (spam) / ("Obama is sending death panels to hunt me down" aka "ham" or at least as close as it gets from Aunt Ethel).

Seriously, sometimes I go weeks without seeing any legit mail from Yahoo, but not for any lack of delivery attempts. Sure, AOL and Hotmail still send email, but at least AOL has the decency to mark its spam as spam before it arrives, and not much comes in from Hotmail. Even less from Google. Given this situation, I'm forced to conclude that something is seriously wrong with Yahoo.

A small clue to the situation is revealed by Yahoo's recent policy to not even pretend to accept abuse notification. It used to be you'd report abuse and nothing would happen. Now you're told that Yahoo only accepts abuse reports in "abuse reporting format," except that no software anywhere actually produces reports in MARF format, let alone any email clients, and there's little evidence that even if you were to follow the RFC and write your own MARF generator that Yahoo would actually accept the report (and some anecdotal evidence to think they wouldn't), and many reasons to think it would just shitcan 'em even if you did waste your time doing this AND against all odds it accepted them for delivery.

The easiest explanation in my mind is that Yahoo knows it's circling the drain, and in order to keep up appearances for dumb investors that it's not in a long death spiral, it fired everyone who either knew what they were doing or cared. Brilliant! Save money by firing your abuse department. I mean, spam filtering isn't a novel concept at this point, and other services somehow keep from deluging the rest of the Internet with firehoses of crap, but nope, not Yahoo.

And no, I'm not the only one to notice this, so I'm not at all surprised that users are giving up on it. I mean, the problem is sufficiently acute that it must be affecting general mail deliverability for Yahoo users as characteristically indignant admins throw up their arms and conclude that nothing of value will be lost, and that there's little reason to put up with assholes who can't be bothered to accept abuse notifications while sending mountains of rancid spam. If it isn't, I hope it will soon because this is ****ing ridiculous.

So yeah, Google has email service that, besides being likely to be delivered, doesn't suck in all sorts of other ways that Yahoo does from a user perspective...or so I've gathered secondhand since I sure as Hell don't use Yahoo myself.

That sound you hear is me tapping my fingers waiting for Yahoo to finish dying already. I know, it could take a while. Yeah, yeah, even AOL still has a couple of greenish gray fingers wiggling from the grave, but come on already...

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[interkin3tic]

Last time I checked (maybe a year ago) I think I discovered that posting AC would also undo the moderations, it just wouldn't warn you beforehand.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[eugene ts wong]

I read that it depends on whether or not you are logged in. You have to log out before posting anonymous. Posting logged-in-anonymous is not good enough.

Re:And, by /just right/, do you mean..?

[bmo]

>implying what I wrote must mean it was I in particular that had a misconfigured sendmail.
>implying that it was hard to have a misconfigured sendmail.
>implying my days of participation in NANAE back in 1998 as a freelance spamfighter (as a hobby, everybody needs one.) wasn't the basis of my previous message
>doesn't recognise the lumber cartel reference, which comes from NANAE.
>implying.

Yeah well, whatever.

--
BMO

Gmail: simple, clean and functional

[blind biker]

Gmail's interface is addictively clean and at the same time functional and powerful. Once you've tried Gmail, it's unlikely you'll go back to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

When I look at Hotmail I now feel like stabbing myself in the eyes. Sorry, but Gmail has spoiled me.

Re:Gmail: simple, clean and functional

[MicroSlut]

Nice opinion, but I cannot stand Gmail's crap interface. Why do some features use icons and others use labels? Why can't the commands be near each other or even on the same menu? Why have a gear icon for settings and when you put you cursor over it is says "Settings" in a label that is exactly the same size as the button? Why the mouseover? Why not make the settings button say "Settings?" And the mouseovers for emails hang on the screen too long. It's like I need to activate a second mouseover to get rid of the first mouseover! For a while they didn't even have a pull down arrow on my account name for account settings. I just had to guess that it was a menu. Oh, and their icons look like shit. What the fuck is that, an umbrella? All the cool features cannot make up for lack of usability. That site needs a weed-whacker taken to it. Don't get me started on targeted advertising. Gmail is great because the service is rarely down and they allow me to use pretty much all standard email protocols to access it. You can keep the web interface. For one of the companies I run I set them up with MDaemon. Awesome anti-spam and a killer web client. I even like Horde, SquirrelMail, and RoundCube better than Gmail, and they are not so great either.

Re:Gmail: simple, clean and functional

[jmerlin]

You, sir, seem to be describing GMail Classic. I think we all agree -- nothing even comes close. Unfortunately, I prefer even Outlook over GMail 2.0.

Re:Gmail: simple, clean and functional

[Tough Love]

And why can't you open an email in a new tab? Gmail's interface is actually crap, but Hotmail's is way, way, way worse.

Re:Gmail: simple, clean and functional

[Branciforte]

You can open an email in a new tab. Just click the standard little icon of a window with an arrow pointing out of it. If you are not sure which one it is, just hover over icons until you find the one that says, "open in new window."

Re:Gmail: simple, clean and functional

[Tough Love]

You can open an email in a new tab.

No you can't. Hover over a normal link, you can right click to get the context menu and open in a tab. Hover over a subject line in Gmail and you can't do that. Because Google programmers are lazy and stupid.

Re:Classic interface?

[Grishnakh]

Has its UI changed significantly in the last couple of years? If not, expect the worst; some "UI designer" is going to decide that its UI is "too old" and "too unlike mobile device UIs" and that it needs to be "improved" and "simplified".

Most users, but not most storage space

[Cochonou]

While gmail used to be the storage space king, it has been unseated by other services which offer "unlimited" space (such as yahoo). Of course, it remains to be seen how unlimited these services really are in practice... but what I know is that I am already struggling with space with my current e-mail provider which offers me 10GB, and that does not incite me to move to gmail. Wasn't it space the main factor that made people adopt gmail in the first place ?

Re:Most users, but not most storage space

[gishzida]

Actually no it wasn't [at least for me]... I was more concerned with malware, Spam, and viruses.

Yahoo has the dubious distinction of having been subverted several times with login scripts which downloaded malware to unsuspecting users.I had to clean up a few of those messes... I don't use Yahoo mail nor to I recommend using it [it also had the quirk of leaving traces of mail sessions in the local browser cache... Never use Yahoo if you are trying to do something underhanded... [Your soon to be Ex will find out.]

While Hotmail was in its time king of Spam and email viruses who needs that?. I've used gmail for 10 years and have not had one piece of malware get through and not many pieces of spam escape their spam-trap. Yes the new UI sucks... but then again its UI is more likeable that WinRT/Metro [Windows 7 forever!]

Re:Most users, but not most storage space

[heypete]

Wasn't it space the main factor that made people adopt gmail in the first place ?

Yes, years ago. When Gmail first came out and offered 1GB of storage, large numbers of people changed: at the time Hotmail only offered about 2MB (yes, MB) of free storage and a bit more for paid users. That additional space was a major game-changer.

These days it's less of an issue: my mother never deletes or sorts her email (she's got thousands of messages piled up in her inbox -- she reads and replies to incoming mail as needed but just leaves read mail in the inbox -- not ideal, I know, but that's how she works) and she's only using about 10% of her storage. I keep my email box well-pruned and even with heavy usage I'm only using about 5%.

I'm more concerned about spam filtering and security (Gmail offers two-factor authentication, HTTPS-by-default, etc.) these days.

Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[bmo]

>People still download it and and run it.

That. I gave up spamfighting as a hobby when the spammers stopped looking for open relays and went to just hijacking broadband connections and botnets. It's one thing when you could fire off a postmaster@example.com and cross your fingers that it would get read and an account nuked or a relay closed, but something entirely when a spammer's got his load spread among 1,000 (or tens or hundreds of thousand) broadband Wintel toybox machines.

--
BMO

Re:And, by /just right/, do you mean..?

[Trogre]

Wait, Sendmail? Hell, no wonder you had trouble. You, sir, have my deepest sympathies.

(from a happy mail admin using Postfix)

Mod parent up.

[tbird81]

...then post anonymously to reverse it.

Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[bill_mcgonigle]

I gave up spamfighting as a hobby

All but a few noble souls have. The rest who run mailservers set up spamassassin to auto-update rules and go on to other tasks.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[Unknown Lamer]

This is indeed true, although the moderator FAQ makes no mention of it anymore. An oversight that shall be rectified.

Re:And, by /just right/, do you mean..?

[Sorthum]

Postfix didn't exist until December of 1998. Before that, you were likely using Sendmail, or (god help you) qmail.

Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[grumpy_old_grandpa]

spamassassin and greylisting. The later takes care of 99% of the junk on my server. By the time spamassassin, and the Bayesian filtering in Thunderbird have done their job, there's nothing left. I get less spam on my own server than I see on Gmail.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[symbolset]

The FAQ is better left as it is - a trap for those with ill will.

hunh?

[symbolset]

I'm really curious if my fellow senior slashdotters haven't owned "myname.com" for their own value of myname. I thought that was expected. Maybe that's a good Ask Slashdot.

Re:hunh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and still do. The difference is, now it's a name in front of Google Apps for Domains so I don't have to maintain a mail service.

It's one of those things that can be a chore, and the payoff over a good, free, hosted service is negligible.

Re:hunh?

[The Good Reverend]

I bought myname.com about ten years ago, but it forwards to whatever project of mine I feel is most important at the time, i don't use it for email. For that, I use an email address I set up on a domain I got in '97 (and access that through gmail's web interface now). I ran my own server for a decade before realizing google would do it for me, and save me all sorts of problems.

Re:hunh?

[heypete]

Same here. I've had my own domain since 1999. Over the years I've had mail provided by a number of services (at one point having it hosted on a server under my desk at home). When Google Apps came out (in what, 2006?) I switched to them and have been with them since.

I get enormous amounts of spam (these days it's around 4,000 messages a month. A few years ago it was in the 30,000-40,000/month range.) so dealing with spam filtering was a massive hassle. Gmail's filters are outstanding, and maybe 1-2 spams slip through per month. They're usually novel attempts to avoid filtering and are quickly blocked. Google's trivial "mark this message as spam" button makes things quite easy. The support for IMAP, POP, and Exchange ActiveSync is nice too, as is their XMPP support (both with a separate client and their web-based one). I'm a heavy user of email (but routinely delete rather than archive messages) and am only using about 5% of the total storage space allocated to me as a free user.

Gmail's also been doing quite well on the security front: their accounts support two-factor authentication using open standards and their service defaults to using HTTPS (with ephemeral ECDH key exchange, no less!).

My parents, who are not very technical people, have used Gmail for years and have been quite satisfied. I'm pleased that the system choses sane defaults to help keep them secure.

Sure, I *could* set up and run my own email server, but why bother? High availability costs money and time, servers are not cheap, I'd have to pay for electricity/network connectivity for an underutilized system, and I'd have to constantly be fending off spammers and other baddies. I'd rather use my time to do something else that's more productive.

Re:hunh?

[Abreu]

My "lastname.com" has been taken up by cybersquatters for years, along with many other common latin american last names, they want me to pay for the priviledge of them giving me an email address. Fuck no.

mycompletename@gmail.com has been my address ever since I got my Gmail invitation. mycompletename@hotmail.com was my previous one.

Re:hunh?

[LVSlushdat]

I'm really curious if my fellow senior slashdotters haven't owned "myname.com" for their own value of myname. I thought that was expected. Maybe that's a good Ask Slashdot.

I've had my own family domain for over 10 years now, with email addresses being firstname@lastname.org.. I've got a bunch of cousins elsewhere and I'm kinda running my own tiny gmail.com, with now over 50 close (and distant relatives) email addresses on the domain. I do like gmail's spam filtering, and I'm too lazy to jump thru all the hoops needed to get filtering that good myself on the email server, so I just forward my personal domain email address to gmail, let google do its majik on the spam, then connect to gmail via IMAP on Thunderbird..

Re:hunh?

[MacGyver2210]

Having never deleted a single email since starting to use GMail in 2004, I still don't use even a gig of storage. Not sure who would ever need the full 7.some gigs from GMail.

Re:hunh?

[shutdown -p now]

One other awesome feature is that GTalk dumps its chat logs to a GMail folder. That enables full chat history sync across all devices (and Web client), but, more importantly, they can be searched same as emails.

Re:hunh?

[hardwarefreak]

Gmail's filters are outstanding, and maybe 1-2 spams slip through per month.

You must be referring strictly to their inbound spam filters. My MX SMTP logs suggest the rate of spam slipping past their outbound filters is a couple orders of magnitude higher.

Re:hunh?

[s0lar]

Sure, the service is undeniably convenient. But what will you do if they choose to delete your account due to some recently announced policy change? Also, on a more general note, how do you feel about Google indexing all your correspondence including banking, medical, trade and other very personal data?

Re:I run my own mail server

[tftp]

I'd be a complete idiot if I thought my unreliable and dynamic IP internet connection would suffice for a mail server.

I have a few static IP addresses, and I pay good money for them. The ISP didn't ask for my geek cred, they only asked for cash. There is nothing magical about my situation - anyone (who wants) can do the same. Or he can sell his privacy to Google; that is "free."

Gmail...

[issicus]

just dont change anything. or I will leave. I would still be using myspace except they let some donky redesign it.

Facebook?

[Joe Jordan]

With Facebook creating email addresses for all of its 700 million+ users, does that not immediately make Facebook the largest webmail service?

Re:Facebook?

[Tough Love]

Maybe for a short time. Just curious... do you trust Zuckerberg with your private email?

Re:Facebook?

[gl4ss]

Maybe for a short time. Just curious... do you trust Zuckerberg with your private email?

the statistics are not about the number of mail sent/received/read. just about the number of accounts.

thus, facebook is the biggest webmail provider.

yes

[Tom]

Remember when people ran their own mail servers?

I still do, thank you. With more and more of the world coming online, most of the new(er) users are not computer-experts (those have been online for a long time already). So naturally, those new(er) users will choose service that provide what they need.

That doesn't mean that millions of people still run their own mail servers and will continue to do so.

Re:I run my own mail server

[sl149q]

I ran my own mail servers from 1987 to about 2007 which probably predates most people reading Slashdot. Got sick and tired of redoing everything every two years when I rolled over the linux server.

Switched everything to Gmail and haven't had any trouble or had to re-install since... far less make work and if the government (or Google) wants to look at my mail they'll find it pretty boring.

Microsoft have an email service?

[phonewebcam]

Gosh, next you'll be saying they have their own search engine, instead of just throwing a script kiddie wrapper around someone else's.

I don't even use Spamhaus

[Vekseid]

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,

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[BeardedChimp]

Instead of fixing the faq, why not fix the problem? Add a "undo moderation" button next to any posts you have moderated.
Currently we have a considerable number of "resetting moderation" posts that just serve to spam threads.

Re:IMAP

[solarissmoke]

We are talking about accessing Hotmail via POP3, not Gmail. Hotmail doesn't support IMAP.

900,000 Activations/day

[Tough Love]

900,000 Android activations per day can do that. Got to be giving old monkeyboy a sleepless night or two.

Re:Google being mildly evil...

[syockit]

So? Does it change the fact that it's now the largest webmail service?

Re:IMAP

[slickepott]

And then again

Hotmail IS a bit of a relic. :)

Re:I run my own mail server

[Tough Love]

Actually, I use Exim and it's about the same difficulty setting up as Postfix. But it isn't at all easy especially considering you have to set up reverse DNS too, which just might push the envelope of your garden variety geek.

Re:I run my own mail server

[tftp]

The reverse DNS setup required just one email to the tech support of my ISP. When you pay for static IPs this comes as a natural part of the deal. You are *expected* to run servers.

Re:I moved my mail to Google

[heypete]

Hover's a pretty well-known, well-regarded domain registrar. FWIW, I've heard only good things about them.

Most of my domains are with GANDI and I've been quite happy with them. Their site Doesn't Suck and they support a lot of ccTLDs, which is nice. Otherwise I'd definitely consider Hover.

Storage Size Rules

[orviljuarez]

I think the initial storage space was one of the most important feature to made people change to gmail service, it was my case.

Re:I run my own mail server

[tftp]

So what? Where I live I have no choice but use an *unreliable* and dynamic IP connection - all the static IPs in the world won't help the reliability one bit. What world do you live in that makes you think everyone in the world 'can do the same'?

If you value your data you can always rent a server, physical or virtual, from any number of hosting companies. You do not have to keep the box at home. What stops you now?

Just because in *your* situation this is feasible you jump to some wild ass conclusion that it's the same for everyone else.

It is the same for everyone else, as I just demonstrated, unless perhaps you are a citizen of North Korea or something. Or if you cannot afford a super-cheap hosting plan. Last time I checked they were under $100/yr. But if you think it's too expensive... I guess that's what it is.

Of course if you are Aunt Janice and you have "nothing to hide" besides your recipes of a plum jam then perhaps Google Mail is fine and dandy. Let Google know that you are a citizen in good standing.

There are other people, however, that still remember how free people operate. Those are intent on keeping "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" - and they understand perfectly well that while the government is constitutionally prohibited from running a mass surveillance program it can outsource it to a commercial entity, and the people will cheerfully sell themselves into information slavery for a handful of shinies.

The discussion about security of SMTP is only a remote part of that thought process. Google has a direct 100 Gbps pipe into mail archives of all GMail subscribers. Hunting for an occasional email that flies through core routers between privately owned servers is a much harder task. You will do well if you simply run your own server. Not only your data is better protected, you are also independent from whims of Google. You, as matter of fact, are the master of your domain. Remember that Google used to kick people out for violations of the G+ "real name" requirements? Would you like to lose your primary email just because a robot decided that you violated something?

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[TheRaven64]

It's easy to abuse undoable moderation. Mod something you disagree with up, wait for it to get 2-3 overrated mods, and then undo it. Rather than making it easy to undo moderation, they should fix the terrible zero-click UI for moderating, so that you need to confirm that you did select the correct post and that you did actually mean that moderation. Or make moderation take a minute to be propagated to the database and allow undo only in this time. A simple finger slip can change the moderation from insightful to troll (or vice versa).

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[Tubal-Cain]

I've never seen the point of those posts.
Why not contribute something useful to the page? Or at least make a funny joke.

Re:Classic interface?

[TheRaven64]

The sad thing is, none of these old UIs is actually very good. There are numerous ways in which they could be improved, but somehow people always manage to make it worse. Apple has been quite bad at this in recent years, replacing people with a background in psychology with people with a background in graphic design on their UI teams. Microsoft just has such large and disconnected teams that they can't get a cohesive vision together. Google just seems to randomly change things - I can't help wondering if they're using simulated annealing for UI design...

Unfortunately, it's a difficult problem to fix in the current market. Most people evaluate new products based on the 5 minutes they play with the demo, and a flashy UI with serious usability problems often does better than a simple UI where common actions are all trivial in this sort of test. There are several results from the '80s showing exactly this: users being timed over a period of a few weeks performing certain tasks with two interfaces, and very often the one that was faster was not the one that they initially preferred (too lazy to look up the citations, but you can find them around chapter 2 of THE).

Oh No It Doesn't

[Tim Ward]

Provided your ISP handles your own email domain, which mine does. I've moved it once already with no trouble at all.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[hairyfeet]

But is there anybody that really cares THAT MUCH to go through all that trouble? I mean seriously, is there anything that is gonna be THAT earth shaking posted here? if you just post honestly frankly the mods even themselves out and you'll have decent karma, the only thing I would change (other than as you said fix the whole zero click problem) is to make sure that a mod doesn't keep going after a single user, just to make sure they are actually moderating and not attacking a single user because of some sort of grudge. After all if its a truly shitty post somebody else will mod it down, no need for one mod to keep hitting the same user unless there is some sort of a vendetta thing going on. i would have it that if they modded the same user twice in X number of days they would get a heads up and if they continued to go after that user then they wouldn't get any mod points ever again. Oh and maybe have a limit on number of accounts by IP, as crazy sock puppety like Mikey 500 accounts is a little too damned obvious.

As for TFA, I thought Yahoo Mail was the biggest, did MSFT somehow get credit for the Yahoo users when they did the search deal? I can tell you here at the shop that Yahoo mail and Yahoo messenger seem to be the most popular with customers by a pretty large margin, just as the number 1 start page? That damned Yahoo portal. While i think its the most cluttered mess I've ever seen users seem to love that crap, they use it like they used to use the daily paper, checking headlines, weather, hell even their horoscopes if they are into that.

In the end as long as we have choice? i honestly don't care who is #1. so congrats Google, don't really like your mail UI (I only use it for a public email address since it does have killer spam filtering) but so long as we have choices I'm happy for you.

Re:Yahoo

[TaoPhoenix]

Yeah, all of my emails are Yahoo, and then they gained even more favor for me as being the Not-Gmail service.

Article (probably) false

[Toreo asesino]

Interestingly Google have declined to allow anyone to independently verify this fact; this is just Google saying so, so hardly the most reliable of sources.

Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[icebraining]

Old times, man. Installing and configuring exim on Debian is a breeze.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[maxwell demon]

We have undoable moderation right now, it just has the side effect of spamming the threads.

Also, an undo button might be restricted to be usable only for, say, 5 minutes after moderation. That's more than enough time to notice you've mis-moderated, but too short to be useful for gaming the system.

When a bank's app is Play Store-only

[tepples]

You're also not limited to just Google's market anyway.

Unless your bank's check deposit application isn't available anywhere but Google's market.

Re:When a bank's app is Play Store-only

[Nerdfest]

True, but the same thing could actually (and has on occasion, I believe) happen with the Amazon store. If you can get hold of the APK, you can still install it in either case, but it's less convenient. This is not a requirement for setting up the phone at this point, but for availability of specific applications.

Overrated

[tepples]

Because there isn't a -1 I disagree with you.

Yes there is, and it's called "Overrated". Moreover, "Overrated" is said not to show up in metamoderation.

Remeber when? $i_sill_do++

[mikeraz]

Assuming this has to be a me too comment in this group

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[sco08y]

The FAQ is better left as it is - a trap for those with ill will.

It accomplishes the opposite. People who have worked to figure out how to exploit the system can do so, while people who had no ill intent get caught.

I switched to Fastmail

[neiras]

I pay for my email now, because I want to be someone's customer, not someone's product

Fastmail is great. No ads, a decent Web UI when I want it, and a dedicated sysadmin team that does nothing but mail. All the Bayesian filtering, Sieve rules and DKIM signing you could want. Plus, I keep my conversations and business dealings out of Google's maw (although it's hard to avoid people who use GMail), and there's Yubikey authentication for when I'm on someone else's machine.

fastmail.fm (full disclosure: referral link included)

I have administered mail servers professionally before and have quite a bit of experience with it. If I'm not being paid to do it I'm sure as hell paying someone else to deal with the hassle.

re:Remember when people ran their own mail server?

[dexomn]

It was 2001. I was working for an isp in the midwest, in the noc. Start seeing '/var/spool/mail ballooning out of control, filling up the f@#$ partition' errors coming from a mail server in Idaho. Login to machine to investigate, see that approximately 40 users of a common domain (hosted domain for email) had forwarded a 9MB .avi not only to everyone that shared their domain, but several other local users who also began spamming people with this thing. It was that damned video of the guy fishing for salmon that gets in a fistfight with a bear.

I agree. Almost completely.

[intellitech]

they should fix the terrible zero-click UI for moderating

Technically, it's one click to open the menu, and one click to select the moderation ;)

I agree 100% though with the rest, though. There needs to be a temporary undo feature or an actual submit button after you select the appropriate modifier.

Re:Classic interface?

[Grishnakh]

Most people evaluate new products based on the 5 minutes they play with the demo, and a flashy UI with serious usability problems often does better than a simple UI where common actions are all trivial in this sort of test.

I'm not so sure about this. The new Gmail UI, for instance, is rather ugly IMO compared to the old one. Similarly, I tried out a Lumia with Windows Phone 7 in a phone shop for a minute or so, and the biggest turn-off to me was how butt-ugly it was. I don't think either of these new UIs are "flashy". This might apply to Gnome3 and Unity though.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[SuperMog2002]

Rather than making it easy to undo moderation, they should fix the terrible zero-click UI for moderating, so that you need to confirm that you did select the correct post and that you did actually mean that moderation.

This sounds familiar. Where have I seen this used before? Oh right, that's how it works in D1! To this day, I have no idea why they thought D2 was actually an improvement.

Probably not...

[lilfields]

While I don't use Hotmail myself, and am a Gmail users...registered users doesn't equate to active mail users. Google accounts do much than just mail. It's not at all safe to assume that everyone with a Google account uses Gmail. They have been using these same stats to claim they have huge growth in Google+ registrations...uhm, but everyone with a Google account essentially (yes I know you have to go through on step) has a G+ account, but how many people use G+? Hardly anyone. Their Chrome stats are also pretty questionable, because they measure downloads and highly active users instead of individuals when viewing marketshare.

Stronghold in Latin America

[John Utah]

I traveled South America for a year and everyone I know there uses Hotmail. When I show them Gmail, they don't see enough benefits to switch.

Re:Google being mildly evil...

[John Utah]

Nope, but it means that they will probably maintain a pretty big user base for a while south of the border.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[eugene ts wong]

They might need to undo them, because they modded down, but wanted to mod up.

They don't bother explaining, because they have been doing it for so long, and they assume that others already understand.

Re:I have a hotmail account.

[jonbryce]

Hotmail is now available via pop3 again on pop3.live.com port 995

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[Tubal-Cain]

It's perfectly clear why they need to undo a mod. I just don't see why they need do it by saying "Posting to undo moderation". Any post anywhere on the page will undo the moderation; surely they can make a normal comment somewhere.

That practice should be illegal

[Casandro]

There is no reason why running a server should have disadvantages for your ISP. If there was competition among ISPs, no ISP would impose such a restriction.

Other than that, a small virtual host at Funkfeuer.at (Austrian ISP made to finance their Freifunk project) only costs 9 Euros a month. It's even cheaper at commercial providers.

I'm also considering this as a possibility because I might have to move next year and it would be nice for the mailserver to stay up then.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[datavirtue]

There are a shit-ton of dead accounts on both Yahoo and HotMail. Gmail has been then defacto go-to mail solution for some time. Just about every user that contacts me uses a gmail account. Rarely see anything else.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[eugene ts wong]

People can in general, but if I don't have any meaningful insight or useful information, then I would try to keep the comment to an absolute minimum. A lot of comments are repetitive, wouldn't you agree?

Re:Yeah, I remember. It was a pain.

[allo]

greylisting adds to much delay.

A certificate isn't the expensive part

[tepples]

A certificate isn't the expensive part; an IP address is. Most of these budget hosting plans pack about a thousand customers' web sites onto one IP address using name-based virtual hosting. Several web browsers still don't support Server Name Indication (SNI), the feature that allows use of name-based virtual hosting with SSL. Clients without SNI, such as Internet Explorer for Windows XP, Safari for Windows XP, and Android Browser for Android 2.x, see the certificate for only the first site on an IP address. Try visiting this site using IE on XP for example.

Re:A certificate isn't the expensive part

[allo]

with ipv6 this will be no problem soon.

Re:A certificate isn't the expensive part

[tepples]

How soon is soon? Home users will have to buy new routers and possibly switch ISPs to get IPv6, if either of the two wired ISPs serving the customer's address offers IPv6.

Re:IMAP

[SgtChaireBourne]

The article is about Gmail taking the lead and one reason is that Gmail supports IMAP. IMAP can be used either to keep the mail on the server or download it locally. It is one of the reasons that Hotmail is losing. Hotmail was ok until M$ got a hold of it and it has been on a long slow decline since then. Now if you have a lot of mail stuck in Hotmail it is a bit of work to transfer from Hotmail to Gmail but it can be done.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[hairyfeet]

But are they REALLY dead, or do they just not talk to YOU with them? No offense meant but I don't give anyone but friends and family my yahoo accounts, my Gmail is strictly for public contacts like...well slashdot. this way i don't have to care about some spammer scraping it and piling onto an account I give a damn about and most of the folks I've talked to have both a "public" and a "private" account although many are now using the FB contact as public and their Yahoo or Hotmail (which I really only see older folks using) is private.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[Meski]

I just moderated about 5 on another page, then posted one AC on it, if it undid the moderations, it didn't give them back to use again.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[Meski]

yahoo and hotmail still put spam within the email, right? Unless they refrain I'm not interested in moving (my 7g of used gmail) to them.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[eugene ts wong]

Yes, that is correct. It is a feature that was built in early on. It's still explained in the FAQ.

Re:'Replying to undo moderation mistake. Sorry, pa

[eugene ts wong]

I meant probably still explained in the FAQ.

That being said, don't bother looking. I just checked, and it seems that they removed it.

The reason is that they wanted to prevent people from moderating, and then deliberately trying to get the points back for later use.