[robomartin]

Seriously, why does ANYONE use anything other than Google Search and Analytics? Why do you willfully choose to expose yourself and your business to what they can do to you? From the article:

"A few minutes into my Google-less existence, I realized how dependent I had become. I couldn’t finish my work or my taxes, because my notes and expenses were stored in Google Drive, and I didn’t know what else I should work on because my Google calendar had disappeared. I couldn’t publicly gripe about what I was going through, because my Blogger no longer existed. My Picasa albums were gone. I’d lost my contacts and calling plan through Google Voice; otherwise I would have called friends to cry."

And that list of losses can be expanded if you use other Google tools.

Personally, I just don't get it. I was using various forms of email before Google even existed. I settled on Outlook and self-hosted email on Linux a long time ago. Oh yes, MS Office for docs, calendars, etc.. Perfect? Nope. But nobody can flip a switch and take it all away overnight.

I simply could not fathom running any of my businesses with this kind of daily risk. Any one of your employees could trigger a Google account shutdown and cost you dearly.

What's the problem here? Are MS license fees too expensive when compared to loosing all of your data overnight?

As for the other non-MS Office services offered by Google, well, there are tons of alternatives, free and paid.

I was lucky enough to learn this lesson about three years ago when a client's account was shut down merely for moving about two hundred domains to a an "AdSense for Domains" service they used to offer. Bam! Three days later their entire account is shutdown, AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, Docs, everything. Wow. New user too.

From that point forward I made a few decisions I have yet to violate:

  - Use Google Search if you must
  - Use Google Analytics if you must
  - Use Google AdWords if you must
  - Do not base a business on Google AdSense.  
    Your entire revenue stream could evaporate overnight.
  - Do NOT use ANY OTHER Google service, no matter how enticing or
    convenient it might be.  Consider what the cost to your business 
    might be if that new sparkling offering on the table 
    is pulled away without notice or recourse.  
  - Do not build a business on a foundation someone else has full control over.

So far, so good. Email, documents, backups and collaboration existed just fine before Google was even an idea in someone's head. Don't be lured into something that can kill your business and cause you personal financial damage.

If I were running an investment firm I would have a clause in my contracts requiring that no business-critical services are to be hosted by Google on any companies we'd invest on. Talk about playing with fire. Invest millions into a venture and Google pulls their data backbone from right under them? Crap! Screw that.

[sgift]

This reminds of a story I've read about (big) companies and electricity: At the start of the 20th century it was typical for companies to produce their own electricity. The concerns where basically the same as they are now with Internet services: Your business depends on another company; what will you do if they close down? Or throw you out? And what about the transmission - I've heard the net is not stable? and so on. So, what did change? Trust. Electric companies invested heavily in various areas:

  - Reliability. The electric transmission net was shit at this time. Blackouts each week, sometimes each day were typical
  - Cross-transmission i.e. a shared transmission net instead of one net per provider, so you could switch without much hassle if your provider failed you
  - Better contracts to guarantee that you will get your electricity and that a company cannot dump you without notice

All of this parts worked together to convince companies that electricity was no longer something you had to do yourself, but something that could be provided by someone else. As far as I can tell Google tries to be the outsourcing address for various (all?) net related services which have been done "in house" in the past. The problem seems to be that they fail in the areas highlighted above. As long as this doesn't change many companies will be hesitant to trust Google with services they depend on. And maybe posts like the OPs (and robomartins) show that they are correct in their assessment.

[jiggy2011]

Aren't electric companies also heavily regulated?

AFAIK they can't just cut your power one day because you tripped some arbitrary secret metric.

[powercycle]

Given that there is common law "duty to serve" protection, how is it that many electric utilities are now offering discounts in exchange for installing devices that give them the power to throttle your air conditioner during a heat wave?

[jbooth]

Probably nobody's challenged them on it, and moreover if they did there'd be the counter-arguments that it's voluntary and that throttling the A/C enhances their service by preventing brownouts.

[dhimes]

And, besides, it says right there in the TOS that you clicked through to create the account that....

[mkup]

Well, there is a plenty of electricity providers, but just one Google.

[bconway]

Really? Most people in the US only have access to one, the same as cable providers. Government-granted monopoly, etc...

[kybernetyk]

Can you suggest a viable alternative to Google Mail? I'm feeling uncomfortable having all my mail in Google's hands but haven't found an alternative yet.

[drchaos]

Dovecot + Roundcube hosted on a cheap VPS, with Thunderbird (on the Desktop) and K9Mail (on Android) as client works pretty well for me. Dovecot 2.2 implements several new IMAP extensions, so you can do serverside fulltext search, threading and push of incoming mail, and with some work[1] it should also be possible to sync your contacts and even a calendar with your server (I must admit though that I haven't tried that yet).

The only thing left to be desired is support for tagging in Roundcube. Thunderbird has it, but it would be nice to have it in the web interface, too. There's a ticket for it in the Roundcube tracker[2] but it doesn't seem to receive much attention yet.

Personally I hope that with the recent closures of Google services more people choose to run their own services with free/open source software. With VPSes and modern tools this is cheaper and easier than ever, and if we want the web to remain free and open, it's much better to have some diversity and decentralization, instead of placing everything in the hands of Google and Facebook.

[1] https://patrick-nagel.net/blog/archives/389 [2] http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1485799

[damncabbage]

What do you use for spam filtering?

I've had terrible trouble with SpamAssassin in the past; can you share an effective config, and are there pre-built spam/ham databases around so you don't need to go through the entire training process?

Are you checking RBLs on a regular basis, or is an SPF record and a reputable VPS provider enough to keep you off blacklists?

Any other tips for someone wanting to try their hand with a VPS + Dovecot + Postfix setup (assuming a Linux sysadmin background)?

[drchaos]

I use the sender/client/HELO restrictions from Postfix to block misconfigured spambots (no FQDN HELO etc.), and a custom rule to block submissions where the sender domain equals to one of my own domains. This alone catches quite some spam, for the rest I use the NixSpam RBL[1], which has a very lenient policy (only IPs actually sending spam are listed, with a TTL of 12 hours, so false positives are pretty rare, while still covering the major botnets).

Usually less than 5-10 spam mails per day survive with this config, which is acceptable for me, I view it as a typical 80:20 solution and don't want to lose potential customer communication anyway.

Regarding outbound mail, in my experience it is sufficient to have a clean IP from a reputable provider with proper reverse lookup to have most sent mail go through. I don't check RBLs regularly but I did once when setting up the server, since sometimes one can get an IP which has been burnt by a spammer before. For a quick check whether everything is configured properly I recommend using the email check of webcheck.me[2], while not covering every single aspect, it gives starters a good overview where they can improve.

If you want to host a blog or personal site in addition to e-mail you should definitely have a look at Froxlor[3]. Froxlor (fork/successor of SysCP) is a lightweight control panel which allows to add domains and mailboxes through a web interface, without taking over your whole /etc (like Plesk or cPanel). Even if you don't use it in the end, the suggested configs contained in Froxlor are a good starting point.

[1] http://www.heise.de/ix/NiX-Spam-DNSBL-and-blacklist-for-down... [2] https://webcheck.me/ [3] http://froxlor.org

[vizzah]

Anti-Spam-SMTP-Proxy (ASSP) (written in Perl) does wonders for me with a minimal tweaking. My own account`s Inbox has less spam than Gmail`s "Spam" folder. And that's considering my e-mail is scattered all over the net (thanks to the WHOIS).

[flyinRyan]

DSpam.

[carletes]

Yep, dspam (http://nuclearelephant.com/) works perfectly well for me with the Dovecot integration (http://edeca.net/wp/2010/03/dspam-integration-with-dovecot/)

[rplnt]

I use Google Mail, just with my own domain (via Google Apps). It's a painless setup and if anything had happened to my Google account I can host the email anywhere else in seconds. But for now I don't have to worry about setting up VPSs, mail daemons and whatnot...

(Of course I have to keep a backup of all the mail, but that's as easy as having some client download it.)

[DaddyDuck]

Way to go! At Cozy cloud(https://www.cozycloud.cc/) we are developing an open source personal cloud platform that you can self-host and assign your own domain. Right now we already offer backup of your email address but we would like to offer a good web-mail alternative. Have you got suggestion for a Node.js mail client we could cook in?

[oulipo]

Start by simply backing up your emails regularly with BaGoMa

[ableal]

"BaGoMa - A script to Backup Google Mail."

http://sourceforge.net/p/bagoma/home/BaGoMa/

Thanks

[tripzilch]

I was going to suggest GMVault, which I use with success. Anybody got experience to tell me how they compare?

OTOH GMVault does the job fine, which I guess is most important.

[cseelus]

Same here. I guess there is no alternative that can match GMail in terms of abailability/reliability, features, spamprotection, 3rd-party support etc. Would be nice if there was some community-driven, non-profit alternative available for such basic, albeit important things like email though.

[DaddyDuck]

While playing around with gmail, I found out that you can send from any smtp server emails to gmail pretending you are someone else's gmail account. There is no way of seeing from gmail that it isn't the trusted sender. The fake email is associated with social details from the real account. Weird right?

[nikbackm]

Better watch out so you don't violate the TOS and get locked out too.

[oliverhunt]

Fastmail (paid) or Zoho(free)

[GFischer]

I use Zoho, but for my low-volume personal account.

The main difference with Google is, I think they'd like to take my money :) and have customer support. If the need arises (hopefully some of my plans take off), I'll gladly pay them.

[jjuliano]

get one of those Seagate GoFlex NAS and just install Arch Linux ARM and setup your domain and mail servers with it. Your data is saved with you portably.

[Spooky23]

Office 365. $50/year.

[DanBC]

People use it because the products sound neat, and there's no friction, and then they keep using them because there's friction to move away.

"Free email, with 1 GB of email storage? Neat". "Nice fast web-browser, nice features? Neat!" etc etc.

People on HN do AB testing for button colours in an effort to reduce friction to the lowest possible. It's not that surprising that people think "it wont happen to me".

See also people who never make backups until they learn the lesson that first time they lose everything.

[aaron695]

>Seriously, why does ANYONE use anything other than Google Search and Analytics? Why do you willfully choose to expose yourself and your business to what they can do to you?

A. Does anyone have a valid story were the user actually lost everything, for good?

B. Assuming it's possible the risk of catastrophic failure by losing Google can still be lower in a risk assessment than the cost of redundancy or of making each part independent. Especially in a startup where there is already risk everywhere.

[nsns]

This reply is becoming generic here, and has a lot of truth in it. It does ignore however Google's part in actively and quite insistently tempting users to adopt its services.