Leaving Google’s silo: Alternatives to Gmail, Talk, Calendar, and more

I've been working on removing myself from the Google silo for the past few months. It's tough, and the alternatives just aren't as good or convenient as what Google offers, but I think it's an important thing to do at least on principle.<p>I found Owncloud to be difficult to install and very buggy. For self-hosted CalDAV/CardDAV, I chose Baikal (<a href="http://http://baikal-server.com/" rel="nofollow">http://http://baikal-server.com/</a>) instead of Radicale. It seemed easier to set up and it's been working great so far. There's no web interface unfortunately, and the Thunderbird addon that connects to CardDAV (SOGO connector) is buggy at times too.<p>Replacing Dropbox doesn't seem practical right now. Owncloud is buggy, Sparkleshare seems like a "when you've got a hammer, everything's a nail" kind of solution, and I haven't tried Seafile yet because the configuration is intimidating and I haven't really heard anything about it.<p>Rackspace has great hosted email for $1/inbox/month. Eventually I want to bite the bullet and host my own mail server (I still have nightmares from when I self-hosted email a few years ago) but in the meantime I've really liked Rackspace.<p>Hacker idea: Create an OSS self-hosted email appliance. Simple setup for a one-inbox self-hosted email server, including DNS, DKIM, spam filter, etc. No matter what anyone says Dovecot/Postfix is not for mere mortals and self-hosted email in general is so full of pitfalls it could be an Indiana Jones temple.

You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own server.<p>Not to mention, I would tip my hat to Google for forcing every one of these "alternatives" to be better, because before Google, these services sucked. AOL sucked. MS sucked. OSS sucked. Firefox sucked -- thanks Chrome.<p>These are not the alternatives you're looking for. People should definitely care about their privacy, and they should definitely live on platforms that encourage interop. However, these articles focus far too much on trying to frame Google as some evil actor, when we could be championing everything Google has done well and how their competitors -- alternatives -- should be doing better.

I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing.<p>The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something?<p>Also, the article mentions that it "exceeds" the features of Gmail, but where the hell are all the features listed? I see nothing on any of the pages except for features like "Reliability" and "Easy migration" which tell me nothing about how it compares to GMail in features.<p>If this is an example of the best "alternative" to a Google product then the competition has a LONG way to go.

It would be really great if somebody wrapped up all the open source material available and made an image available to AWS and other VPS users. Use the image, have email, an XMPP server, etc -- out of the box. On your own dime.<p>I'd pay for it.

The biggest problem with moving back to XMPP now is that Google us cut us off from anyone now using Hangouts. Less than a year ago I drank the Google Kool-Aid and started using GApps instead of my personal server running Postfix/Dovecot/EJabberd. Since 87% of my XMPP contacts are on the GSuite, by going back I lose all IM connectivity with them. I almost feel like I'm being held hostage at this point. I've also invested a few grand in services, software, and hardware that ties into the GSuite, providing further disincentive to move away.<p>In summary: Bah.

A lot of people here are suggesting moving from one closed ecosystem (Google) to another. Unless you are really moving to a fully open source alternative which has all - email, calendar, cloud storage, may be a browser and an integrated smartphone etc. I don't see much point behind doing that, especially since Google doesn't have much track record of "misusing" your data in practical terms (that I know of at east).<p>The only FOSS organization which is capable of doing and promoting it on a large scale looks like Mozilla. They already have a few of those, and a Firefox OS phone is coming as well. Mozilla guys, are you listening?

Fastmail.fm seemed to be good till I read the fine print. For the personal account you have<p><i>100 MB email storage, 2 MB file storage</i><p>Kinda reminds me of the nineties and not in a good way :-)

Are there any good alternatives to Google Calendar? If not, seems like there may be a gap in the market for a next generation calendar service, as the core of Google Calendar has been the same for a while, I'm sure there must be some innovation available there.

All I know is that I sleep a lot better that I have two-factor authentication turned on for gmail. I would leave gmail quickly if a good alternative had that. Looking at the OP's recommendation of fastmail.fm, it seems to have multi-factor authentication:<p><a href="https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html</a><p>It appears to depend on a physical key that I'll have to carry around with me. Gmail's MFA relies on an app on my iPhone which is far more convenient and they have a backup way of getting into the account with a hand-typed key that is very long.<p>Why is good web-based email MFA so hard to implement and why has Google been the only one to perfect it?

I'm surprised no Microsoft alternatives are mentioned here -- Skydrive, Outlook.com, and Office 365 are very solid. I have very specific use cases for Google that prevent me from switching (long story) but if I could I would use the MSFT products in a heart beat.<p>Also, Yahoo Mail + Calendar + Flickr + Tumblr are pretty solid now-a-days, with lots of positive upside with the new company direction; however I'm iffy on their chat client.

I'd never heard of Lavabit before; it looks like they're still operational, although their website hasn't been updated much since around 2007. Looks interesting.<p>I'd really like to see a high-quality secure email provider get wide adoption.

For those interested in replacing the Gmail's built-in voice calling feature, I wrote up instructions for setting up a SIP endpoint: <a href="http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/" rel="nofollow">http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/05/18/replacing-skype/</a><p>It's by no means a complete Google Voice replacement (though one could presumably build one with some work using Plivo, the SIP provider I used).

&#62; Google started by dropping XMPP invites under the questionable guise of spam protection. Shortly thereafter, we learned at 2013 Google IO that their real motive was to drop XMPP entirely and move to a closed platform. I’m sure that timeline is a coincidence. No really.<p>If this is true, it makes fools out of everyone on HN who defended Google and poo-pooed the reaction to the XMPP spam move as being merely geek hysteria and paranoia and a massively overblown fit being thrown by prima donnas, saying that it was merely an anti-spam move and <i>surely</i> not a prelude to scrapping XMPP entirely.

Zoho provides good email, calendar, and many of additional apps for business such as CRM, invoices, etc.<p>My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.

I wonder how hands on Larry Page is. I cant imagine that some Googler asked Larry face to face about XMPP. I cant even imagine that it was a bullet point in a video chat. Maybe it was an email to a large group of people that Larry may or may not have read. I can imagine that.

There is always yandex, if you aren't afraid of a Russian company.<p><a href="https://mail.yandex.com" rel="nofollow">https://mail.yandex.com</a><p>You can also set up a personal domain there for free, if you can read/translate Russian instructions at <a href="http://pdd.yandex.ru" rel="nofollow">http://pdd.yandex.ru</a><p>Their web client for mail is localized into English.<p>Pros:<p>* Not google; yandex have rather good reputation here, and like google, they are tech company, with good engineering team<p>* A nice web-interface for mail (for my use case it's comparable to google's)<p>* Supports RSS feeds via mail interface<p>* Like google, there are interesting services: calendar, maps, search, translations, etc.<p>Cons:<p>* Basically, yandex is Russian google in terms of business (89% of their revenue is ads); however, they don't do hardware and don't have a facebook/plus-like social network<p>* Russian-based, so potentially a kgbfsb threat (never heard of any kgbfsb incidents, though)<p>* Some/most services are not localized for English speakers

I recently switched from Gmail to Fastmail.fm for much the same reasons as the OP. Fastmail.fm managed to migrate 30k emails without so much as a sweat.<p>I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

Personally, I closed my Google account when my CR-48 died. I don't think Google is evil, so much as they simply had too much information about me.<p>Still use Google for search, though.

If you need calendar and contacts synchronization, a hosted Exchange account might fit your needs. For example, Microsoft sells accounts with 25GB storage for $4 per user and month.<p><a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans-hosted-email-for-business-FX103764022.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/msproducts/exchange/compar...</a>

How well would all of these tie in with android or some other mobile OS?

The biggest problem with Gmail alternatives is missing hotkeys. Outlook.com is the only one I've found that even comes close, but things are still <i>different</i> enough to be irritating.

So basically this article finds no good open source / self hosted alternatives, but instead lists a bunch of paid services. And even those don't live up to the "Google Silo".

I've been eyeing some of the some of the Zimbra hosts (01.com, xmission.com) as a possible home for my email accounts, as we've been testing Zimbra at my day job for a possible Exchange replacement and I've liked the experience so far. Anyone have experiences with Zimbra (and the hosts) to share?

I went through this process a few months ago but I chose to still use some silos. I moved my blog (blog.markwatson.com) from Blogger to a cheap Wordpress host, maintaining article URLs. I asked people to start using my email at my own domain; I still forward it through GMail but I back it up frequently. I can flip my domain email to my VPS email hosting service very quickly. I could live with loosing my calendar so I left it on Google.<p>There are a lot of siloed web properties that I use without depending on them: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. I enjoy them but if they dissapear I can live with that.<p>Two we properties that I do depend on are Dropbox and Evernote, but I am a paying customer of each.

I left Google in favour of self hosted applications:<p><pre><code> * Horde Webmail (http://www.horde.org/) which brings * Webmail, * Calendar, * Addressbook * Tasks * Notes * Sync via Exchange ActiveSync or SyncML (most mobiles incl. iOS and Android support it) * XMPP server (http://prosody.im/) * Multi IM transports (http://spectrum.im) * XMPP webclient, Jappix (http://jappix.org/) * Owncloud for files (http://owncloud.org/) * SelfOSS for RSS (http://selfoss.aditu.de/)</code></pre>

I've been considering zohomail for gmail alternative.<p>Does anyone have experience with both that and fastmail and can compare?<p>From a cursory exploration, you can get quite a bit (including quite a bit of storage) from zohomail at the free tier, compared to what you get from the $5/year (might as well be free) tier at fastmail. But fastmail may have lots of cool features if you do want to pay?<p>(Definitely interested in getting away from gmail. I've always had my own domain name for email, but it's currently hosted at gmail, using the no-longer-existing free google apps tier).

Also another suggestion, for a Google Analytics replacement you could try using Piwik, an open source web analytics platform. Of course I think you'll have to provide your own hosting for it.

"Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives to some Google properties. Maps...."<p>For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.

I posted this as a comment on the article, but I figured I should mention it here too: I’ve switched to Twilio + OpenVBX (<a href="http://openvbx.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openvbx.org/</a>) as a replacement for Google Voice. The per-month cost is low (something like $2/month per number), though you do have to pay a per-minute charge when you’re actually handling calls. I think transcription might be an additional fee, too.

I don't like that Google killing some great technologies, like Reader or push-email for iPhone (especially last one). I was Gmail user for a long time, but switch on iCloud recently, because i'm looking something fresh and easy-to-use and still want to have push in my iPhone.<p>iCloud mail interface not just "pretty", but simpler and especially settings. So, after iCloud Gmail looks very cheap, if you don't use iCloud, you should to try.

When evaluating communication services you should give extra credit to hosts that are located in a different country than the one that you live in in order to get some privacy from government spying. It might not stop spy agencies like the NSA but it should at least stop the local police, and in some cases even the FBI, from casually snooping your email at their whim.

Anyone using hosted.im?<p>I'm planning to switch to that one too. Moved away from mail / calendars etc a while ago. Talk has been keeping me attached. If I switch my domain to another XMPP provider using the same email address as in my google apps account, will the migration be seamless for my contacts (who are still using Google talk)?

I have been extremely happy with the Office 365 service. It works perfectly on my Mac and iPhone.

The issue he is discussing with ownCloud and timezones is not a limitation that applies to their CalDAV implementation, it is just an issue with their web client. If you use a CalDAV client that supports time zones properly (most do), it will work fine.

I use Zoho Mail and I definitely recommend it. I've never had any problems with it.

Why not just host your own email, calendar etc? You can even do it in your personal cloud and replicated it SECURELY to machines who won't give out your information at the drop of a hat or are hacked by a high profile attack.<p>It would seem that many server apps support open standards (SMTP, CalDav, XMPP etc.)<p>Your address book is the new friendlist instead of facebook's. Why not do the same with your email and calendar, etc. ? And dropbox is cool but you can easily have mercurial + watch files with node.js ... I think there's DVCS-autosync and OwnCloud is coming along

I actually just switched my personal email over to Zoho today (before reading this). It's pretty nice; I was surprised not to see it mentioned here as a Gmail/Google Apps alternative.

A side point: Does it make signifiant difference from a legal point of view to have the mail provider in Australia ?<p>For example, would it free from the 13 years old limitation on account ownership?

Mozilla should build a whole suite of services like mail, calendar, docs, files, photos, etc so they can start offering free ad-based or vip ad-free subscriptions.<p>They have the resources, the browser and the community to make it work.<p>I always say I'd like to have a myname@firefox.com account from where to manage all my web presence.<p>Imagine a hundred million people registering just to grab their vanity plate.<p>From there... profit!<p>Mozilla guys, if you are interested just reply to this thread, I'll contact you right away to get the ball rolling.

Fix your certificates! Your cert is signed for webfaction but you're hosted at kkinder.<p>Host: kkinder.com<p>Common name: <i>.webfaction.com<p>Alternative subject names: regex([^.]</i>\.webfaction\.com), regex(webfaction\.com)

I am especially looking at alternative after Google started charging for the use of GMail for small businesses (in spite of their promise to support up to 50 users free). I am sure the alternative will not be as much polished, but I can roll my own postfix+roundcube and run it for 100+ users at &#60; 100$ a year vs Google's $5000 a year! I don't need all the social shit Google throws in with an account, just mail and chat will do.

Does anyone know of a secure (like lavabit) web mail service (that doesn't look like crap) that integrates chat (irc, google chat, etc)?

I was actually considering owncloud but there seems to be a lot of negative experiences.<p>Anyone know if its getting better/actively developed?

I'm wondering if there's a twilio based replacement for google voice. It's got most of the building blocks.

ZohoMail seems to be a decent replacement for Gmail/Docs. I've set up one of my domains there now (free for up to 5 users). Looks pretty nice. Has email/docs/wiki/chat/calendar. It's very much designed to be a gmail alternative. I like.

For a Docs replacement, do give <a href="https://hackpad.com" rel="nofollow">https://hackpad.com</a> a try. It's web-native and optimized for collaboration and sharing (vs trying to bring a desktop experience to the web).

AOL Alto makes a nice alternative than Gmail. And a much better one at that.

google's silo is as good as or better than most, and I trust Larry Page not to do the-wrong-thing more than most CEOs out there... just always keep a backup and don't worry, be happy

We have a free migration tool that you can use to move your email in and out of Google Apps:<p><a href="http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/shuttlecloud</a>

A man said to Google, "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied Google, "That fact has not created in me "A sense of obligation."

lavabit isn't accepting new users right now.

I just switched to commafeed for rss. My only complaint so far is the iphone display.

The article does not state a major problem which is that fastmail.fm is not free.

I rolled my own Google Voice using the Twilio API. It's not free, but it works.

mail.com + netvibes.com<p>Netvibes has AJAX widgets for all one's needs. <a href="http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us" rel="nofollow">http://eco.netvibes.com/apps/essential/us</a>

Is DDG reading this?

does anybody know a decent CalDAV web GUI? I have been using agendav and caldavzap for the last months, but am not super happy with any of them.

silo? oh, just because of THE READER again...

This is probably not gonna be a popular sentiment here but I actually like the G+ integration with all the services. The main reasons for that are my expectation of better personalization and synchronization, and a better experience with Google Now. And BTW I'm an iOS user.

If you want to run your personal cloud please check us out at tonido.com. we have an awesome workspace that can take care of your tasks, calendar and contacts, dropbox like sync and really good mobile apps for ios and android. We don't have mail app though. But tonido is a platform and so something to consider in our roadmap.

there arent many alternative to move out of the google's domain. But sooner or later we will all have too as google's privacy policy Sucks... (Source:<a href="http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/google-privacy-issues/</a>)

Sigh. It's the same anti-Google post on HN again.