4 Feb 2014

Stop Google Mail

Third post of my Stop Google series, this one is about GMail.

What is it?

GMail is an email service like many others, allowing creating an email address, sending emails through SMTP and retrieving emails through IMAP. GMail also provides a proprietary sending/receiving protocol and a web-interface to read and send emails. Like other email providers, it’s mostly based on standard protocols.

I really don’t like GMail, for many reasons:

• too many people are using it, centralization issue;
• I think the webmail interface is plain ugly and hard to understand;
• Google has its own implementation of IMAP, and it’s not following the standard, raising issues on interoperability (see all the issues with Mail.app in Mavericks);
• it’s not following the SMTP standard (the reason is about fighting spam);
• their spam filter has too many false positives, which is much more annoying than having some spams arriving in the inbox;
• it’s nearly impossible to teach their spam filter that an email is legitimate because their spam filter is mainly based on everybody’s decision;
• when sending an email to GMail users, you can be blacklisted without any specific reason, and you can’t get any feedback from Google about that;
• of course, they have algorithms checking the content of your emails to profile you and give you targeted ads.

Alternatives

This is not a service specific to Google. You can get a mailbox in a lot of places. The easiest thing is to take an email address to a less used company, diversity!

Lots of registrars also do email services, so you can get your own domain name and have personalized email addresses.

And of course, you can host your emails yourself on your own server. I explained a long time ago how to install your own mail server in previous posts. There’s a great tutorial (and much more recent than mine) on linuxfr on how to host your emails (in French).

• For the SMTP part, Postfix is the most used server, recently OpenBSD guys released OpenSMTPD to do that too (they write very secure code, and usually I find their software easy to configure).
• For the IMAP part I used Courier, but I had several issues with it, I switched to Dovecot, which works nicely, but I find it a bit hard to configure (hey OpenBSD guys, what about an OpenIMAPD server? 😉).
• For the webmail part, roundcube is doing the job quite well.