I just put the finishing touches on my ansible playbook for my 'Goodbye Google' server (Mail via dovecot/postfix w/ dkim, dspam, greylist, sieve, Radicale for CardDAV, CalDAV, Prosody for xmpp). Works fine so far.

What I'm lacking right now is a decent webmail client. Roundcube isn't exactly my type of thing, mailpile might be interesting. This seems ambitious and interesting in general, but seems to come with too much strings attached (puppet? No, ansible. Comes with postfix? I already have that). So .. it is more than I'd need.

I do like the idea of ready-made, easy mail server setups though (obviously, given the first paragraph). Perhaps a project like this could integrate well into owncloud or arkos though?

I welcome this as I welcome Mailpile and other efforts like it; I look for another mail solution every few years. Not with the idea of replacing gmail (might/might not do), but to see if anyone did anything useful yet. So far, no. All solutions, even considering the changes to gmail everyone seems to hate (I don't), are nothing compared.

Every time some new frontend/backend comes up, I say the same (and have done on HN before); i'm not a typical user; I had email since '95, I have been a heavy user since then and I took my mail with me since. In 2005 I was looking, like I had been then as well, for a better mail solution and stumbled upon gmail. I wrote an export script for the mail system I was using at the time and imported 10 years of mail into gmail.

I now have over a million mails in my mailbox (i'm not sure what is the total); I have over 50 mail addresses coming to my inbox, I receive 1000s (sometimes 10.000s) of spam messages per day which Google filters well. I guess this is due to the fact I have had/have businesses on those 50 mails since 1995. All clients I tried so far just simply hang when I try them, including outlook (exchange or imap), thunderbird and some free and commercial web versions (yahoo and outlook web/live simply don't work; I cannot even read my mail through the amount of spam and the clients are horrible for productivity imho. Slow as well).

I also need a solid spam solution; spamassassin simply doesn't cut it; not only does it run high processor on my server, it doesn't actually filter stuff like google does. Google almost never goes wrong for me; actually; I have had very few mistakes / missing mails. While with spamassassin, I'll be carefully inspecting 5k mails / day while still getting spam in my inbox.

I think my mailbox is a bit weird now, but it'll be quite normal as it'll be normal for people to have a mailbox since birth and taking it with them till they die. If you run a few businesses along the way, getting to 1 million messages is not hard; spam will find you as well. Media messages are getting common; I make a point of using dropbox/sftp for attachments, but not everyone does that, so I do get videos, huge blah megapixel cameras of birthdays of family etc. This is normal and will only grow; the current mail solutions don't handle it well. If you want to deliver a competitor to gmail, you need to make this work imho and it needs to be a test case.

Collaboration or integration with Mailpile [1] might be a useful direction to consider. They are doing interesting work on the backend, but as far as I am aware, there isn't much frontend present yet.

[1]: https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile

I really like it - good work, keep it up. It's a good thing that you guys (you, Mailpile, Roundcube) develop alternatives to gmail.

However, for me to switch (like most here, I am a heavy email user), I need a few things:

- PGP encryption

- Contacts

- Calendar

Have you thought about expanding the developer base? Maybe via Kickstarter/Indiegogo? The alpha already looks good, I'm sure a lot of us would like to contribute to the development.

It would be nice it supported PGP out of the box, I think it would be a strong selling point. Kudos for the initiative.

How effective would it be to self host your mail regarding spam?

In gmail I guess that once a few peeps click "Report Spam" on a mail that passed filters, similar mails are also flagged as spam in other accounts. I've always found gmail extremely effective at this, and I practically never flag mail as spam myself.

Sure, there are automated spam filters to configure, but overall wouldn't going alone make things much less efficient on that topic?

I do love the attention to detail, with the Nigerian's prince email.

Doing good software is one thing, doing it with a good touch of humor is what makes it stick. +1.

I'm looking forward to a day when a prominent model will be cloud-based applications storing data in private repositories.

Thanks for working on this.

I look forward to the day when it will be easy to set up and configure a mail server at home. By all accounts, it is currently a very painful process that is prone to error and interrupted service.

Happy to see more alternatives to Gmail. I am still using Gmail with the old HTML interface, as the new one is cluttered with all kinds of stuff I do not need. Stay with KISS, when it comes to functionality and interface, with optional integration of PGP. I wanted to quit using google services for long, but it is only now that I get active in that regard (e.g. duckduckgo as search engine). As such, I am searching an alternative for the

1. web based storage of emails 2. a good web interface.

As for 1., I stil have not found anything really interesting that comes for free.

As for 2., I was once using Mutt and found it quite efficient, and am now thinking to try out sup. However, there is still this feeling that there could be a better client when it comes to usability and ease of installation. Using Mutt on Windows can be really annoying.

Very cool. Looks like a really good web interface that would be a pleasure to use.

On a personal note, am I the only one that generally prefers a mail client? The ability to combine all my emails (work, gmail, @mydomain, etc) into one unified inbox is why I prefer it.

I think we'll see a lot more of this type of software in the near future.

It's easier and cheaper than ever to automate the setup of servers. Imagine being able to click a few buttons, in something like the webmin of yore, and suddenly having a private mail server/file sync node/document editor application, set up at the VPS provider of your choice.

This type of thing will encourage open standards, as the private servers will need to communicate with each other. It also ties in nicely with concerns about the implications of everything being hosted and controlled by major providers.

There are probably business opportunities at many points in this model.

The Distributed Everything blog post encouraged me to leave most of Google' services due to their closed ecosystem and the violation of privacy. I managed to leave everything (GTalk/Hangouts, Agenda, Contacts, Google+, etc.) except Gmail because of how great and useful filters and labels are. In my opinion, these two points are the reason why Gmail cannot be easily replaced. I thus would encourage working on these futures.

Also, I don't want to sound like a troll, but I wish it was build in a more popular language, such as Java (it's not my favorite) to encourage contributions. Good luck!

The main reason I'm using GMail is that it's available everywhere for free - both in money and my time.

However, I like your project and it would be nice to have an alternative if I decide one day that I value my privacy more.

How much of GMail does this do (or intend to do)? Off the top of my head, GMail does this for me (in this order):

- Email server that I can run for my domain.

- Search a large number of messages on the server

- Spam detection on the server

- Automatic labelling / categorisation on the server for incoming mail

- Address book

- Saving of drafts on the server so I can edit and send on several devices

- A webmail interface

Is this intended to be a GMail replacement or another webmail interface?

Quite a minor point of feedback, and not altogether fair, but attempting to obscure your email (~) gives me a bit of a lack of confidence in the spam filters you're using. I have my gmail up in plaintext on my homepage, and don't experience too many problems.

If nothing else, putting your email in plaintext could help you debug your spam prevention?

Kudos! I think the hardest part will come in trying to maintain and scale this from an interoperability perspective. I used to work at an ISP where 80%+ of the work on the mail product was getting our IPs un-blacklisted and other ISPs from not blocking our traffic anymore, as well as pruning out the bad/bot users.

Support keyboard shortcuts, at the earliest. It is one of the most heavily used features for heavy email users.

The biggest pain I've experienced with similar web interfaces was mobile. For the desktop there are a few that are decent, but on mobile they generally suck. So do the native email clients for Android and iOS.

Do you plan to stick with a desktop version? Will you always design 'destop first'?

Would be nice to see people get together and finalise a viable alternative. Keep up the good work! Meanwhile, here is another potential solution. https://assemblymade.com/amail

Afterlogic has a free lite version

I like it compared to other scripts like SquirrelMail or Horde.

webmail.afterlogic.com

Great Job. Ignore all the other projects that are out there please (If they are not BSD, they are useless for me). This is what I was waiting for. I would recommend developing both mobile / desktop together.

check out https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail for a mature gmail alternative.

Tried out the demo; it's nice. Keyboard shortcuts and threaded display would be nice to have. Will check out the source for my learning.

Search is mentioned as a keep feature a lot in this thread. Would using elasticsearch be a feasible solution? It certainly scales easily.

XMPP would be cool too and suddenly you have a chatbox.

Would be cool to have in all the "home server" platforms (Freedom Box, ArkOS, ...) too!

Great, as far as I know Roundcube is the only decent open source webmail thing, and it could do with some competition.

have you seen/heard about mailpile?

Is there a mailing list to track this project? I can't see any way of monitoring updates on the page.

Can anyone comment on Spamassassin's efficacy as compared to Google's spam filters?

This looks great. Just curious: Roundcube didn't cut it for you?

I appreciate the hard work. Nevertheless, IMHO it would be better if open source projects will bring original ideas to the market, instead of copying an existing product.

Squirrelmail?

+1. Would use it.

You r just shooting your own foot