- The search is very good, even searches within attachments.
- You can have large attachments.
- Doesn't run out of space and is free.
- Spam detection is flawless. I've rarely had anything important fall into spam. Alternatives like spambayes are not nearly as good.
- The threading is excellent. Most competing products suck at this.
- The keyboard shortcuts are comprehensive and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.
- Labels and filters are super powerful and save me tons of time. Most competing products suck at this.
I don't like any of the non-webmail alternatives, simply because they are not webmail, and you can't get to them from everywhere.
Alternatives seem to be:
- http://openwebmail.org/ (pretty bad)
- http://squirrelmail.org/ (also pretty terrible)
edit:
Looks like mailpile is closest to what I want, with a open source and modern python stack, super clean and simple UI, focus on the right features. But it's fairly alpha. On the other hand, they seem to have gotten some 160k of crowdfunding, so the main developers seem dedicated.
Fastmail also seems to be the best non-open alternative around, imho.
edit2:
Somewhat disappointed that mailpile seems to have reinvented the wheel multiple times by not using an existing web framework / search server.
The problem is that you mention you run your own mail server and even plenty of tech-savvy folks will look at you like you're the Unibomber.
It's not the interface that's hard to replicate, in other words; it's the backend, the service component. This is pretty consistent with the type of "moats" Google has generally built around its properties, they're almost always more about magic on the backend than magic on the front.
Outlook.com's spam filtering is at least as good as Gmail's now, probably better. The only significant difference is that it's much less aggressive. Outlook.com will let two or three spams through where Gmail will put four or five legitimate emails in the spam box.
Since most people probably don't check their Gmail spam boxes regularly, Gmail's spam blocking is actually more dangerous.
To be fair, I get a lot of press releases, newsletters and bulk mailings. But there's really no excuse for Gmail to keep putting emails from, say, EE Press Office in spam when I take them out every time. (My account was an early beta.)
Also they seem to engage in very spammer-friendly activities such as notifying spammers if and when you read their spam email (if images are turned on by default). Soooo, I can't imagine that competing against their spam filtering is as impossible as people tend to believe.
GMail jumped the shark when they forced the new interface on everyone, killing usability in the process. It doesn't deserve my eyeball time any more.
Why is there no alternative webmail of the
caliber of gmail? Is it a difficult problem?
The point of gmail is that they take the configuration and headache of maintaining a mail server away from you. If you're okay with running your own qmail/sendmail, then there are vastly better open source UI options than gmail. Google didn't invent email. They just run some of the world's largest mail servers as a (mostly) free service.
Really? Because I haven't found a web front-end as good. Otherwise I am happy running my own mail server.
Surely the community would expect something closer to 2014's Gmail (which is the product of tens of millions of dollars of engineer-hours, even if you skip all of the advertising-enabling gunk that an open-source clone would surely skip) before a theoretical Gmail clone got any kind of traction.
A clone that approaches "modern" Gmail is absolutely possible, of course. My original "Are you serious?" was just a bit of incredulity aimed at the person who asked "Hey, why isn't anybody on this yet? Is it hard?"
Possible? Yes. Hard? Yes.
> The idea for Gmail was pitched by Rajen Sheth during an interview with Google,[55] and went on to be developed by Paul Buchheit several years before it was announced to the public. Initially the email client was available for use only by Google employees internally. Google announced Gmail to the public on April 1, 2004.
Obviously, MS is no less evil than Google. But they exist.
If you don't want to use a tacky old Hotmail.com domain name, you can also register for an MS account at Live.com or Outlook.com - this gets you a web Outlook account which gives you email, contacts, SkyDrive (photos and docs/spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc) and calendar. And they don't have their own analogue to Plus and they've abandoned their old messaging systems, so the only "social layer" tedium is an optional integrated sidebar for Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter.
It's actually pretty nice. I still use my gmail as my primary because there's not enough reason to switch and I like open-source Android, but MS has built a solid thing there.
There are a handful of alternatives each with their own pros and cons but the key problem is lock in, psychological or technological.
Even if Gmail were down for an hour every day, I'd have to think and work hard to migrate away due to (over)-relying on their service and some of the unique features it has.
Edit: plus, no Google-snooping of course.
I just want to be able to run an email server that has conversation features, contacts, XMPP chat, etc, but isn't Microsoft Exchange
Turns out there are plenty of good open source webmail frameworks: Roundcube, Mailpile, Zimbra and RainLoop are all freely available and ridiculously easy to set up.
The issue is that they're all just front-ends for the horribly complex and difficult to configure backend of a modern email server (SMTP/POP3/IMAP). You can configure them to hook into Google/Yahoo/Other smtp servers, but then why bother — you're back where you started.
I had no understanding of how broken email was until I tried to set up a simple SMTP + IMAP server using postfix + courier.
Imagine that you could still use your email when Gmail goes down, but you would lose a lot of features like autocomplete, search, recommended recipients, etc.
Disclosure: I work for Microsoft (not outlook.com team though).
I use Outlook.com as a backup to Gmail and I use Gmail with my own domain name. I haven't switched, but it wouldn't be a problem if I had to.
Spam filtering works well too.
I can imagine a few reasons why there currently isn't an alternative, like network effects stemming from your contact list, or the fact that you'd have to change your email address everywhere and forward from your gmail account. But what are the real reasons?