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Gmail Service Disruption

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17 points by piersadrian 5 years ago · 10 comments

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niftylettuce 5 years ago

I built something to help get us all off Gmail, an intermediary step rather:

https://forwardemail.net

It is 100% open-source, and I built it because I wanted to begin to move away from Gmail as Google Business was no longer free to use on custom domains.

(disclosure: I am the author of this project)

  • smt88 5 years ago

    I'm confused. What does this do that Gmail doesn't already do?

    • niftylettuce 5 years ago

      Read the about page

      • ggrelet 5 years ago

        The French translation of the website is really hard to read

        • niftylettuce 5 years ago

          I'm going to feed the locale files to a human-based translation service soon. Getting up new infrastructure now.

          If you'd like to translate the French one for us toss me an email at niftylettuce@gmail.com - would gladly tip you or give you free service.

      • smt88 5 years ago

        I did. It lists things Gmail already does and is generally not clear in the first place.

        Why post your link to a message board if you don't want to engage anyone's sincere questions?

        • niftylettuce 5 years ago

          Gmail doesn't let you easily do webhooks, doesn't let you have unlimited domains, doesn't let you have unlimited aliases, doesn't let you have unlimited everything pretty much... Gmail also doesn't let you do custom port forwarding. Gmail also costs $5/mo/user per domain... That's just 1/10th of it.

          :laughing:

          • smt88 5 years ago

            > doesn't let you have unlimited domains

            I checked, and the limit is 600. In practice, that is effectively "unlimited" for anyone who isn't a professional spammer or reseller of email services.

            > doesn't let you have unlimited aliases

            Untrue. It lets you easily add 30 aliases per user, but you can put a few more minutes of effort into it to add as many more as you want[1].

            There's also the "{username}+{whatever}@{domain}" feature that lets you create disposable addresses or aliases (e.g. "sales+usa@domain", "sales+eu@domain", etc.)

            > Gmail also doesn't let you do custom port forwarding

            I have no idea what this means in the context of email. Is it for people who don't use standard IMAP/POP/SMTP ports?

            ...

            Here is my individual marketing data point, which you are welcome (and likely, based on this thread so far) to disregard:

            Your three main value propositions seem to be 1) privacy, beyond what is achieved just by leaving Google, 2) unlimiting features that Google tries to limit, and 3) better UIs for various existing features.

            However, the four large features called out on your landing page are privacy (great!) and then three other things G Suite does.

            Your about page mentions more interesting features, but it's a wall of text. It's generally hard to make sense of the service, and I'm saying that even as a highly technical user.

            I would also recommend that when you get feedback along the lines of "your copy is confusing", you consider the possibility that your copy is confusing. No one should have to read hundreds of words in 18px font to understand why they'd give you time/money.

            1. https://www.goldyarora.com/blog/create-more-than-30-email-al...

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