Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Alternatives to non-freedom-friendly webmail services?

[Fabian Rodriguez]

On 2013-06-20 12:52, Andrew Hills wrote:
> [...] my friends who are just
> becoming aware of privacy issues with Google and other such services
> (thanks to this wonderful NSA scandal) have nowhere near the technical
> capabilities to run their own mail servers, and their brain power is
> much better spent improving society in ways that they are capable.

A past colleague who is LPIC-3 certified and does have that knowledge
used to maintain his own server, with gray listing, white listing, and a
bunch of nice features.

He eventually gave up and used Gmail.

Installing this stuff is one challenge, then maintaining it is another.
The main obstacle would seem to be scalability vs. effort: will you
maintain a setup such as the above for one account (or for just a few:
family+friends)? Doing it for a number of accounts that justifies the
effort goes against the trust-by-proximity / web-of-trust model.

While I agree it's rather complex to setup email that just works on your
own server, it also comes up as the only sensible solution. Improving
this to the point it's as easy as a web-guided, automatic "one-click"
install should be the goal. OwnCloud (http://www.owncloud.org), while
young and still having room to improve IMHO, somehow pulled this off,
but it doesn't include email.

During my research I found that some people started documenting
autonomous self-hosting of such services in French, its licence should
permit translation and easy sharing of such information:

http://www.auto-hebergement.fr/
http://wiki.auto-hebergement.fr/

Perhaps another priority project for the FSF would be to further advance
and translate a resource like the above, while implementing such
practices in software like OwnCloud. It feels close, yet so far :)

F.



-- 
Fabián Rodríguez
http://fsf.magicfab.ca

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