this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 159 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Getting worse is putting it lightly.

Get the fuck off Google services if you can. Highly recommend Proton mail and drive as a replacement.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Is it still viable in 2024 to run a home email server? I used to have a personal Postfix box back in the day.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago

You'd have to be really committed. There's more admin work than you think to make sure you're not insecure or getting blocked.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It's a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there's a lot of annoying work to "verify" yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn't be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I'm secure still needs to happen, but I don't mind that work and find it fun.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they've proven otherwise. Can't prove otherwise until you've been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.

Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.

Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don't want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've been hosting a personal domain with an established-but-not-large hosting provider for around 6 years, without any troubles sending or receiving mail from that domain (via the provider's servers, of course).

Does that mean my domain is now well established enough to take email hosting to my own server?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Good chance you could at this point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Awesome. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would need to see some alternates for Google Drive in that case.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I just signed up for that just to check it out and compare it, and it looks like upgrading the storage on it is more expensive than Google Drive.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but that’s expected. It’s difficult to compete as a smaller company compared to what Google can offer.

It’s the price of privacy and to be outside of the google ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Apparently, doing a sync with it just on my documents and photos, it ended up filling up the Proton Drive and giving hundreds of errors on one of my Windows 10 computers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Were those errors that the drive was full?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Some of those errors were about the drive being full.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I recently started using Tresorit, E2E encrypted cloud storage, owned by the swiss post, only downside I can find is price. I haven't used it long enough to really be able to recommend, but there aren't a ton of options out there.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

There's an incredible story behind it. But, the short form is that Proton is more expensive because they're not harvesting your private information. In a few months the law will prevent them from doing for as long as the core fiscal law and Proton exist (at least decades).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I happily pay for my email service from Proton to compensate for all the data mining they AREN'T doing to me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

If price is main concern, you still have options, but you'll need to be a lot more specific about what you need. For example:

  • direct Drive replacements - OneDrive and Amazon Drive
  • just file storage - DropBox, and MEGA
  • backups - NordLocker, Backblaze
  • hosted and self-hosted cloud platforms - OwnCloud and NextCloud, use Backblaze B2 for storage

I'm doing the last one. I have NextCloud installed on my custom NAS (just openSUSE Leap with some drives) and am working on configuring B2 as a backup service. It's more expensive than Drive, but it's also more versatile (streams movies to TV, use as Linux package cache for faster upgrades, etc).

Each of these are similar in price to Google Drive, but with a different feature set. Some are cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sorry for not being more specific about what I need, I will explain it here.

With Google Drive, it gets assigned to a drive letter on my computer which is H: here and I'm not sure if any other Drive alternatives do that or not.

Right now, I currently pay $3 USD a month for 300 GBs of Google Drive space and they appear to go up with 5TBs for $25 USD a month and $10TBs for $50 USD a month.

I'm not interested in One Drive as that is Microsoft's Shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Here are options for to mount Backblaze B2 as a drive. It's $6/TB/month, and I think they allow <1TB, so for 300GB you'd pay ~$2/month. So I think they're pretty competitive, but I'm not familiar with Google Drive's terms. They're certainly in the same ballpark, if not cheaper, but it depends on your egress and Google Drive's policies around that (how much you download from their service).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, for one thing, I would want to find out if there is a way to mount a remote drive service to a drive letter on a Windows machine like Google Drive so that I can have it as a backup option that would keep my stuff privacy, and not scraped by some AI LLM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

And that's exactly what that page discusses. It links three options you can try:

The first two are paid, the last is FOSS, and it claims each can mount Backblaze B2 as a Windows drive. I haven't tried any of them, so YMMV.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

But what if Alphabet buys Proton!?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

They went non-profit recently to specifically prevent this from happening.

https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Block all their servers on your network, it’s really not hard to go Google-free.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

duckduckgo and yandex.

restricting your search to r*ddit to filter out blogspam.