** Alex Hudson home@alexhudson.com [2007-09-25 21:42]:
On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 21:05 +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
All good projects, but none are alternatives to Gmail since they are purely the application and not a service. Things like Operamail, Hotmail, etc. are comparable to Gmail, but clearly no better on an ethical stand point.
To be honest, the only thing stopping people offering them as a service is time and expertise: with stuff like the Amazon platform, it's extremely easy to deploy free software web mail at cost. It's theoretically very easy to take a piece of free software, offer it as a service, and you don't need to deploy any infrastructure.
The big difference is likely that very few people are going to want to pay for web mail. And if you want something for free, there's a quid pro quo - in the Google case, advertising (or whatever). So, if you want to offer a service based on free software, you're going to have to subsidise it heavily to get it off the ground.
I have to say, personally I don't see an ethical issue in there in free software terms. If Google were deploying Squirrelmail instead of their custom job, it would have all the same problems. If you want the service for 'free', you give up something non-monetary.
** end quote [Alex Hudson]
Agreed. I personally don't have any issue with Gmail, and I do use it myself, twice over actually as I am in the process of migrating one of my ADSL connections to an ISP that uses a branded Gmail service. The big thing about a free webmail service is how you pay for the disk space and bandwidth required. That bit was more mentioned in passing with reference to a bit not quoted from earlier in the thread :) My use of Gmail is actually quite low though, as I prefer to use my own domains for email, which sit on my own servers that are now running Roundcube (prior to that SquirrelMail, but I never found that a particularly attractive package to use - and that's not a reference to its lack of graphical appeal!).