Paolo Vecchi

Authored Comments

It seems like this article has been "re-dated".

I take the opportunity to let you all know that the Open Source alternative to GMail & even Office365 is Kopano, the evolution of Zarafa, which now sports also integrations with MatterMost (MS Team/Slack services) and LibreOffice Online.

Kopano is available in Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Fedora repositories, as source code and as packages ready to use for most Linux distributions. See https://kopano.com for more info.

Hosting your own email server to take back control of your privacy and data isn't that difficult at all.
Many small businesses have or can get decent connectivity, at least in metropolitan areas, and can get a public IP so they could setup their own services knowing nothing or very little about Linux by using platforms like ClearOS, Univention or Collax to mention a few on top of which they can install with a few clicks a replacement for GMail. I personally use/recommend Kopano but if you need basic features others will do.

Private users can do a similar thing by renting a small VPS for $5/10(?) a month and install, or get their nerdy friends to install, their preferred GMail replacement.

True that it's more convenient to use "Cloud" services as it's convenient to let other people decide for you but then they can't complain if their data gets lost or is used against them.