The Context

For the past two days, Openmailbox was unavailable, doing some kind of upgrade. Nobody was notified of that upgrade taking place or of the fact that there would be a complete outage of that mail provider’s services: mail and cloud storage.

It came back today, with a refreshed interface:

Uh, actually, not that one. (That’s what has been happening with OMB for at least three months, but that’s not what I’d like to talk about in this post.)

The Reason

Openmailbox changed hands, and us - its users - were not informed of that fact.

Compare the legal data of the previous owner with the legal data of the new owner. Screenshots here for goodness’s sake:

The Pros

The new webmail interface looks rather nice. It is pleasant to have the cloud storage and mail integrated in one place.

It seems that the total available storage for a free account was boosted to 5 GB in total. This seems to be shared between the mail and the cloud storage, though I’ve had about a gigabyte of mails and the system currently does not take this into account. Likely to be a serverside error, IMO.

The Cons

IMAP/SMTP/POP3 access became paywalled. This means that me - a heavy Thunderbird user - was left out without a way to use my favorite mail client.

Mail aliases completely disappeared. This means that the old aliases *@openaliasbox.org just disappeared overnight and no longer redirect any messages.

This means that the old aliases just disappeared overnight and no longer redirect any messages. The webmail app is broken - it is impossible to send emails. With IMAP locked out, this means that OMB mail is right now read-only.

With IMAP locked out, this means that OMB mail is right now read-only. There was zero communication of this ahead of time. The users were not informed of the outage nor of the upgrade’s consequences and woke up to the fact their functionality is restricted.

The Shitstorm

Openmailbox was a provider that was very popular with the Linux community. The changes they have made have sprung some reaction from people who, until now, had no reason to think they would be betrayed by OMB like that. Some of that reaction was rather emotional

Probably the most flames are happening on OMB’s Twitter right now, though Reddit has also seen the outrage. This last link contains a quickly created Python tool for backing up mail from OMB through their new web UI - not everyone was as lucky as I was to have enabled a local mirror of all OMB mail.

The Outcome

Above, I’ve used the word “betrayed” - and that’s exactly how I am feeling right now. OMB went against their users and disabled the features that made it good and worthwhile for me in the first place and, from the Internet’s response, it looks like I am not alone.

Their argumentation, as seen on Twitter, is: maintaining IMAP/POP3 is “expensive”. From what I saw - OMB had all the money it needed. The donations that were requested by OMB were fulfilled; if the costs stated publicly were real, then OMB had enough funds to go on with their previous configuration.

The Alternatives

Teknik.io offers free email along with utilities like pastebin, Mumble, unlimited Git repositories (with Gitea as the web UI) and a blog - including the blog you’re reading this on right now. UPDATE: Since teknik.io had an outage, I temporarily posted this blog post on tumblr instead.

Disroot is a little-known free service that bundles multiple tools: mailserver, ownCloud, Diaspora, Discourse, Lufi, Taiga, Etherpad et al.

As long as you’re not scared of 4chan and putting your mail in the private hands of a single person*, it seems that cock.li is a viable mail alternative. Among their collection of very 4chan-like domains, they have this pretty nice and innocent @airmail.cc domain name.

*come to think of it, though, isn’t it less scary than putting your data into the hand of some corporation that’ll use it for whatever it wants? it all comes to trust in the end.

tl;dr

OMB was bought over and decided to suck, I’m jumping ships.