Gmail and most of commercial emails track us in a shameless way. They have no regard for our privacy. They scan our mails, sell us to advertisers, treat us as a commodity. As a perk we get to use their email service as free.

After NSA, Julian Assange and all those stuff, people have started to think. Rather than having all emails in one large Gmail who has the possibility to know about all, people who were conscious of these evils migrated to other services.

One possible minnow email hosting provider was openmailbox. Though it was small it seemed to have a big heart. It gave away a gigabyte of space for free. It also ran own cloud for you so you could host your files.

Owncloud is morally superior to Google Drive and Dropbox and works better than them. I hosted my books on Openmailbox cloud instances so that people could download them for free. All things went well until recently their Owncloud offering seems to have collapsed, and my Thunderbird reported that it can no longer fetch email from Openmailbox servers.

Hope and Betrayal

I asked open mailbox on twitter weather my Owncloud will work, for which this was their reply

I believe them 100%, they never indicated that only paid service will work, and now in their website I see this

Well, its not wrong to make service paid, these were the mistakes done by open mail box

  • Free users were never told that they can access all service if and only they become paid
  • No warning was given to backup and migrate data and email

And to add to fuel to flame Openmailbox claims most people love this move

Thats bloody bullshit. People must have been given sufficient warning so that they can move out. Just making some good service go off doesn’t make them worthwhile for the trust we have on them and the propaganda we made for them.