I'm a dedicated Gmail user because I dearly love its client feature set. And I've recently become a big fan of "Better Gmail 2" because it adds even more nice features to the exiting Gmail UI. Indeed, I have several years worth of mail in Gmail (somewhere on the order of 70k messages).

But I am constantly haggled by my colleagues, friends, and family asking questions like "How can you trust a single company with all that information?", "What exactly are they doing with all your data?", and "How long until Google turns into [your favorite hated company]?" These are good questions, and I don't have good answers.

To be clear: I use Gmail because of its wonderful feature set, not because of the coolness factor of being a Google service. To be absolutely clear: I'd host my mail on my own server in a heartbeat if there were a software package available that supported the great feature concepts that Gmail does. But I haven't found one (freeware, shareware, or commercial).

So let's think outside of the box: is there a way to write a script (perhaps a la those in "Better GMail 2") that could enable me to host my mail elsewhere (e.g., my own server) and use the Gmail interface to access it?

Knowing nothing about how Gmail is implemented, I'm guessing that even if it is possible to s/[foo].gmail.com/[bar].mydomain.com/ on the fly, work would also be required to reverse engineer the protocols used to communicate with the Gmail servers (both for mail and contacts and ...?), and then to write a new server/extend an existing server that supports those protocols.

Is this a crazy idea?

Is this a crazy idea?

In a word, yes.

Not that it's impossible of course, just that if it was that easy, Google's competitors would be replicating their feature set wouldn't they. The work required to do something like this would be absolutely unfathomable. GMail is a HUGE application with reams and reams of massively complex, highly obfuscated code. Even the seemingly simple task of writing scripts to manipulate their interface is uneccessarily compicated. If you'd like to take a peek at their code, try enabling Firebug on GMail for a bit and checking out your script tab (hopefully it won't crash your browser).

Bummer. Oh well; thanks for the sanity check!

In a word: no. I don't know how it really works, but I know that some companies use the gmail interface with their mail server. Look at the bottom of the gmail start page, there is a link Gmail for Organizations

@Aquilax
I could be mistaken here, but I believe that link refers to the paid for version of GMail which gives you more diskspace and the option for organisations to rebrand it and redirect emails for their domain to GMail's servers. Since it's all on GMail's servers though, I think it would be the opposite to what Jeff is seeking (i.e. Google would still have full access to all of your private data)

Or am I wrong here... I'm not really familiar with that service either.

@lucideer
In some countries if you offer a email service/account you are forced to have the emails on your servers, obviously google doesn't give its gmail interface for free, but the emails are not hosted by google. I know two companies that use the gmail interface with their server, but as I said I don't really know how it works.

@Aquilax
Wow, thanks. I learn something new, I must look into this myself.