Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

Lately I've been looking at some paid email options as I'm not happy with the offering over at Yahoo, Google, Microsoft or AOL. I wonder why they're all quite expensive. Fastmail is $40 a year, and that's for 15 GB. I would need at least 20 GB (which means I'm looking at $120 a year).

15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...

One option would be to "self host" at Digital Ocean. For the same $120 I would get 30 GB storage and I could use the VPS for some other things. But even DO themselves try to dissuade you from doing that (on reasonable grounds I believe)[1].

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/why-you-may...

I'm using;

1) https://kolabnow.com/ (just the lite version for webmail)

and

2) https://posteo.de/en

both through Thunderbird and K9 clients. Perfectly happy with them.

Thanks, couldn't find info on storage space over at kolabnow. Posteo I've looked at before, it would cost me 6€ for 22GB, which is not too bad.

> 15 GB is free over at Google. Does that mean my data is really worth $40 a year to them. I do realize this is oversimplifying things...

That's not a valid comparison, the economies of scale Gmail benefits from means it can't be compared with a smaller email provider like Fastmail which has to ammortize the fixed overhead costs over a much smaller user base.

Gmail has over 1B monthly active users, at $40 /user would generate $40B a year on gmail alone, they made $75B Revenue in 2015 (16.3B profit). Google don't break their revenue numbers down but they have 7 properties with over 1B Users where I expect an overwhelming majority of their revenue still comes from Search when users are in the "actively searching" frame of mind and are more likely to purchase goods rather than in Gmail where their primary use-case is email.

I have about 20gb of messages in gmail that I'm considering moving too. But really, I can't think of a single time I've needed to look at a message that was more than a couple of years old. Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.

My plan is to move to fastmail but and only migrate across the last year or so of messages. Google's data liberation front[1] lets you download the complete data set as an archive. Then I'll just import the most recent year into fastmail (or one of the competitors) and ask google to delete its copy of my mail archive.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

> Running your own email server, getting around spam blockers and blocking incoming spam all sounds like a pain.

It does look intimidating, but it's not. I've been doing it for years with little effort. Once you get dns set up, and set up spam-assassin (which is super easy), It's been pretty much just sit and watch it work, IME

I did that for a year on a 10 dollar box with Digital Ocean. In the end, the cost wasn't justified, as I can pay FastMail 120 a year for a lot more than what I was getting with Digital Ocean, and I don't have to worry about maintenance (updates, ssh configuration, etc)

I'm not saying that running your own server is for everyone. If you think FM is worth it for you, then by all means, have at it. I'm just saying that running your own server is pretty easy, and all the supposed spam-maintenance work is overblown

Yeah I agree. If running it yourself works for you, then by all means, you should do it. For me, I'd rather spend the 4 hours it takes to configure on something else.

Why delete from Google? They already crawled the hell out of it. You don't have much privacy to lose from them, even if they actually do delete the messages.

There is some risk that your gmail gets compromised in the future I suppose, but the chances of your backup being borked might compete with that.

I plan to move away from gmail but I'll probably keep the old stuff there. Convince me otherwise!

Try getting your mails from your self-hosted DO server into the inbox at Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. The big mail providers have it all relatively sewn up - anything coming from the likes of a random VM provider like DO will end up in 'spam.'

that's only semi true, and probably true if you hadn't checked DO given IP address whether it was previously blacklisted in which case you need to create new server with hopefully pure IP.

In case of my own DO mailserver, Yahoo will put you into deferred state for a while eventually will see other emails are not similar enough and give you a chance to go into main mailbox. Unless you have nasty friends who mark each of your email as spam, Outlook Gmail and Yahoo will let it thru to their main mailbox. Also most of my friends are checking spam folder once a week or so, and then its enough for Yahoo to get you to reply to that email once, to consider it being 2-way conversation and all my future emails go to their main inbox without any issues, helping my IP get better reputation.

TLDR: most stories of personal mailserver being bad idea because big guys will put you in spam are grossly overstated, unless you plan to use your server to send large amount of emails that contain marketing stuff.

Not necessarily true. A well configured mail server should be just fine. I personally use https://mailinabox.email/ to handle configuration for me and that works great.

If you're concerned about deliverability, you can also use a service like mail-tester.com [1], which receives a message you send and analyzes it for a wide variety of potential problems. I've found it to be a good guide.

[1] https://www.mail-tester.com/

You can configure the MX record of your domain to point to your server (receive mail) but you can still send mail using a well known SMTP service.

I'm happy with Zoho Mail [1]. Even their free tier comes with a custom domain and 5 GB mailbox.

[1] https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Zoho is pretty good and a serious company, but I've had some trouble with them a few months ago (they were dealing with severe flooding) and it was on a really bad timing for me (I was expecting several critical emails).

After evaluating the alternatives, I'm still with them (both Google and Microsoft were too expensive or didn't support what I expected), I only wish they'd been more upfront with their issues. They did write a blog post later, and I think they've learned:

https://www.zoho.com/service-updates/blog/zoho-customer-supp...

Why not use that transfer as an excuse to delete old email? I try to limit my accounts to hundreds of MBs, despite having far more capacity. Reduce the weight you carry around rather than hire a bigger backpack.

My tax returns are emailed to me. Even though I have never needed them I'm legally required to save them for 7 years just in case. I have a number of other emails in the old list that I don't expect to ever need again but they are still relevant to something and I need to keep them just in case. Odds are my house will not burn down, but I still have fire insurance - most of my old emails are like that: I don't believe I will ever need them but I can't prove it.

At work I've discovered outlook has an expires after tag that I can set on each email - I set this on everything I save which keeps my saved messages clean. I haven't found a convent way to do that with anything else though I understand something like it exists.

I back all my Gmail, Google Drive, contacts, etc. to S3 each year. Essentially I've got a yearly snapshot of each year's data, encrypted with GPG, in a rather redundant form of extremely cheap storage. Knowing this, deleting old years' emails from Gmail doesn't bother me.

Probably you using Gmail makes you more likely to use other google services, also they have scale, so if they get $10 of value per Gmail customer that's a lot more than Fastmail.

Also google is very bad at monetizing their products in general e.g. Google Docs has been around for years before Microsoft's cloud office offering, but they never seem to have bothered to turn that into a subscription based software package - which they almost certainly could have.

I think that's easier said than done. AFAIK Microsoft gets the real bucks from big business using their stuff. It would have been a very steep hill for Google to climb to compete with Microsoft in the office software market, doesn't matter that they had the web product sooner. You can see the same in reverse with the Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on.

In addition, the difficulties of monetizing websites and software that seem to be doing great when offered for free IMHO shows how much stuff we don't actually need and only like to play with.

> Windows mobile OS trying to compete with iOS and Android - which they seem to have given up on.

Microsoft's strategy is to be cross-platform, which is why it has dozens of apps on iOS and Android, and supports Linux on Azure.

Microsoft's Windows strategy is to be cross-platform, with Windows 10 for "internet of things", phones, tablets, games consoles, all types of PC and servers.

Windows phones didn't sell well enough and the hardware lagged what was needed for Windows 10 (eg Hello and Continuum). However, there's still an ARM/smartphone version of Windows 10, so that door's not closed yet. There are always rumors about a business-oriented Surface phone

Also, Windows 10 was and is free for smartphones, so there's still room for Asian manufacturers to have a go. Even if they don't ship many units, it provides a fall-back if Google gets too aggressive on Android.

> Microsoft's strategy is to be cross-platform

Now, when Windows Mobile turned out to be a failure. But not couple years ago and definitely not when they were buying Nokia.

Microsoft launched Office apps for iOS in 2014. So when did they start writing them?

UPDATE Note: Office 365 already supported Macs, and alternative browsers.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric (theregister.co.uk): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114334

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12170771

https://9to5mac.com/2016/05/25/microsoft-windows-phone-dead/

Current market share mobile OSes: https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...

Optimism is fine, but after so many years...

Google has been trying to monetize its online suite since 2007, when it introduced Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 per user account per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps_for_Work

> very bad at monetizing their products in general

I'd guess that it's a support problem. It's quite hard to deny users support for paid-for products, and Google tries hard not to provide human support. It's expensive.

Obviously I'd be pleased if anyone has a better explanation ;-)

I on the other hand have a mailbox that is not even 100 MB, but I would have to pay $40 a year just to use my own domain. That's also a bit too expensive for my low mail volume.

I don't believe so... you could use the Family Lite account for $10/year (250MB, custom domain) - https://www.fastmail.com/signup/family.html

25 gigs at mailbox.org will run you EUR 3.50/month. Plus you get calendaring/contacts, proper CardDav/CalDav and GPG built in. They've been providing email for 27 years and run the email infrastructure for many companies large and small. Plus, your email would be running on renewable energy and their bank account is with a socially responsible bank (yes, such things exist).

What is reliable email worth to you though? $40/yr is a pittance for something I use every day...the analysis is harder when you have more data though, like you say.

Depending on what your threshold for needs is, Rackspace Email is a pretty solid solution for about $2 / user / month.

Been pretty happy with them for my needs. YMMV of course.

But if I remember things correctly they don't sell to a single user..?

Try calling them and ask for a single user account.

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