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Comment by terraforming | Hacker News Reader

After the fastmail fiasco (they increased prices, and now old packages no longer have access to the newest features), I started looking for an alternative and came across mailbox.org... I've been trialing for a few days and they do seem interesting.

I just wish we could use an unlimited number of aliases in our own domain, it doesn't make sense to me otherwise..

They do have some interesting features, such as mailbox encryption as well as calendar/contacts encryption. It's client-side encryption, though it's in the browser.

An alternative to mailbox.org is mailfence.com.

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It's probably worth clarifying that you have a business account with multiple users, and FastMail have recently implemented a new setup that changes how their business accounts work.

I've used FastMail for my personal mail for about 10 years, and the changes have made no difference to me at all.

I also have a business account with multiple users. I have no idea what OP is talking about. Can you clarify?

Do you have some citation for this "fiasco"? They did change the plans but I was unaware of any significant unhappiness. (And existing users can keep their old plans anyway.)

There's a 17-page discussion here: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=72032

I think they abandoned a lot of their "freemail" style services but grandfathered existing users in some cases and those grandfathered plans now aren't updated for obvious reasons?

I really can't recall a major negative fallout from that and I'm fairly certain I joined right around the time that happened (the docs were still a mess because a lot of it hadn't been updated yet and referred to the now non-existent plans).

There was a fiasco? And I'm not aware of any features that old plans don't have access to. AFAIK the only difference that would be made by me moving to the new plan structure would be paying $50/year for 25GB instead of paying $45/year for 15GB.

It gets a lot more complicated for "Family" and "Business" accounts.

Previously, it was possible to mix users with different plans in the same family or business, so heavy users would get the $40 plan while light users would get the $10 plan. Now it seems that everyone in the family or business needs to have the same plan (usually the $50 plan because of the custom domain requirement). This can increase the cost by up to 400% for some users.

Individual users aren't affected much, especially since they will continue to be billed at the previous price until and unless they decide to change plans.

What are the new features old packages don't have access to?

I was about to move from Google to Fastmail (been looking to move away from Google for a while) and then I read your comment. Now rethinking the decision.

Make the move. FastMail is great. I didn't even know there was a fiasco (I knew they changed their pricing structure to make it much simpler, but it doesn't really affect me in the slightest as a normal user). I switched from Google to FastMail a while ago and I haven't had a single regret.

Seconded - the only hiccup I have seen with FastMail in the last 3 years was a recent DDoS attack [1] (and that was minimal). If you are willing to pay a small monthly fee, I think FastMail is an excellent alternative to Google.

[1] https://blog.fastmail.com/2015/11/11/ddos-attack-may-lead-to...

I remember reading about that, though I don't remember if I even noticed it happening at the time. I just want to highlight something from that page that I think is awesome:

> We do not respond to extortion attempts, and we will not pay these criminals under any circumstances.

> it doesn't really affect me in the slightest as a normal user

What is a "normal user"? Previously, FastMail customers could get a Family plan that supported custom domains for as low as $10/user/year. New customers who require custom domains must now pay at least $50/user/year. A 400% price increase is a fiasco.

For reference, the $10/year plan came with a paltry 250MB of space and no CardDAV or CalDAV access to contacts/calendars. Nobody in my family would be able to use such a plan. The $20/year plan came with a fairly low 1GB of space, and still no CalDAV. It's possible that maaaybe one member of my family might get away with this plan, but I'm guessing that everyone in my family probably has over 1GB of email. The $40/year plan came with 15GB of email, which would probably be sufficient for my family, though I can't state that with 100% certainty. $10 extra per year is not that big of a deal, especially when you realize it comes with even higher limits (25GB, and 10GB for file storage as opposed to the 5GB that the old $40/year plan offered).

I think they now offer one extra domain per user and same space, which I think was not the case earlier (I could be wrong here).

> An alternative to mailbox.org is mailfence.com.

Do they also use on Open-Xchange?

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