Genuinely curious: What's a good alternative to gmail? | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious: What's a good alternative to gmail?

3 pointspyderman7 comments

I'm probably not alone with this one. Opened my first account 10+ years ago, since then I use gmail for both work & personal accounts.

Recently, I started freaking out when thinking about privacy and Google knowing everything: reading my messages, subscriptions, bills, dentist appointments, heck, even my salary.

My perfect mail provider should have the following traits: - reliable - monthly paid plan. Business model is important, I don't want to be the product. - strong encryption - privacy first - guarantee that the company won't disappear in the future

Tried couple of alternatives, like running my own mail server (bad choice for me, not reliable enough) or other popular providers, none seem to Check all boxes.

Any suggestions?

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I also use thexyz and it is a secure and reliable service. They have been offering private email email hosting for around 10 years so doubt they will be packing up shop anytime soon.

Hello,

I work for Zoho Mail, so I may be slightly biased here but I would recommend Zoho Mail :). Let me try to answer a few of your concerns and tell you why you should trust Zoho Mail.

1. Privacy - We are a 100% ad-free email service. And by this, I don't mean just showing you ads. This means we don't ever scan your email for keywords and show you ads based on that. The ONLY reason we scan your email is to analyze spam. So we never show ads, scan your keywords for ads, and we never will. We are 100% committed to maintaining your privacy.

2. Reliability - We have a 99.9% uptime guarantee for Zoho Mail, which is the industry standard. We constantly work on upgrading our infrastructure to maintain that reliability. In the odd event of a downtime, we have contingency plans in place for you to access your email.

3. Monthly paid plan - We have a free plan that is free for up to 25 users. Through our referral program, you can get another 25 users absolutely free. That's a total of 50 free users, which is plenty for most small businesses. Our free plan is perfect for that. Above that, our paid plans start at $2/user/month. You can take a look at our pricing here - https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html.

Zoho as a company has been around for 20 years now, and we're going nowhere :) You can read about us online.

I hope I've allayed some of your fears and convinced you to try Zoho Mail. I recommend you try our free plan. All the features of the paid plans are available in Free as well, so you will get a clear picture of what Zoho Mail is. If I can help in any other way, please feel free to reach out to me at revanth@zohomail.com.

Thanks!

I've used Hushmail and they've never done captchas, challenges, security questions and all the other nonsense the majors do when you move around to different IPs and devices. They try to look paid only, but there's still free accounts. No ads. Canadian. And three UIs, old school, new and mobile.

fastmail.com zoho.com protonmail.com

Thanks for the tips.

Forgot to mention, but another point would be to avoid US based services. That excludes zoho.

Protonmail is definitely on the shortlist, what didn't convince me was a) not being sure how future-proof it is and b) their pricing table (limiting for labels used? emails sent a day? not that I'd exceed those values, but it sends wrong signals).

Thanks!

ProtonMail's mission is to keep your emails secure and they are relentlessly working to enforce and evolve this goal.

Giving the history of the team, coming from CERN and highly educated in MIT, Harvard and Stanford, I would not bet for a better company in the encryption space to survive better than them.

I don't understand your point related the pricing table. They are 100% community backed, started from a crowdfunding and they are surviving in an industry where email is considered free due to the other players in the market making profits with ads and data exploitation. It's normal for PM to limit the free account because it's based on a freemium model. The limitations, however, do not affect your experience and they offer you the same quality of security as the paid accounts.

Which in my opinion is pretty sweet. You should just check it out and see how it "feels" :) I pay for it but this is my choice because I support the mission and I want them to succeed.

Cheers,

thexyz.com

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