Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

57 pointsrayalez73 comments

I'm looking for a good alternative.

I (and a lot of other people around here) are enthusiastic FastMail customers. Hit any of us up off-site if you are interested in a referral code (10% off). It costs money, but you get a really solid webmail experience with real human customer support. The CEO is active here on HN and posts pretty solid things like this: https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electroni...

I have a strong belief that FastMail's business model is aligned with my interests/values, and they're a strong open source community member with initiatives like JMAP.

I found the idea of mail as long-term memory (also, as file-system) alluring. I instantly started working on a "pay once" email system, reserved http://memoria.email and put up an early-acces address reservation system. Working on it as speaking.

One issue I have with FastMail is the reuse of email addresses. It is possible to "hack" accounts on websites which were registered to expired email addresses by simply registering that email address anew and doing a password reset. This is very common in the domain space, where email addresses are publicly listed.

Does this affect custom domains, or is it only an issue with @fastmail.com accounts?

Well, with custom domain email addresses this is always true regardless of service provider.

If you ever abandon the domain, someone else could come along and buy the domain and create the same email address. They could then receive any mail intended for that email address (e.g. password resets). This is why I consider any domains purchased for email purposes to be lifetime investments.

There are other "security issues" too.

One is that you can send email as any other FastMail user, and it won't stop you. SPF passes and DKIM signatures signed (even for other customers' custom domains), totally impossible to tell the difference between a legitimate and spoofed message.

To be fair, DKIM is a borderline useless technology and doesn't really prove anything, but it still appears to be an intentional policy decision by FM to be "lax".

Interestingly enough they do track the real sender in mail headers (which I suspect enables them to mark their own official emails with "verified" badges), but it's a dynamic obfuscated value iirc so it's absolutely worthless for regular users.

It kind of makes my stomach churn when I consider that it's trivial for any other FastMail user to impersonate me, but OTOH, it's best not to be under the delusion that email is authenticated, so I'm staying with them.

Great service, despite my comments.

Have very recently moved over to Fastmail from a hosted Exchange service (personal - own domains). Very pleased so far although my only issue was that I couldn't get SRV records to work properly on my domain (the DNS is at cloudflare, and I'm more than certain it was my own incompetence) which made setup on my iPhone a bit of a faff for calendar, contacts and mail compared to exchange. The web-interface is excellent for mail and calendar - for work I have to change between browsers and OSs regularly and it's worked perfectly with all combinations I've come across so far. Also very interested in the work they're going with JMAP as hobby projects of mine have led to me running my own mail servers and developing clients, and this new protocol looks very straightforward and lightweight.

Zoho Mail and RunBox. Zoho has dedicated EU branch if you want that:

https://www.zoho.eu/ https://www.zoho.com/ https://runbox.com/

FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc).

RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works.

Zoho Mail is also available free too and it's extremely generous for ad free hosting:

https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html?src=zmail

Scroll down the page a bit under the paid for price listings and it's headed 'free plan'. Includes hosting your own domain too.

I'm also using Zoho, since it was the only provider I could find that let me use my own domain for free. It's been working great so far.

Up until fairly recently, I was using Pawnmail (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548307), but it became very unreliable. Half of my sent mail bounced, and then it just stopped working altogether.

I use Thunderbird as a client.

I started off free, still have a couple accounts there free I think, but moved to paid because it was worth it to me.

Without the free offering i probably wouldn't have ended up on a paid plan so I'm glad they do it!

Also using Zoho free for several years. Great service. They recently tightened up the free plan a bit but still very good.

I'm going to change to Zoho from Fastmail just for these reasons. A lot of additional tools for less price, although I'm really happy with Fastmail.

Fastmail is a great service if you only use e-mail and you don't usually use Google Docs.

I've been on the free Zoho plan with my own domain for years. There have been a few minor issues but in all I love them. Can definitely not complain about the price. The web interface is very capable and they seem to take security very seriously.

If anyone is setting up email for elderly relatives, take a tip from me: don't use Gmail. Google is constantly changing (allegedly improving) the interface, gratuitously moving buttons from one weird location to another, and monkeying around with the UI. Certainly no problem for Hacker News techies, but once you've trained an elderly person on how to attach an image, print, forward, or reply, all your training goes out the window. The smaller paid mail services rarely fiddle with their UI. The $30-60 per year is a life saver for your time and your relative's frustration.

It would be nice if Gmail had a setting for simple mode: very limited operations, minimal UI that almost never changes, and looks identical on any device, app, or browser.

That's strange to hear, I thought it hadn't changed in ages.

I have run my own mailserver for not quite 20 years. My preferred mail client is mutt, but I use K9 on Android several times a day and I set up rainloop, a web mail client.

When people ask me for advice and they are not in a position to run their own mail server, I generally recommend Fastmail.

ya, i used to run webstar on a mac in the 90s.

Gmail's labeling system is hard to beat. In particular, any given email can be in several "folders" (a.k.a. labels) at the same time.

All other services I have tried out so far do not replicate this approach so that an email can only be in one folder at a time. Of course, you can copy an email into several folders but then they are physically different emails on the mail server.

Despite this, I switched to the German provider www.mailbox.org as they do not index or process your emails in any other way. And in Germany, the authorities still have a hard time getting access behind the scenes. Further, mailbox.org allows the creation of mail aliases and also temporary addresses. The service is 3 € per month which is totally acceptable.

I see mailbox.org as a main competitor of Protonmail and Posteo.

EDIT: additionally, I am using my own domains that are redirected to my mailbox.org account.

I moved to Runbox a week ago and am happy (so far at least). Before I switched from Gmail I worked out what my requirements were and evaluated a few services, wrote up my findings at http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ . Fastmail is the obvious competitor, but I wanted a mail service that didn’t have servers in the US (Fastmail have US and Amsterdam, but replicate across then instead of letting one pick a region as far as I can see).

I have been using Posteo for a few year ( https://posteo.de/en/help?tag=end-to-end ). Pro:

  - Cheap: 1€/month for 2 GBs mailbox
  - Basic functionalities such as Web interface, SMTP, POP3, CalDav, CardDav are all included.
  - They seem to take privacy and security seriously, including email encryption, 2FA signin or recently Autocrypt[1]
  - The warm fuzzy feeling of using 100% renewable energy for your email.

Cons:

  - No custom domain
  - Might have less features than other providers[2]

[1] I am not a security expert nor I have validated their claim

[2] I use notmuch with emacs for reading email, it works great and very fast so I don't really need any other features.

EDIT: I also run my own email server but the effort involved is just not worth it, IMO.

EDIT2: Formatting

Another happy user of Posteo. In addition, they allow anonymous sign up and payments by mailing the cash.

Hm, I thought about switching to Posteo, but no custom domain is a no go :/

If you want custom domain but same high privacy quality as Posteo, try out Mailbox.org - have been happily using both for years

I've tried a lot of mail services over the years and every time come back to gmail, well actually GSuite. Stuff I tried: - Posteo.de: Great, but you can't use your own domain or groups, which was a dealbreaker. - Fastmail: Nice enough, didn't really care for the web interface though. - Postbox: Great, after the merger with fastmail got the fastmail webinterface :-) - Microsoft hosted exchange: It was ok, S.O. wasn't a fan due to slow webinterface on a tablet. Spam filtering was a weak point. - MXRoute: Nice service, good price/quality. In the end however I didn't liked that I couldn't control the spam filter (you have some config options but mostly it's global).

I've been trying out Protonmail which I'm happy with, but in practice I'm still using Gmail.

I'm reluctant to move away from my @gmail address, and inform all my contacts to use the new one. Besides that, I notice that orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain. I wish I could take my gmail address to another service.

> orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain

Sure, if you had the foresight to reserve your.name@gmail.com twelve years ago, but today you'll have to use your.name772@gmail.com. Chances are that you won't even get incredibly.obscure.name@gmail.com.

However, chances are better for your.name@fastmail.com, your.name@protonmail.com, etc.

That's indeed a good reason to pick another domain. I hope non-gmail domains will become more common because of that. It might lower the barrier to switch for many people.

I managed to get firstinitiallastname@gmail.com (account created in 2004ish) but for my Proton Mail account I had to add in my middle initial.

Yep, that one was taken by the dude that couldn't use @gmail, because you already had it ;)

I switched to Protonmail in November. I'm using the free version now, and it's fine.

Very happy Fastmail customer here. Find the web interface more responsive than gmail and the IMAP implementation seems to be play better with apple's mail clients.

The web interface is fantastic, to the point where I use my Fastmail account for most of my email because it's less of a pain in the ass to go through.

The mobile app is also fantastic, but I've had instances in the past where I've received no notifications if an unread email is left in my inbox. I'm the kind of person that won't check my email unless I get a notification, so there have been times when a week has passed, and I've gone to wonder why I'm so unpopular, only to find a hundred unread emails from people wondering where I am.

The mobile app is pretty basic and doesn't support offline use. It's okay but I wouldn't rate it as fantastic. Outlook seems much better.

Adding that connecting everything to a custom domain was a breeze to setup. Also, once your spam filter has been trained, it's very effective (at least in my experience).

Funny story: I've had FastMail for over a year now and still haven't gotten enough spam to train my filter. But the nonpersonalized one has done a pretty good job so far anyhow.

Office 365 Business Essentials. Costs money but get good support and 50GB mailbox. I actually only needed the Exchange Product, but for only a $1.50 a month more I get a whole bunch of things, like SharePoint to play with :)

I'm very happy with https://mailbox.org/. They are based in Berlin, Germany right here in my neighborhood. They offer:

* Caldav/Carddav

* Optional at rest encryption using your PGP public key

* Microsoft Exchange API

* Pretty decent web mail interface

* For iOS/macOS: Configuration profiles that make it really easy to start configuring new devices

* Easy domain aliases

* Cheap and affordable (< 20 Euro per year)

I've been using Soverin for almost two years now https://soverin.net/. I chose them because of the their privacy focus and the fact that at the time I was looking for a bare-bones email service.

For the most part it works well, the only (rare) problem I've had was with Soverin rejecting emails from my Google forwarding rule. I've encountered ~10 instances of this error in nearly two years so I'm not that concerned about it.

They use RoundCube for the web interface, which I don't use. I prefer Thunderbird on the desktop and use the Gmail app on my phone.

Mail-in-a-box is AWESOME ... for 3+ years without a hitch! https://mailinabox.email/

Fastmail user here o/

Simple, cheap, secure and reliable. Offers a superior alternative to the mainstream services. IMHO. ;)

Privateemail works pretty well, 10€/y and I think it's like 3€ or 4€ per each extra email address. As mail client I use thunderbird and K9. I very much appreciate my privacy, so I would always use things that I can understand how they are making revenue without selling my data.

My own mail server of course, accessible through IMAP, a stand-alone web mail client (Roundcube) and the mail app buily into Nextcloud. The server supports Sieve filtering (which, for those who use Nextcloud or Owncloud, currently interferes with the mail app necessitating a patch to get it to work). Spam is filtered (through Spamassassin and greylistd) and moved to a separate folder (through Sieve). Any spam which made it through can be moved manually to a spam folder from where it will be used to train the filter through a cron job which runs nightly.

Fastmail is a great alternative, but I wish their mobile app was more native instead of just a WebView. Not a big deal because the desktop UI is amazing and the service is consistent.

I use my own email server (Postfix + Dovecot + OpenLDAP + OpenDKIM + DMARC + Spamassassin) and have SOGo on top of it for calendar / todo / contacts sync.

very good sir, same here.

Office 365, with the native Mac Mail clients; though if you don't like it the web interface (Outlook Web Access) is pretty good.

I'm only using it as a throwaway, but ProtonMail seems okay.

(Scraped quickly after posting here in a hiring thread, too: "Good day to you and your family. I apologize if the content here-under are contrary to your moral ethics but please treat with absolute secrecy and personal as that is my business proposal to you.")

Thunderbird here.

I am using dreamhost mail with a bunch of domains and a few addresses for these domains that I regularly check.

Any downsides to using the email service provided by your webhost, aside from the pain of potentially switching webhosts in the future? I've been using webfaction for hosting and email for 4 years now, and it's been great for both.

Fastmail (since 2013) & pobox.com (since 1997). Now they're the same company...

I'm trying ProtonMail https://protonmail.com/

Pro :

* There is free limited version (500MB, 150 messages per day).

* Web and mobile app

* Security

Cons :

* By design, the mail search is currently limited (wip)

* Currently no integration with calendar or other usefull app

ProtonMail https://protonmail.com/ Very good privacy, spam detection doesn't work on content afaik (as they can't read your email)

I'm thinking of transferring to ProtonMail. They are insane about security.

I have built and have been using this for a few years now: https://github.com/adaline/dockermail

Hushmail. It is private, local (to me) and non-american which was a big deal for many of my clients in recent years. Data not crossing that international boarder is always a good thing.

I pay for an account on hcoop.net. This was back in 2001 or so and my personal domain is hosted there. Hcoop has email. I fetch it to my local drive and read it. This is my primary email.

I evaluated a few different services on cost, privacy, access, etc., about a year and a half ago and finally moved to Posteo. I have also been looking at this space once in a while. Almost all the services I looked at focused on privacy explicitly, with some being stronger than others.

I can talk more in detail about Posteo, while with the others I'll stop with what I know from my evaluation and checking on their sites later. The services I evaluated were:

1. Posteo (posteo.de)

Pros:

* Cheap enough (could be cheaper), good privacy policies, has good help documentation on protecting privacy better, IMAP support.

* The company is highly focused on social good and social justice (this will be abundantly clear when reading through the website). This was another plus to make me switch.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a fourteen eyes country — Germany.

* No custom domains (this could be a pro, depending on one's outlook; as far as Posteo is concerned, this is a pro because Posteo tries hard to avoid collecting any kind of information that could tie an account to you as a person).

* Support is slow to respond.

* No spam folder, since spammy mails are rejected by the server before they even come to the mailbox. Side effect is that mails from authentic senders may bounce, and Posteo support may just report that nothing is wrong on its end after a few days. Posteo retains logs only for seven days. This makes inbound deliverability related troubleshooting highly difficult to handle.

----------

2. Mailbox.org

Pros:

* Cheap enough, and slightly similar to Posteo in pricing, IMAP support.

* Custom domain support.

* Provides a cloud office system on the web.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a fourteen eyes country — Germany.

* The pricing is in tiers, and not more like a proportionally scaled payasyougo kind that Posteo has.

Documentation could be improved. Linking a custom domain is a bit tedious to do if one follows the documentation.

----------

3. ProtonMail (protonmail.ch)

Pros:

* Custom domains.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is Switzerland (not a 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes country).

* Pricing is expensive compared to Posteo or Mailbox if you need multiple mailboxes (and not just one mailbox with multiple aliases).

* A bit painful to move out of ProtonMail because the main options to access email are to use webmail or mobile apps. For more than two years, there was no IMAP support to mass download and keep a copy of emails. Recently an application called ProtonMail Bridge has been made available that will act as an IMAP/SMTP gateway to your email client. This means that there is still no direct IMAP access, and accessing mail using a client like Thunderbird requires installation of the ProtonMail Bridge (available on Windows and macOS).

----------

4. Tutanota (tutanota.com)

Pros:

* Custom domains.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a fourteen eyes country — Germany.

* Pricing is slightly similar to Posteo and Mailbox, but not as granular as those services. So when your needs grow, you may end up paying for a lot more, comparatively.

* Painful to move out of Tutanota since there is no support for IMAP/POP. Such support won't be coming in the near future either.

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5. Fastmail (fastmail.com)

Pros:

* Custom domains.

* IMAP support.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is a five eyes country — USA.

* Pricing is expensive compared to Posteo or Mailbox if you need multiple mailboxes (and not just one mailbox with multiple aliases).

----------

6. Migadu (migadu.com)

Pros:

* Very cheap (or the cheapest) if you need multiple mailboxes since pricing is not based on that. If you need four mailboxes or more, none of the others can beat this one on price.

* Custom domains.

* IMAP support.

Cons:

* Privacy wise, the location of the servers is Switzerland (not a 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes country).

* Privacy part is just ok. Could be a lot better.

* Most parts of the website were updated in September 2016. The copyright messages were also outdated, standing at 2016 till early this year. Doesn't look like anyone maintains the site regularly.

* Currently the site doesn't even load on the browser (confirmed as a multi-location problem through other services).

gmx.com

It's pretty straightforward, short URL and you can setup several aliases which is very convenient. It also has cloud storage. I don't really get what they're business model - so I'm not really sure what the deal is privacy-wise. I think they're based in Germany, so that's probably a plus

OVH Exchange. Works pretty well, the anti spam could be better though.

I’m surprised no one mentions iCloud as a viable alternative. Reasons?

No custom domains support would be the main one for me.

It doesn’t let you use your own domain, which massively increases the difficulty to move providers in the future.

I like it, I use my custom domain as a spam filter and have a short me.com address.

Mailbox.org with own domain (so I can move if necessary)

a static IP, and a home email server.

Tutamail + ProtonMail

FastMail

I'm in the process of migrating to mailinabox (mailinabox.email) right now! Migrated last week, I'm currently in the evaluation period.

So far:

* imap search is inferior to gmail (slow, no "did you mean"), but I can live with it.

* greylisting is a pain, but I can live with it. Actually I'm on HN right now after alt-tabbing to wait for a "confirmation e-mail" to come through. Ironically, for an account on the mailinabox format to discuss spam issues :) which brings me to the real problem:

* SPAM. I assumed the spam filters would be worse, and I could live with that. The real problem is that it's a total black box. I have zero insight into how it works, or even IF it's working. Just drag into "junk" and hope for the best. It's very frustrating, and if this continues, I'm not sure if I can live with it :(

I'm getting ~10 messages per hour from the same sender and they all get through. I have dragged >100 of these to the junk folder, used some incredibly obscure command on the box (from a 4y old github issue) to see if it's actually being "counted" as spam at all: it is. Now what? Clearly something is wrong; either this filter is as dumb as a bag of nails or it's not working correctly. Good luck figuring it out. I have no idea where to start debugging.

Essentially, the promise of MIAB is that you shouldn't have to look under the hood. Hosting e-mail is notoriously hard, and they're trying to abstract it all away. The problem is: it's hard because the old tools have terrible UI. Absolutely awful. Arcane unix commands, weird process names, no visibility into nothing, incredibly unintuitive, config files all over the place, log files all over. Sure, it's open source, it can all be learned. But the mental overhead is equivalent to learning a new programming language. It's harder to learn than something like Photoshop, which, honestly, is not OK for what it is (messaging and spam filtering).

I'm weary of the direction this is going in. I'll give it another few weeks, but I'm afraid I'm taking on a responsibility I don't have time for. I don't want to manage dovecot, spamassasin, and what not; they're a full-time job. But with MIAB, at the end of the day, it's not really abstracting it away. It's just a nice setup script. In the end, you're still managing all that cruft, and when push comes to shove, you're on your own.

I advise against it :( Unfortunately.

Hopefully, one day, someone will make a holistic spam server for the new generation. A holistic system which handles everything: outgoing and incoming, SMTP and IMAP, TLS, spam filtering, storage, backups, user management, attachments, greylisting, logging, catch-alls, domain forwarding, all of it in one tool.

The danger of using different tools for everything is incompatibility. E.g. I'm using a lot of forwarding rules, internally. It might very well turn out that spamassasin has a hard time following those rules. Will it understand the internal forwards are not to be marked as responsible for the spam? that the first external received: line is the one to block? I have no idea. And I don't want to worry about it :(

I'd love to pay for a piece of server software which took care of it all, holistically.

> I'm getting ~10 messages per hour from the same sender and they all get through. I have dragged >100 of these to the junk folder, used some incredibly obscure command on the box (from a 4y old github issue) to see if it's actually being "counted" as spam at all: it is. Now what? Clearly something is wrong; either this filter is as dumb as a bag of nails or it's not working correctly. Good luck figuring it out. I have no idea where to start debugging.

Well, if it's of any consolation, I have Outlook365 from work (of course, it's paid), and I have a similar problem where the same sender has been sending spam for several months and I have marked it as Junk (as well as sent a copy to Microsoft for further use) all this while. It still gets through after all these months. I have no idea what the Microsoft email team is working on and how this is even a service for sale to enterprise customers!

Regarding spam I recently found out this: https://heluna.com/ but haven't tried it yet. Basically you set your MX to heluna and tell them which server to send the clean email to (and charge your for it....)

Yandex.

I've used it for custom domain mailboxes as well. It's ok, has 2FA as well.

Google Inbox

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