Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

43 pointsyorby45 comments

because switching to another email provider is not enough if most people are still using gmail...

Fastmail is a great standards based Gmail alternative. They use Cryus Imap under the hood and give back to the community. It is both powerful and easy to use. They were the only ones to be able to accommodate my formally self hosted overly complicated email setup. For the truly esoteric needs, they support custom Sieve code. [1]

For business purposes Office 365 is great. It has the full power of Exchange under the hood. (I was recently able to setup forwarding only email addresses to external email addresses, without needing new licenses or setting up mailboxes.)

[0] - https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/

[1] - https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html

I second FastMail. I originally tried Proton, but the iOS app is kind of annoying. FastMail seems really polished on all platforms. Setting up custom domain was a breeze.

I recommend Fastmail as well. I payed like 10 dollars per year at first but now I pay 20 dollars since I have a lot of stored email. It's absolutely worth it. The user interface is very modern and fast, and these guys actually do care about privacy. There are lots of good blog posts from them too, which always makes a lot of sense and are not written in enterprise language (full of you know what).

I'll hop on the bandwagon as well. They are a great bunch of techs who give a shit about privacy, technology and service. In other words they work hard at things I give a shit about.

There are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page.

In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to: what do I use email for and how else can that work.

I had already mostly switched from email to instant messaging (Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, Riot.im, etc.). These have some of their own problems but that's a different discussion so the remaining use-cases are:

- open source code mailing lists: Github issues, dependent on adoption but most seem to have moved here

- private company PM emails: many moved to Slack which I detest, or an issue tracker which is not so bad, or other dedicated PM software. There's usually not much individual choice here though unless you're running the company.

- newsletter updates: these typically come from services like MailChimp so using non-Google email to receive these is fine.

- account confirmation: highly dependent on adoption but SMS is becoming an alternative here often

- official correspondences: job applications, etc. There is no alternative. Possibly a space with room for disruption but it would be incredibly challenging.

Generally though, many options sub a federated technology with a lot of user choice (email) for a centralised walled garden. While I'd recommend Riot.im for the messaging part, my main comment here would be that it would be nicer to just have a built-in email client feature or plugin that alterted you in an obvious manner to the service you were communicating with (doing lookups on the To:/Cc:/Bcc: fields before you send. AND a not-just-for-geeks viable alternative to Gmail that could gain ground over time.

Up voted because I'm one of the guilty people you mentioned

I wish there were a standard of sorts in im space. It's not signal because it doesn't allow for saving conversations.

> standard of sorts in im space.

XMPP? Check out https://conversations.im/ and https://dino.im/

Encrypted, federated and modern.

> standard of sorts in im space.

As mentioned, there's XMPP.

As well as Signal, there's also Matrix.org which is used by Riot.im.

You could argue there's now too many competing standards (ActivityPub has some similarities in a way too), but without having ever implemented an XMPP client myself, seemingly people had enough issues with it for there to be significant traction given to replacements like Matrix.

Personally I was always a fan of XMPP, and the idea/concept (just not the implementation) of Wave really excited me at the time. Momentum behind XMPP seems to have slowed so I've been giving Riot.im a trial. Sofar I really love it, so I'm once again hopeful.

XMPP is still the protocol of choice for most IM/IM-like client-server services.

The major difference is that all the major players have turned off (or never enabled) federation, and dont advertise that its xmpp.

Honestly I think the non-xmpp open source projects will never succeed to the point of being ubiquitous. NIH strikes again.

Sadly openly federated XMPP is far from ubiquitous (relative to SMTP, or HTTP as federation success stories, or proprietary alternatives like WhatsApp and Slack).

Matrix is also far from ubiquitous too, but we categorically did not create it out of NIH syndrome. The whole point was to provide a protocol with entirely different primitives: history sync rather than message passing; group channels rather than 1:1; decentralisation rather than federation. And also a totally different governance model (no extensions; just a fat monolithic baseline that should “just work”). Obviously the experiment is still on and it remains to be seen if Matrix will succeed to the point of being ubiquitous, but to accuse it of being NIH is massively to miss the point.

XMPP has multi user chat and history sync extensions.

It also has a several open implementations that have proven scalability.

I’m also not really sure what you mean about “decentralised rather than federated”. This is from the matrix.org faq:

> Matrix provides open federation - meaning that anyone on the internet can join into the Matrix ecosystem by deploying their own server.

No extensions means no customisation for the purpose at hand or for future enhancements.

So tell me again about how matrix is so different?

I’m not disputing that XMPP can be used to build a modern chat environment with history and group chat. The question there is one over the primitives that the protocol provides. As you say, these features (and decentralisation, via FMUC) are provided as optional extensions in XMPP. In Matrix, they are the core primitives of the protocol. To put it more concretely: Matrix works by replicating chunks of conversation history between servers - not by forwarding stanzas. And there is simply no concept of a 1:1-only coversation; all conversations happen in rooms which may have an arbitrary number of users.

On the federation/decentralisation question: yes, matrix servers federate with one another networkwise. But the data they exchange is decentralised: it is equally replicated over all the servers which participate in a room, using a merkle DAG to enforce integrity (like git, or a blockchain).

> No extensions means no customisation for the purpose at hand or for future enhancements

This is not true. Matrix is extensible at the data level - you can put whatever you like into it and define whatever semantics for it, a bit like HTTP. But the API itself evolves as a single entity released by Matrix.org, and folks are very welcome to contribute their future enhancements into it.

> So tell me again about how matrix is so different?

A loose analogy could be svn versus git (architecturally, given XMPP is much higher perf than Matrix currently). Classic XMPP MUCs are centralised to a given domain like a svn repo; if you try hard enough you can decentralise them (FMUC), just like svk existed for svn. Or alternatively you could write a new system with different primitives like git.

I hasten to add that the analogy is not exact and Matrix isn’t remotely as successful as git, but it’s an example of where sometimes it doesn’t hurt for a different technology to come along and shake things up.

I can strongly recommend the Matrix.org standard for this sort of messaging. I have only been positively surprised by every part of it.

I think the repliers didn't understand the question. And I didn't understand it very well either. I still don't think I understand it.

"alternative to email" doesn't seem too difficult to parse.

Beyond that, if you're looking for a "why", the OP could have elaborated on that alright. Another user, @davewasthere, has explained this well below though.

Could've been phrased as, "if you were to ditch email" no? OPs question is confusing.

Email. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.

Yes. This.

The unique link solution is a tricky one, transmitting the credentials is a chicken egg problem. Something like keybase.io is designed to solve this kind of problem but of course not everyone uses PGP and they never will. It will remain a tricky problem.

The only way to transmit credentials, I believe, unfortunately, is via out-of-band communication, e.g. sms/IM/phone/face-to-face. Not exactly convenient, but if you need the message to stay secure from human adversary, it is probably the only way. If your adversary is a machine (your peer in gmail is in control of his/her account, and is not wiretapped by an actual human/you simply don't want google to feed on your emails/you are not an enemy of mossad), a captcha would probably do, along with something like we see in email verification links.

Gmail has the best spam prevention. I'd love to hear arguments against this, but its why i stay.

I have a gmail and fastmail address (the fastmail address is plastered all over the internet in plaintext as well), I can't say I've noticed much of a difference between the two.

Agree with this, I have been using Fastmail for almost 3 years and its spam filter works pretty well for me.

Fastmail

the outrage with facebook? the ability to read your mail keeps gmail free.

If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to the internet?

Because Google is a major presence on the internet...

This question doesn’t really make a lot of sense. What are you trying to achieve?

Oh, didn’t read your question carefully as well. IDK, there is no viable alternative as of now. Asynchronous, federated messaging system that replicates messages to every host in the chain (you have it in sender’s client, on recipient server and on recipients devices, all of them, provided its IMAP). I don’t know, I really think it is wrong to speak about email as about particular tech. It is bunch of protocols and technologies that form a _concept_. It is hardly possible to replace the concept. If you change everything, but keep the way people interact with it you will get same email simply delivered through different protocols. Like Fido. Almost the same thing but through different protocols. I think we’d better off advocating for people to pay for their email services than change the concept of email itself.

While not for everyone, I ditched Gmail for my own self-hosted server. I started gradually with low-profile accounts, and moved slowly towards more and more important things. It's a lot of fun, if you're into server stuff.

My main complaints with Gmail are, 1) snooping content and metadata; 2) resisting anonymity; and 3) nuking accounts without recourse.

For anonymizing identity and metadata, I use Tor. Which I access via nested VPN chains, just in case. To secure content, I use GnuPG. That is, Thunderbird with Enigmail and TorBirdy. I've found both vfemail.net and cock.li to be decent no-bullshit providers, and both have Tor onion mail servers.

Sure, some of your correspondents may use Gmail. But there won't be anything useful for Google to see.

I need GNUPG to encrypt messages from my friends when we brainstorm ideas and inventions. So I use Thunderbird with Engimail I have Yahoo and Gmail accounts and set up message filters.

I'd like to have a webmail address that does GNUPG on it, but the average user does not use encryption.

Also I dislike having to give out my cell phone to verify because I get junk calls when they sell my info.

Zoho Mail - https://www.zoho.com/mail

Lavabit: https://lavabit.com

It looks like you can run the server on your own hardware, but I have not tried this so YMMV. https://github.com/lavabit/magma

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few years ago and couldn’t be happier.

I much prefer to pay for a product than be the product.

Protonmail

I like Protonmail, I use it. But one should realize that search works only on the headers, because, well, the content of your mail is encrypted ... doh!

I’m using Runbox. Better pricing for multiple accounts than Fastmail since the latter ditched their family plan. The webmail interface is a bit clunky but otherwise I’m very happy with it.

outlook.com or self hosted I guess

Posteo - https://posteo.de/en "Green, Secure, Ad-Free"

What do these things have to do with each other? Why would you need an "alternative to email" just because you stopped using Gmail?

[Zoho](https://www.zoho.com)

Office 365 Business - Outlook

KolabNow (Switzerland).

Read their webpage before brushing off. Underrated.

Protonmail

gmx.com

How does it matter if most people are still using Gmail? Email is a very open and widespread protocol. I'd continue using email 100%.

Because even if you're not on gmail, almost everyone you're emailing will be... therefore, your emails are on Gmail by default.

OK I misunderstood. Good point.

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