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Comment by zaksoup | Hacker News Reader

We use G Suite at work and I'm not a fan of the new calendar design. Material design works nicely on a tiny phone screen but on a 32" 4k display it just seems like there's a lot of unused space. That's probably the ridiculous size of the panel, to some degree, but frankly, I just don't think Google's done a great job of designing desktop user interfaces that aren't search.

For folks interested in avoiding your email provider also being an advertising company, I switched to Fastmail* last year. They've got gmail import and full IMAP push support (something gmail canned years ago).

I'd also love to see other hosted alternatives to gmail. I looked into rolling my own on EC2 but decided I didn't have the expertise to do it "right"

* https://www.fastmail.com/

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What is fastmail's sell other than their webmail interface? Seems very expensive to me. I pay $15 a year at mxroute for unlimited domains and users.

I don't ever use their webmail, to be honest. I've got native mail clients on my devices that I connect to Fastmail with IMAP. To compare apples to apples it seems most relevant to compare storage tiers, MXroute is 5/month for 20gb, Fastmail's 5/month plan is 25gb (but single-user only).

I personally don't really want to deal with cPanel, too. Not because cPanel isn't cool, but because I explicitly wanted to pay somebody to do the management for me so I didn't have to get too in-the-weeds. I'm certain I'd misconfigure something somewhere and I just don't want to deal with that.

EOD it seems mostly like personal preference and how much you want to tinker. Value for both seem close to the same.

Ah, maybe I have a pretty hot promo deal then, I've got unlimited at mxroute.

I've also read mxroute's writeup on why they use cpanel, and apparently it just made sense to use it for user configuration, and that under the hood it's all a very unusual setup (I don't understand enough about email to be honest).

I used MXRoute for a bit. It's alright but also shite. The search is useless.

how did you get $15 a year? The lowest prices I see are $30?

Must have been a limited deal. I'm $15 a year "unlimited" storage.

edit: looks like they have a deal at $60 for 2 years with 40GB, still unlimited domains and users, which to me is the main draw.

I use FastMail and quite like it, the main selling point for me was that it wasn't Google (I care less about that now though.)

The billing is awful (they may have changed it and I may have not noticed) but I login every three months or so to manually renew a three month subscription, I don't think there's recurring monthly billing.

I like FastMail too. I like their philosophy, that I can route and apply sorting rules to multiple domains easily, and I like their web interface.

There is recurring monthly billing and I've never experienced any issues with their billing. Reference image: https://piqdd.com/fastmail.billing.screen.png

I think they're looking at vastly different models. MXRoute looks to be like ordering web hosting (but mostly just for the mail portion), whereas FastMail is more equivalent to a user-based account service, like G Suite or Office 365.

I wouldn't knock MXRoute, if you're happy with it, that's awesome. I'm a pretty happy FastMail user, personally, but I will say the account-based pricing has sniped me: I wanted a separate mail account on my domain for a very low usage, text only email handling piece of software... and it would double my bill to do that. I'd at least like to be able to have my different user accounts on different user tiers, pricing-wise, and currently that isn't available.

SOGo could be an interesting open-source option as a groupware.

https://sogo.nu/

They offer a demo here http://demo.sogo.nu/SOGo/

The account sogo1, sogo2, sogo3 are available to login and see what it looks like.

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