Ask HN: E-mail providers in 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: E-mail providers in 2019

10 pointsjason_slack12 comments

This year I'm moving away from all things Google.

First step is e-mail. Whom do you all recommend? I'm happy to pay, no need for a free service. IOS and Android apps would be nice to have.

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I assume you mean personal email?

I like FastMail. Just as much as Google Apps ($5 / mo), privacy-focused and the way they handle multiple domains on the same account is better than Google.

My one annoyance with Google was if I want to send something from "hn@<mydomain>.com", I would have to prove I could send from that address by clicking a link... that went to the same inbox.

FastMail allows you to edit the "From" field freely when you have one of your domain fields selected.

They don't have an iOS app but they do make it very easy to add your account by downloading a profile.

We recently switched our company to https://runbox.com/ (https://runbox.com/about/company-values/) Our previous hoster kept trying to upsell us webhosting, SEO services, kept adding us to more and more newsletters, so one reason was to choose a company that does only one thing (email).

Self, on a $9/mo VPS . I use Vultr but DO and others can do the same.

Can you explain more about your setup? How do you avoid being black listed and other common mail sending issues?

Sure! I run qmail, dovecot, djbdns on one of their stock FreeBSD 11-RELEASE images on their cheapest static-IPV4 level. Blacklisting hasn't been an issue (knock wood) anywhere except for Yahoo and they were impossible mail recipients when I had a real business static CIDR space so screw em. The VSP is great about maintaining the inverse address mapping. I have the SPF records, not sure that they do anything.

Edited for copy and expletive deletion

Cool. Any kind of setup guide you can point me to? I've got some familiarity with this from about 10 years ago when I used to host my own mail.

Sorry, nothing for the whole kit and kaboodle. But there are good individual stand-alone guides:

For the underlying guts, the FreeBSD handbook https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/index.html

Freebie book online for qmail is at http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html .

lwq.html or the OS's port collection will point you to DJB's (mandatory) djbdns config instructions. Do you remember how to manually edit DNS zone records? He uses a unique format but you'll still need to remember which resource records to use. By now there must be great online DNS resources? I don't know them. O'Reilly's dead tree books weigh on my bookshelf.

dovecot comes with excellent documentation and man pages and worked out box of the FreeBSD port collection.

I left out one other use. I subscribe to about 30 mail lists, all but NANOG o/s related. I have those emailed to the VSP instance and use a really simple mail2news.py script to pipe it to rnews for forwarding to a private INN server that sits behind a dynamic IP to preserve and read mail lists with a newsreader as $DIETY intended. With a static presence and a cheap VSP it's so much easier to make things work the way you like them. I hope you try it and get into it as much as I do.

More copyediting...

Outlook now has labels and a chat that works and you can sort by sender and what not. Spam filter sucks

I love FastMail. Multiple domain support, unlimited aliases and a fast mobile website. It's just really great.

I was looking at Zoho Mail yesterday, not sure how it stacks up against FastMail though. Slightly cheaper

Fastmail. Cheap and reliable. I've been a customer for a good number of years now and love it.

I have a domain and my ISP hosts my email. I connect with POP3, send via SMTP, and use the mail client of my choice.

Not sure why anyone would do anything else.

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