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Comment by mcbetz | Hacker News Reader

Some privacy-conscious Gmail alternatives from Europe (I use them all):

  - Mailbox.org (DE), from 1€/month, basic custom domain, aliases possible
  - Posteo.de (DE), from 1€/month
  - Migadu.com (SUI), from 4€/month, run unlimited custom domains with very flexible settings (mailboxes, aliases, forwarding)

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I'd think about the german providers again if I were you.

They are forced to gather data about you as well (https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundesverfassungsger...) and since the government is taking measures to further invade your privacy it's not that safe there anymore.

I've watched the changes of their laws over many years and I can tell you this: Germany is not the country of privacy love (anymore). Given a decade or two without any changes in this development they'll very likely become like China some day.

Privacy is not a virtue in itself but a tradeoff between saving individuals and their data and public security (i.e. not helping human traffickers by totally blocking law enforcement).

I continue to trust a country where privacy issues are discussed and ruled objectively at the highest court and where law enforcers can only obtain IP addresses for severe crimes - mentioned in the article: drug trading, illegal arms trading.

Germany is nowhere near China with a civil society so active that every privacy threatening action creates strong counter action (i.e. new Bavarian police law). No, civil society cannot prevent everything that the powerful state wants, but neither can state representatives do as they wish (unlike the CP in China).

These providers also don't sell my data as Google does, because I pay for the service. It still strikes a good balance for me.

Edit: replaced "they" with "state representatives"

FYI: The bavarian police law has passed though many people tried to stop it. That also happened with a lot of other laws throughout the last years.

On the other hand people also love stuff like AMZN echo and trust all information to their smartphones.

What's going to stop this development then? A miracle?

How do you know providers don't sell data? Did they tell you that or promise it somehow? :-D

The obvious conclusion of this development is that we need technical solutions which work without the consent of governments and without putting trust into private companies.

There's also mailcow that's popular in the self hosting crowd. Anyone use it and can share experience ? I'm a bit lazy to switch email since the other end of the mail is going to be gmail/outlook etc. anyway. So not much net gain.

Great addition, from a quick trial I can say the admin interface is easy to use and has all settings you need as a manager of multiple users and domains.

I'm running mailcow for about a year now. So far so good, very little to no maintenance and the update process through the dockerized version is very easy. Using it with a few friends and 10 custom domains with wildcard addresses, no issues with the spam-filter either.

I'm only slightly worried if they ever abandon the project I'm out of luck maintaining it by myself. But since it's all based on standard software it's rather easy so switch to another solution I guess.

Does it have a decent mobile app with push notifications for important mails? That always seems to be where the other providers fall down...

What client you use is up to you. It's just a mail server. Any client that supports IMAP idle should work. I imagine k-9 will do fine.

IMAP idle doesn't really work on mobile devices anymore, because no recent version of Android or iOS allows apps to keep the radio alive with persistent TCP connections - you need something that supports APNS and GCM, converting every notification into an HTTP Post request to Apple or Google or another notification provider.

So far, there seems to be no standard extension to IMAP to integrate with those, so you need some app which has a server side component to do it. (Which is exactly what Gmail, Outlook, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, etc. all do).

k-9 works fine for me without gcm. So at least on latest aosp, it appears that imap idle is all that it needs. Also, signal, whatsapp and telegram work without gcm as well.

Edit: I don't remember if I had to whitelist k-9 under battery optimisations. Maybe that's a requirement to use notifications without gcm, as it's a common theme in all apps that support notifications without gcm. On Apple devices, you will be generally out of luck, but that's a foregone conclusion.

A genuine question, how do you tell they are really better than Google?

1. Their revenue comes from the users, i.e. they are not the product.

2. Compare the privacy policy of Google and these companies.

Mailbox and Posteo do have transparency reports (https://mailbox.org/de/pressemitteilung-transparenzbericht-2... and https://posteo.de/site/transparenzbericht). Both also support privacy groups via donations (https://mailbox.org/de/post/mailbox-org-spenden-2018 and https://posteo.de/site/wirunterstuetzen). Posteo also hosts privacy related events (https://posteo.de/lab/).

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