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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again.

That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge providers.

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I have mostly moved to self hosting email. I still have a lot of legacy registrations with various companies that go to gmail, otherwise everything else is self host on a hetzner vps (2.50 eur per month) which doubles as a wireguard vpn.

First time setting up an email server was quite a chore as I have no background in email, getting all of the moving parts to play nice required some patience.

My second email server used Mail-in-a-box scripts which I highly recommend. Zero to functioning email server in a few minutes. The slowest part is DNS propagation. Anyone comfortable setting up a domain name and the basic DNS settings that are invloved will have no problem self hosting email. The setup includes web-based client. I use k-9 mail client on my phone.

I find the catch-all email feature very helpful in creating ad-hoc addresses for spammy companies (eg car insurance). I can sign-up with spammy.companyname@mydomain.com and it will direct to spammy@mydomain.com.

I'm not completely de-googled, but I am consciously and gradually reducing my exposure to google, and other large networks.

At the very least it is worth a try.

https://mailinabox.email

edit:spelling, added url.

I've been using Fastmail for about 5 or 6 years now. My only problem is the 1GB mailbox size limit I have. Maybe I should upgrade. Otherwise I love it. Their webmail client is phenomenal and works with mobile and desktop. I don't like their Android app but I haven't tried it in a year. Their web client is so good I don't need an app for them.

I do see mail going to spam though. It's never bugged me that much.

You can also just use the native imap client provided by your operating system. The beauty of using a provider and service that adheres to open email standards.

We're still a fair way away from that! We're growing steadily, but not at the same rate that "give it away free and work out how to monetize it later" services do. Worth it for having a sound business model and no venture capital breathing down our necks to turn evil though.

Thank you for not being evil.

Please allow me to export notes to txt.

hah - nice segue to a feature request! You can access notes via IMAP, so that's an easy way to get the whole lot raw.

As for a more general download - what would you be looking for? A zip file containing all the notes?

Thanks! I was looking for an export button for them earlier today so when I saw you comment I couldn't help myself.

A zip file with all notes in it would be fantastic. I just want to feel like my data is safe from Apple having a bug that wipes it. Read a lot of Catalina horror stories.

IMAP looks promising and might be all I need. Neither Spark or Apple Mail seem to let me export mail as txt but presumably there's a mail client out there that does in which case problem solved. Thank you for point that feature out, should throw it up on:

https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/downloaddata.html#tran...

It's not the ideal solution and certainly not as easy as clicking a button but, for a quick 'n dirty solution, you might look into using "offlineimap" and configuring it to sync only your notes folder instead of all of them.

You're right.

I use Fastmail scared that my emails will go to spam. But ideally I want to live in a world where my emails hosted on my email server will send like they did 10-20 years ago.

I keep using my own email server to host my emails but had to switch to fastmail for smtp since it was untenable otherwise...

It's sad that it's no longer viable to have your own email server

I want to use Fastmail, but their minimum price for using your own domain is $50/year. At that price I can get Exchange Online with double the storage. And given that they have an office in the US, I would expect them to follow the same laws that Microsoft and Google have to regarding requests from government agencies.

This looks to be a good alternative except it does not have HIPAA support.

Even though I have shut down my practice for the near future, I will still need to have information protected for several years to the Health Department's requirements for psychological records.

Email providers who lack this support will have difficulty gaining traction in the health world.

You shouldn't be using email to send PHI at all.

But fastmail lets you use your own domain, so there's much less vender lock-in.

The problem is that smaller companies may not have an appropriate budget for security.

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