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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

Alternatively pay for a GSuite account for like £3 a month (Or Office 365) and all of this is handled for you with superior spam filtering, search, webmail, no manual administration and no issues with email delivery due to other filters thinking your server is a bit dodgy.

It's too much effort to run your own email server well.

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Of even better, use some smaller alternative that is not Google (mailbox.org, protonmail, fastmail, ...).

GMail's de-facto monopoly on email (and especially spam filtering) is a threat to the Internet.

If you don't need IMAP/POP3 access and can live with just the webmail and native apps, Tutanota is great and costs almost nothing

I'd recommend Rackspace. $3 per user per month, and allowed me to bring my own domain. Haven't had any issues after setting everything up.

I tried registering this domain through G Suite and Zoho first, but they both said my domain had a TLD that's commonly used by spammers, and refused to bind it. Zoho eventually made an exception but took over a week for them to get back to me.

Huh, that's the first time I hear of rejection due to a TLD. What is it?

I guess that would be .tk

Oh. Right.

It was a .ml domain, wanted to have a play on .ai

But the very first comment of the article explains exactly why one might want to do this as an alternative to gmail:

>> Getting off GMail is one of the best ways to take back your data in the face of dragnet surveillance.

The obvious rebuttal here is that not everyone is comfortable having a Google or Microsoft account, or having Google and Microsoft scanning their emails.

In that case, Fastmail is a good alternative. It’s not quite as good as Gmail on security and anti-spam, but it’s much better on privacy.

Can you clarify what you mean by "security"? I've found Fastmail's spam filtering to be quite excellent: very few false positives (usually just non-spam marketing messages) and almost no false negatives.

Security - I think Fastmail is pretty good at security, but I don't think there's another firm on the planet that does as well at security as Google. Specifically, I found Fastmail's implementation of 2FA to be a bit lacking. I imagine that a determined attacker would find it easier to abuse their support processes, since Fastmail's support is quite helpful whereas Google barely even responds.

Spam filtering - I have both Gmail and Fastmail. I'd score Gmail 10/10 on spam preventing, and Fastmail at 8/10.

By the way - I told our support team that you told them they were quite helpful. They are pleased to hear that feedback :)

Seriously though, we have been making as much effort as possible to push the account recovery away from being an "agent decides" to following an automated process. We famously got this wrong once many years ago, and have learned from that!

So the fact that our lovely support people are very helpful once they have identified a person does not mean they are pushovers for an attacker.

They genuinely are very helpful. I always get the feeling I'm speaking to a human being that knows enough technology to answer my questions, and has the empathy to try to understand my problem.

I remember on one occasion needing to extract billing info from a number of different accounts that were under one master account. The support explained there was no native solution, but helped me come up with a workaround. That kind of support is sadly missing from a lot of vendors.

I'm very proud of our support team! That's exactly the kind of help I'd expect them to give anybody :)

We are expecting people to pay money for a service which others provide "for free", so we need to differentiate ourselves, and having real humans who not only provide great service, but are located close to the technical teams and can feed quickly back to improving our service is a key differentiator for us.

Some of us don't use google. Plus you have to use a web browser. I use a variety of clients as Dovecot is standards-compliant unlike gmail.

Also I run things over my mail database as I have direct access to it.

I'm sure there are some people for whom google is an acceptable option. But it isn't for everyone.

Life must be hard to not use Google. Too many good services.

Search, Mail, Photos, Translate, YouTube, Maps, Drive, Calendar, Docs, News etc. etc.

What do you replace them with? In experience Google is usually the best or not far from the best.

It’s not hard at all, and in fact is Typically easier. Google has degraded search to the point where it rarely gives me a useful result; instead the primary results are ads and “boxes”, so switching to ddg was a pleasure. tools like mail and photo aren’t as fast or convenient as local apps; with local data I can switch from app to app. Yes Apple Maps isn’t as good as google maps, but in some ways is better. I watch the odd YouTube video in private mode but if I watch three videos a month it’s a lot so if it went away I doubt I’d notice. and docs...blech, where to start. I still get new documents from companies I left long ago. The editing tools are primitive.

I know people talk about Apple having a “walled garden” but really for me it’s google that has one, now with a shitty web based interface.

I think you might be missing the point.

posteo.de is 1 euro/month

Looks good but doesn't seem to offer custom domain support

Gsuite is at $6 per month.

I pay about £3.50 or so.

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