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Comment by itg | Hacker News Reader

Right now I have everything tied up to my Google account (primary email, drive, photos). Has anyone moved away and if so, to what?

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Fastmail. But the key thing is using my own domain name. You can actually use Gmail safely... as long as you are using your own domain name. If Google (or Fastmail) terminated my account, I could point my domain name to another mail service, and not lose access to any of my other services.

But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied up in that single arbitrary point of failure, to a company that does not view you as a valuable customer.

Is there any US-based company, which offers a paid email service, and great customer support?

Hey.com ?

I'll switch to them in a heartbeat once they have custom domains.

(Apparently that's coming this year! https://hey.com/custom-domains/)

What about Microsoft/outlook.com?

It's definitely not the cheapest option, but if you don't have a large storage requirement, 25 Mail St. is a good option. I host my own personal email, but have set a couple clients up with 25 Mail St. and it's been excellent. By far the best part is the support - all support is done by the engineers instead of customer support staff following a script. They're incredibly transparent about things like support statistics, and are understandably proud of their metrics. The main downside is the low amount of storage offered for the price.

It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.

> But the key thing is using my own domain name.

Then the trust is placed in your registrar. Maybe that's where the trust should be placed from your perspective, but do note that you're still choosing to trust another organization who's interests may not totally align with yours.

You can't be self reliant. No one will deal with you of your only contact information is GPS coordinates

My point is that where and on what level you put your trust is a choice, each with their own risks.

Atleast where I live, and I choose local registrars, I can sue a registrar for the ownership of a domain, even if it was bought by someone else in the meantime, I can get it back.

The likelihood of loosing a domainname in my country (Germany) is fairly low unless you used it to actively (and provably) spread malware or commit other crimes (and your registrar will have to prove it and better hope they filed a police report, or their cancellation goes poof).

I don't really use google for anything; I never did, which probably made it easier than for those who had to switch. For e-mail I run a standard dovecot and postfix set up. For drive, I just scp files to a server. I don't take many photos or care. If I did, I suppose I'd just copy them over to my server as well. I run all of this stuff on a few old boxes at home (ancient laptops, old towers, what-have-you).

As a side question, to those who use google drive or similar, how do you stand it? I hate having to click through a bunch of dialogues to do stuff. Just being able to use a plain HTTP link is much better. I put stuff I want private in a directory that requires HTTP basic auth and it's so much easier. I can copy to/from on a phone by VPNing into my house and using a samba client. So much easier.

Don't use Gmail to signup for stuff. If you lose the account, you lose all the forgot password links, the email 2FA codes, and the communication with support.

And use what instead? You're just re-stating the problem, not offering anything in the way of a solution.

Should have been clearer.

Preferably, you should use your own domain (atleast for signing up).

Or use something like Tutanota [0], only for signing up for stuff. They have a very generous free plan. You should open it only to verify new accounts, and for 'forgot password' links.

[0]- https://tutanota.com

A real sign up with your email address on your own domain.

Pay few $ a year for your own domain and then you can switch email providers. I love Fastmail.

I use Google Apps but with my own domain. My own domain gives me the opportunity to take my business elsewhere with limited impact. The caveat is that I pay $6 / month (instead of free).

Yep! This is exactly what I do. With Google Takeout, I don't have to worry about data loss if I get locked out of my account or other issues like that.

I love Fastmail for email; I’ve used them as long as I can remember, probably 20 years now.

I have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a Linux machine for E-mail. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. No reliance on some cloud account for what is essentially the gateway to all of your password reset functions. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid.

Use your own domain.

Use fastmail for email: it's best of breed outside of gmail. (This isn't damning with faint praise; it's quite good. Just not as good as gmail).

Use Arq for backup from your devices into google cloud storage or aws s3.

I moved my email + contacts + calendar to Fastmail, for files I use dropbox or iCloud it depends on the purpose and I use Apple Photos for photos. All services are much better than Google services. I would never again trust Google with anything important on consumer services, I had similar experience as the OP.

I would love to see a step-by-step guide on how to move away from centralized services entirely. Maybe in favor of the various federated services that are popping up.

People post guides to HN periodically about how to do exactly this. But it will require a lot of effort and a carefully designed backup/failover plan for when your self-hosted things tank (or get hacked).

> But it will require a lot of effort and a carefully designed backup/failover plan for when your self-hosted things tank (or get hacked).

One assumes that it will require no more effort than when your Google account tanks or gets hacked?

I use nextcloud with s3 as the backend for file sharing and storage. Backblaze backs up the folder that contains nextcloud.

I self host email using the standard dovecot/postfix

When this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem?

Only without outlook. I am currently working to fix the issue. They have a process, and it's definitely a process.

Barring that. I still have my gmail account.

>When this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem?

I had this issue a couple of times (with Comcast IIRC) in the early oughts (somehow I found myself on a RBL/DNSBL). I resolved that fairly quickly.

I haven't had problems since. Just to make sure, I implemented SPF/DKIM/DMARC in my DNS zones. And I'm sure implementing DNSSec didn't hurt either.

And except for those few times 15-20 years ago, my environment has worked like champ.

Implementing DNSSEC didn't help your deliverability.

I use a more privacy-focused email provider, their lowest tier costs 1 Euro/month and is enough for me, which means I still have near free email with calendar sync.

I don't upload any photos or other files anymore, though. The problem is that you can never fully trust those cloud providers to keep the data safe, so you need other backups anyways. I was thinking about using a more trustworthy service for off-site backups though.

What they are called?

Not OP, but it sounds like mailbox.org

Correct

Currently I am trying to figure out how to move e-mail away from google, not my personal one, but my company e-mail.

Couldn't figure out yet...

The reason is that despite being a corporate costuemer we don't pay enough to have access to support, and some issues we had, the only thing the FAQ and documentation did was redirect us to a page behind payment.

Have you considered Zoho? They have a free tier and gdocs competitor.

I left Gsuite for Zoho (mail) a couple of years ago after reading so many of these Google account closure scares. I cannot speak to the quality of the Zoho office apps, but their email seems reliable and allows me to have over a dozen domains tied to one account at a tiny cost per month. Fastmail, as I recall, couldn't or wouldn't allow many domains tied to one account (otherwise I would have chosen them).

I don't know if your account was different, but I have 15 domains on my Fastmail account and almost a hundred specific aliases (in addition to the catch-all) and they've not complained one bit.

User https://www.thunderbird.net/ to make a local backup copy, then you can sync it with other accounts.

We already use thunderbird. In fact that is part of the reason we want to move away from Google, they declared Oauth 2 will be mandatory, and thunderbird last I checked didn't had all the certifications needed, and we had a scare when suddenly all our company thunderbirds couldn't login on gmail-based accoutns at all, and we needed them to, to send urgently some documents to the government.

Microsoft 365

I don't know why this got downvoted, I use 365 (in addition to other non-Google providers) and am quite happy with them for the accounts I use them for.

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