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Comment by Igelau | Hacker News Reader

Anyone using any of these email services? I'm not looking for a workplace product, I just want to be able to get myself out of Gmail reliance and gradually get my family away from it too.

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I can highly recommend FastMail. This is the exact scenario I was in, and it has performed far better than Gmail in almost every aspect.

The key is to use your own domain for email. The rest doesn't matter as much.

Email is not secure, no matter what service you use. It is transferred in plain text between providers.

Security is not absolute. There are many different types when we talk about email:

1. Encryption in transit - Yes, indeed unencrypted SMTP is common. SMIME and GPG are not as common as they should be

2. Encryption at rest, server side - 99% of providers don't do this

3. Account security - supporting MFA, u2F etc

4. Application security - If there is an official application, does it store saved mail property (ie, not in a big dumb PST file)

So yes, somebody could sniff some plaintext SMTP email regardless of your provider, but the other features are very valid and important.

I've been using Zoho for personal-domain email, it's been a low-maintenance and cheap ($12/year) solution. That said I can't speak for the quality of their mail client, I use a native app (Mail.app/Spark).

I use Fastmail and could not be happier. The product is great, excellent customer service (you talk with a person right away), affordable, easy to setup, out of the box aliases. I strongly recommend them.

Using migadu.com for all my email. But I am not tied to them. Just use your own domain. Switching service providers after that becomes pretty easy.

A backup of emails in gmail can be downloaded over IMAP and saved offline. Offline searches in Thunderbird are many times quicker than within gmail.

I use GMX as one of my email providers. The web interface isn't that bad, but I have it set up with IMAP and it works just like anything else. The front page of GMX is a news site. It's more old-school with folders rather than tags and priority boxes but I never liked those anyway.

I opted for Posteo because the FSF recommended them. The web UX is, how to put it, retro, but the service is flawless otherwise. No custom domains, but there's an alias feature which is cool.

My main concern is that people who have my email from years ago now try to contact me and they find I've changed my email address. Is there anything to do to avoid that?

As another commenter noted, the key is to have your own domain. Get that set up, then forward all of Gmail to your new domain and mail provider. If you are deeply dependent on Gmail, this transition can take years to finally pull the plug on it.

The best time to do this was yesterday, but the second best is right now!

It's not gonna get better otherwise.

+1 for Fastmail

Another happy Fastmail user here.

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