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Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

Also german ones mailbox.org, posteo, tutanota and norwegian runbox.

Mailbox has been around since early 90s ive been happy user for a longtime.

You make good point that Swiss (German also) laws should protect your privacy more than US laws. That includes fastmail and icloud.

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I would advise everyone to stay away from services that also provide and allow use of an email address on their (provider) domains i.e. user-name@service-provider.tld (e.g. name@mailbox.org) but don't have any free tier (even the bare minimum). So the moment you stop paying you are cut off and if you had been using email on their domain you might be less inclined to migrate away even if better competitors are around at better prices.

So, mailbox.org (my current mail host), posteo (they don't even allow custom domain!) and the like should be avoided. It's nothing but lock-in.

Because you will eventually start using it. the domain sounds very easy and tempting and it is easy to tell someone <4 letter name>@mailbox.org rather than <4 letter name>@<9 letter first name>.com.

I was a FastMail user until Gmail’s launch and regret that I abandoned my free FastMail account and it was deleted. Not sure if I ignored email warnings and that was years before Twilio so there were no SMS reminders and iOS didn’t exist so there were no push notifications to try to give me a last chance! I wish I hadn’t lost years of personal email history, especially since there were probably photos there that I didn’t have anywhere else. Back in those days, data was expensive enough that they probably wouldn’t think of automatically archiving your account into a zip file in case you came asking for it later (when I asked, it was long gone). Now I wouldn’t hesitate to pay if I could resuscitate that account. Can’t really blame FastMail and now I use them for a business and love their service but it was a good lesson for me.

AFAIK you can use a custom domain with mailbox.org.

Exactly paying for your domain name is the safest way how to "own" email. I wouldn't expect people to use email without owning domain. What happens when your service of choice ends or changes rules?

I advice against tutanota. I was surpised to learn that they try to scam customers into paying for longer than was intended.

They refuse to accept cancellations of their paid premium services for when the paid for duration ends.

They insist you to login the day the duration ends to switch to the free mode. If you miss the date (by not much), they say they'll cancel and reimburse you.

The intent of this scam is clear, they hope you miss the date and pay for one more year. However, they have absolutely no legal standing in refusing the cancellation.

I'm engaged with customer protection organisations against this scam by tutanota.

Sorry i had no experience with tutanota. I just mentioned some providers. I have only experience with mailbox and runbox which both were no issues.

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