Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?
I’ve been getting on the privacy and anti-tracking bandwagon big time recently and am looking to replace gmail. What are good email services that allow you to use your own domain name?
The migration process was pretty painless. I did a one time import of my historical mail from gmail and then set up an autoforwarder --> specific fastmail folder that I look at from time to time and either unsubscribe from whatever sent an email there or update the address as appropriate.
You could split the zip archive into smaller sized volumes, e.g. 45MB, and store those, assuming it's something you don't access too often.
[1] https://jmap.io/
Great web and Android apps, simple and fast. I contacted their support once and wasn't disappointed.
No issues at all until last week: they lost an incoming email (which was actually spam, as they could share with me the subject and sender info) due to a bug during an upgrade on their side. They credited my account with US $5 as apology.
The only trick is you do have to configure configure the addresses if you want to send (not receive) mail from $recipient@your-domain.com.
I use the standard plan.
One of the be things about fastmail is they've been rolling out noticeable improvements to their web apps over the last 2 years.
I'd say the downsides, at this point, are the labels model for emails is slightly different than gmail. If you've decided you really like how labels work, Fastmail's don't work quite the same. And their contacts app isn't good. Though given the pace of improvements elsewhere, I suspect they're working on a fully-featured contacts app.
Aside from that, I have no complaints about their service.
One thing that hasn’t been a problem but which causes me a little anxiety is that with GSuite I felt I had basically infinite storage; I sorta wish Fastmail had a tier that was a “you don’t ever have to worry about storage space” type thing. Maybe I’m worrying for nothing and I’ll never even get close to their limits.
The mobile app is okay, it's good enough for reading and sending short replies. The web interface is alright. I like to use the bridge application from ProtonMail on my desktop and use a mail client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail.
https://community.netlify.com/t/email-domain-protonmail-com-...
I miss nothing, but absolutely nothing, about Gmail.
Spoiler: ended up using Runbox (www.runbox.com). I disagree with them on this but I think the webmail UI is pretty crap. I don't use it though, and instead use neomutt (on Linux) and Apple Mail (on iOS). I've found it to be pretty reliable and the support is very responsive.
If I would pick one I would go with Hey, since I really love their Screener feature which helped me reduce a lot of noise. When they launch Hey for Work we'll probably switch from Fastmail (not that anythig is wrong with it).
You can use your own domain and I don't think data there is used for ads.
I am really scared to put my trust in a small provider from a data security and availability view. Security is really really hard and emails are a critical part of your online and offline identity. YMMV
I think HN just dislikes the idea of google maintaining a service.
I'm on their cheapest 1€/month plan for three years and happy.
It's not perfect but I think it's the best out there for any price, including the consideration they are based in the EU.
I do wish they supported 2FA over IMAP/SMTP and CardDAV.
The most private solution by far is to self-host, but that's also very challenging these days.
And any email you send to a non-private service (Gmail, Yahoo, anyone's work account) is instantly going to be just as insecure as if you yourself used that other person's service.
What I'm getting at is that email is inherently a not-very-private communication method and you should try to avoid it. The amount of time required to make it more private is not going to have much benefit for most people (whose contacts will be using Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.)
You also can't easily or meaningfully get E2E encryption with email, so there's a lot of surface area to lose your privacy.
You can do this without self-hosting, though. As long as you control the domain and MX records, you can just switch providers when you need to.
A lot of people are now doing the "your domain + Fastmail" approach, for example (or at least they were before Australia's government went completely insane).
Not to mention that not all hosters are too keen on having people run mail servers due to the danger of hosting spammers and getting blacklisted. With the last two or three hosters, I had to jump through a couple of hoops every time and get permission to run one.
I still think it's worth it, especially if you own a bunch of domains, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone starting from scratch these days.
It works well with my own domain, but my understanding is that it's not great if you have a lot of users with email on that domain (you have to pay more).
I should have seen the yearly plan fee as a sunk cost and moved on sooner. Hope this helps someone else.
Keep in mind that several large email providers blacklist competitors by default and _literally charge an extortion fee_ to get off the blacklist. Migadu's issue is that they refuse to pay it.
Oh and it's in Beta.
It's just much easier for me to host that myself, as opposed to email, so I do.
They have most recently added ProtonCalendar and ProtonDrive [2], which were the features I was missing the most. Thus, I moved everything over and pay for the bundle of all products which comes at just under EUR 8.00 a month (Mail, VPN, Calendar and Drive).
As mentioned by others, the webmail and UI of all 4 products is minimalist, but it is snappy and pleasing (to my taste, at least). The mobile apps on both iPhone and Android work very well, just missing threaded messages on the Android one.
Finally, of course, end-to-end encryption, hosted in Switzerland and abiding by stringent national privacy laws [3] and out of the US, 5 eyes network as well as EU realms.
[1] https://protonmail.com/ [2] I believe they're still in Beta [3] https://protonmail.com/security-details
[1]: https://posteo.de/en/ [2]: https://posteo.de/en/help/which-domains-are-available-to-use...
I do with it had better calendar integration, or maybe it's own calendar. I'm not sure, but that's the big thing that Gmail has that I really miss
I also use their Invoice product for time tracking and invoicing.
I guess some folks group this into "big corp" email perhaps compared to the smaller providers, but I think if one just wants to not give google the ability to end your online life at its whim Zoho could be a good option.
I use my own domain and I do still have a separate Gmail account that I mostly use for newsletters, promotions, coupons, and other "semi-wanted spam" to keep things clean in my inbox.
Mailfence is in Belgium, so they're outside of the main Five Eyes but are still in a cooperating area and part of the Fourteen Eyes, which may matter depending on your precise personal privacy/risk levels, but for general personal privacy it's plenty for my use case.
No idea if it's better than any of the other alternatives. I also still have my Gmail account, as it would take way too much effort to change emails on all the websites I use.
I am using protonmail now, which has the option for a bunch of aliases that I really like, the web interface works fine though it's missing bells and whistles - I do miss the smart grouping of GMail! - and you get to use custom domains. It also provides encryption and you can even get VPN to go with it. Here's all the options you get per tier: https://protonmail.com/pricing
Still an early user, but so far quite happy with it!
It's $4/month and you can very easily bring any domain you have registered in route53. They also let you create as many aliases as you want. It also supports both the microsoft exchange protocol and plain SMTP.
Supports domains Good UI, web and mobile app Support for multiple other providers to federate into one system Calendar, notes, files
tl;dr. runbox.com