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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

Everyone reading this on Chrome should switch their browser today. Get off of Gmail while you're at it. There is no perfect alternative, but all those reasons why you think you can't switch don't add up to anything a fraction as bad as what Google is doing.

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Seriously. Anyone who cares at all about privacy should never have touched Chrome in the first place. The reasons for its existence were obvious from the outset.

What's a good alternative to gmail? Fastmail? Protonmail? Other? I don't mind paying a small subscription.

I have been using Fastmail for many years. My wife also switched a couple of years ago. The web interface is fast, they have great IMAP support, contribute to open standards (JMAP). They can also be the DNS server for your domain.

When I contacted support a few years ago about a keyboard shortcut issue in their webmail, they were very friendly and rolled out a fixed to their beta version very quickly.

I use Fastmail and have been very happy with them. They have been trying to deal with a DDoS attack from around the time this story broke. I initially didn't think anything of the timing, but given that this story is _literally about potentially criminal conspiracy_ it tickles the part of my brain that wants to indulge in other conspiracy theories -- e.g. someone connected to Google thinking "quick, we'd better make it look like a bad idea to try moving off GMail".

Personally I liked disroot, not only does their email fits me well (most of the time), but so does their calendar. For some reason though, sometimes some emails take a bit longer to reach you, but that's quite rare.

I use hey.com

You have to get used to their system but now I prefer it compared to Gmail

I mean at this point hotmail, outlook or icloud would be preferable.

I have a paid protonmail account but haven't fully switched because the search feature is abysmal.

Their spam detection is true garbage. One year in I had zero actual spams blocked and hundreds of false positives.

Unsolicited mail from a direct mailer in India for an SEO webinar, straight to the inbox. Every message from your bank, straight to the spam folder.

Am I sure it didn't catch some spam and age it out before I saw it? Yes, because I had to go in every 2-3 weeks to pull my banking messages and other false positives out. A process which invariably went "Open Junk folder, Look for spam, Find none, Check All, Move to Inbox."

Here's the kicker, there's no option to even turn spam filtering off. It took me five cycles with the support team to get them to offer an inscrutable sieve filter that would disable filtering if I pasted it exactly right in an unvalidated free text field.

(The second-to-last agent told me there is a way to do it with sieve filters and then closed the ticket without saying how, so I had to open another ticket asking if they would kindly share the solution they coyly hinted at.)

So what you are saying is that they are very good at filtering spam, they just got inbox and junk folders mixed up? ;)

Gmail was behaving exactly like that for me for a couple of months. There was a huge HN thread of people with the same issue and that might have made someone at Google to fix finally the issue.

I recommend Posteo!

https://posteo.de/en

I'm very happy with gandi.net, $16.49 per year for a .com domain name and two email accounts (accessible via web, imap, etc), plus aliases. Been around for twenty years. They have a "no bullshit" promise.

I use Gmail but never use the web interface (or log in with it at all for the most part). I just use the built in mail clients for iOS/macOS but any app will do. They can still see your mail but can't do much with it as I use DDG for the most part and am logged into a different account for stuff like YouTube.

Not saying it’s a good alternative, but if you believe Apple’s marketing about privacy, they now allow you to use your own custom domain for family emails.

I've done my research just yesterday and decided upon mailbox.org. I fully switched over in less than 4 hours.

It's hosted in Germany (GDPR regulations and reasonable privacy), supports custom domains, provides cloud storage and office suite and supports full inbox encryption with your own public key - the service provider allegedly can't even read your email after they encrypt it.

To move your existing email from GMail, first remove large junk/spam/ads emails and then download everything with Thunderbird over IMAP, then slowly copy emails to mailbox.org folder.

It also provides cloud storage (which I intend to use in addition to Syncthing) and cloud office suite.

Migadu is very cheap and a great alternative. 20 dollars a year if you don't use email much

I have close to 15 years of emails stored in Gmail.

Is there an easy way to download that or move it to another provider?

Gmail still offers IMAP, right? Use your favorite mail client (if you don't have one, Thunderbird is FLOSS and pretty good) that has an archiving feature.

Yes, you can easily import it to Fastmail.

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753594-Imp...

They have a service called Takeout which will generate mbox file of your Gmail account. You can then import to Thunderbird or elsewhere to do as you like.

>I have close to 15 years of emails stored in Gmail.

>Is there an easy way to download that or move it to another provider?

You can set up pop3 access[0] to your gmail account, download your emails (with any of a variety of clients[1]) and have the client delete them from your google account.

I'm sure there are other ways to do so as well.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7104828?hl=en

[1] https://www.getmailbird.com/pop3-email-account/#Top_Mail_Cli...

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