There are lots of apps out there, mostly priced. But I'm worried that my data (including email texts, attachments, contacts, calendar, etc.) will be saved on third-party servers, and I already have to grapple with that issue on Gmail.
Are there any email apps that can be trusted with our data, even if they're not free?
The best arguments for a long-term mail storing solution - it keeps your emails and all your mail settings, in a form that is truly portable, so that you can easily move it from computer to computer
I am trusting it with 22 GB of emails (many tens of thousands of emails) organized in many folders.
You can have it connected to many online mail services, so it will sync (and keep an offline copy of your mail) and keep all of them separate. Or, you can configure it to sort all your email in a single place and folder hierarchy.
You can have various types of filters, separately per mail account.
Absolutely. I have emails in my Thunderbird profiles going back to 1996. No one can look at them unless they hack my systems and/or have physical access to them.
I highly recommend Thunderbird (download it now. You won't be sorry.)[0].
[0]: https://k9mail.app
Edited to add that K-9 is an email client (app), but not hosting the emails.
What I use:
- MTA: Exim, greylistd + SpamAssassin for spam filtering
- MDA: Dovecot with dovecot-sieve for filtering
- MUA on Linux: mutt, claws-mail
- MUA on Android: K9
- MUA on web: Rainloop as a Nextcloud app, Roundcube standalone
I've been doing this for more than 25 years and never had any significant problems. I get far less spam in my inbox than I see in the Gmail account I registered back when that was a new thing and which I only use for testing purposes. If I am to believe the naysayers on this forum and elsewhere it is impossible to host your own mail but my experience shows they are simply wrong.
Just get a SBC, install a mail stack (MTA + MDA, Sieve, SpamAssassin, some form of greylisting if you want to use that) on it, hook it up to your residential connection, get a domain name and start experimenting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...
Another interesting question is, which email backend can you trust? It's literally your post-box, can you really trust that to be anywhere except on a physical machine in your own home?
I certainly don't. All my emails are sent/received/stored on physical hardware located on my premises.
Just about anything else is untrustworthy IMHO.
Price comparison:
Fastmail: $5x12 = $60/year
ProtonMail: €48 = $51/year
FastMail is 30GB, custom domain, infinite aliases
ProtonMail is 5GB, custom domain, 5 aliases.
For someone who uses IMAP and creates aliases when signing up / for filtering rules, as alternative to Google’s +addresses, FastMail looks like a better choice on the surface.
Can you convince me that ProtonMail is so much a better choice? Privacy matters to me, too.
From 1986-1994 I used a bizarro lash-up to get email through UUCP, which imported the messages into a DOS BBS program to use as a reader. (I said it was bizarro...) The incoming mail was in standard UUCP format, and could have been imported into any common Unix mail program of the day, and thence propagated into the future. Fortunately the BBS mail datasets were plain text, and I can still read them, even if they're not as convenient as a normal mail reader. For that matter, I can still read them running the original 1986 BBS software in DOSEMU.
It's not the best MUA there, but for the last.. five? Years it was the best one for me.
No HTML mails, no JavaScript things, no pixel trackers. Sure, I don't communicate with a living people often, and the portable version I use doesn't integrate good in the OS nor it stores the password in a secure way (it's plain text there, be warned), but it serves the purpose communicating with people and ocassionly searching my emails for something.
Overall, 8/10 for the MUA experience.
TLS support only provides a mechanism for encryption across the wires. If your email is stored unencrypted anywhere except your own physical hardware (and sometimes not even then), whoever owns that hardware can (and the likes of Google actually does) read/modify/delete any or all of your emails at their whim.
Second, split desktop and server. You can use Outlook or Thunderbird or pine from the CLI, depending upon what you care about.
Third, let’s face the server problem. There are plenty of options for self hosting all of these [1]. The trade off is that you’re going to spend WAY more time and money in maintaining it.
I explicitly said I'm not looking for just _free_ options.
I've used Alpine for email and Emacs's Calendar for calendar.