Bonus points for EU jurisdiction, and a mail interface that doesn't look like the 90s (for my use).
If EU jurisdiction is important to you, Runbox* and Mailfence are pretty ok - their service isn't as well-documented nor polished/reliable as Fastmail (e.g. I've hit some odd errors fetching large amounts of messages over IMAP - e.g. connecting a new client and blind first big sync of mail on an account with a large archive) but overall they're both extremely serviceable.
Re: mail interfaces, Runbox's is a little better than Mailfence, but both are a little dated. Again, Fastmail is better here; non-EU is their only fault imo.
* Runbox is technically not actually EU, per se, being Norwegian.
Fastmail was the best. They have IMAP integrated with contacts and calendaring. Sieve filtering and good webui. The main reason I left them is that they were rejecting (not just spam-folder) important mail, even if I whitelisted the domain by adding a contact. I contacted support and it took them forever to get back and when they finally did they basically said "nope, we will reject those, you are wrong about what spam is". It didn't leave a good taste in my mouth.
Migadu was pretty good but I had trouble getting my catchall accounts working how I wanted too.
MXroute was very opinionated and I didn't agree with all of their opinions. They pretty readily block large blocks of IPs or senders so you will miss mail. They also don't believe in Bayesian spam filtering and it shows as a lot of spam ends up in your inbox. So not only was I missing mail I wanted I was getting a lot of mail I didn't. They also have 5 webmails that aren't well integrated as well as 2 address books and 2 calendars. They seem to really like trying new things but miss out on integration such as using my address book for spam filtering. On the upside the support was fast and direct. I appreciate the clarity of the responses. I think there are some people who would love this provider but their choices don't work well for me.
While I can't recommend it I ended up managing my own incoming mail. Spam was surprisingly barely an issue. RSpamd with default settings is working excellently. Basically I dumped my spam folder (1 month) and archive (many years) into the spam learning and it has been doing an excellent job. The flexibility of running your own mail-server is also nice because I can do things like signed addresses for giving out different emails to different companies.
"Opinionated" is a very good word for them, though. I think Jarland Donnell is legitimately passionate about running a good email services, and has strong opinions about what that means. In my experience, it's meant something no-nonsense, with good technical transparency, that delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more. Perfect for my needs.
This is worrisome; are you able to share any more information as to the nature of what was being rejected?
I've wondered if it would be useful to reject + store in spam. This way I have a copy and the sender can know that I likely won't see it.
In practice I'm using Fastmail for everything, but in theory self-hosting an IMAP server should be pretty easy. The main usefulness of hosted email services is deliverability for outgoing SMTP, with inbound spam filtering in 2nd place. So if you can separate those functions, you can do all your mail storage on your own IMAP server without suffering from much headache. I haven't tried to actually do this though.
Happy to test with anyone from hn. Email address is in my HN profile.
Their mobile app seemed fairly kludgey as well. Certain gestures didn’t really work the way that you would think because they implemented some custom way of handling it which just made the user experience worse.
They allegedly stopped doing this in 2017: https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...
1. Fastmail: tried and stopped using because of Australian law that is relatively more hostile to privacy and is more expensive that Runbox when adjusted to features (e.g. alias count limit for personal domains)
2. Mailbox.org: Tried and stopped using because firstly they made a payment routing mistake when I upgraded to a paid account during the trial and blocked sending of emails. Took a few days to get it cleared. Also, there are important features you can't try on a free trial like sensing emails to non-mailbox.org domains, configuring your own domains, etc. They quote alleviating spam account risk but it doesn't feel right when runbox allows you to try these features for free before signing up. Also, mailbox.org forces cloud drive, video calls, etc on you. I don't need that crap. Just need a solid mail service. If you want encryption, you have to upload/let them generate the private key for you. While this is technically necessary to encrypt your mail box using pgp, I don't think this is a good idea. I think entrusting the key and the lock to the same people defeats the purpose of encryption.
3. Posteo: doesn't allow personal domains. This is a deal breaker for me.
4. Soverin: I ran into some issue with Soverin. Can't remember what that was. I really wanted to use them otherwise since they seem like a small team and I like supporting small businesses.
Finally I settled for runbox because they show a decent level of commitment to privacy, cheaper for the set of features they offer (unlimited aliases on your own domain, catch all, etc), let you try all their features on free account which I think is a very good sales posture, there's a fantastic deal right now that gives you a two year subscription for the price of one.
I do not have any affiliation with runbox btw. I highly recommend using your own domain in case you need to lift and shift at some point, use pgp keys for privacy whenever possible and take a principled stand against bullshit laws like those in Australia if you care about privacy. Overall, right now, runbox will give you the best set of features and comparable privacy guarantees to their competitors for a better price.
Huh? I've been a mailbox.org user for years now and didn't even know that they have a cloud drive and video calls. How are they forcing it on you?
I see this kind of thing all the time. I could understand if you emailed a lot of stuff to yourself, but privacy is ultimately going to be determined by both email providers. It seems in this case that email is being used as a substitute for secure file sharing and secure chat.
I haven't found any meaningful negative reviews online and they are by far the lowest price. They primarily use OVH I think in France, it's stated somewhere on their site.
Bonus feature: Fastmail Notes can sync into iOS Notes app.
I have not used them except for some occasional testing, but the engineering made a solid impression.
BUT their UI is from the 90s which rules them out by the requirements. It‘s not a bummer for me as I never use the Web UI.
For me, that's a huge plus for Tutanota/Proton but Tutanota doesn't support IMAP and Proton is too expensive (I don't care about its other features, the only thing I need is IMAP).
I have also used soverin.net and broadly found it was fine, but ran into a couple of issues like difficulties managing spam settings, poor documentation on website etc. Worth noting that soverin.net also requires a phone number to sign up, which some people dislike on privacy grounds (may or may not be a deal-breaker for you).
I think you could run the ProtonMail Bridge on a personal server. It wasn't intended for that, so IDK how secure it is for exposing on the open internet.
Protonmail is soooo good, so I'd hate to rule it out, and I'd like a solution too. And it makes sense why they don't support IMAP directly, because the protocol doesn't support it, because the emails are all encrypted on their server, and IMAP doesn't support end to end encryption (to my knowledge)
The governments from both sides mine email data aggressively. Wether the companies also do it, and to what extent, there is no way to tell (Fastmail says it doesn’t, unlike Google, but we can’t verify).
As for differences, Gmail security is unrivaled AFAIK, and Gmail is free.
see: https://digital-hilfe.com/die-besten-und-sichersten-e-mail-a...
sorry it's in german, but you could let run a translation tool
But in the freer part of world the biggest challenge is users selling their privacy in exchange for so-called free services.