Setting up on-the-fly aliasing for my domains was also just a matter of following their directions, and I love the looks I get when I fill in [businessname]@[mydomain.com]. A middle-aged lady engaging in email nerdery really subverts expectations - I tell them if they're really hesitant to accept that address with their business's name in it that it's an organizational tool for me (true) with a bonus of free hacking detection for them (possibly true).
I do not say that the main reason is that I do not trust them to never ever misuse or lose control of my data.
Apple has been a rock-solid email host in my experience. They're not well-known as an email host, but they've been hosting email at scale for a couple of decades, or longer if you count old services like eWorld and AppleLink. (Fun fact: The first email from space was sent via AppleLink.)
I used imapsync for the actual transfer, which worked brilliantly. https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...
The only thing I don't like is their slightly buggy Android app but hey, at least it's FOSS.
The free tier is pretty generous, forces me to manage my emails better instead of letting it turn into a spam bin. I'd definitely recommend ProtonMail.
Tutanota is encrypted, FOSS, and doesn't even use Google Push. IMO it's like Proton, but a step ahead as it has a stronger focus on security and open source; plus it's much cheaper.
I think Fastmail is 100% great, but there are always some mailing lists and other recipients who might treat you as a third or fourth class citizen for sending mail from your own domain, even if you do all the deliverability stuff right.
Some people think Fastmail is a little pricey, particularly for a large inbox, but you get what you pay for.
Of note from a quick comparison... Fastmail is faster and more responsive. Which means a lot! Proton has second-order lag whenever I click a new message, folder etc. Noticbly less responsive than gmail and fastmail.
- Fastmail: Better service in every area except privacy, as ProtonMail is encrypted and Fastmail will turn over your data if a court orders them to. Though Fastmail does value your privacy and there’s nothing shady about them
- ProtonMail: Unmatched privacy and security, but at the cost of many integrations and conveniences
Set up the DKIM with your DNS and you'll be fine with your own domain. Aliasing is great, too. There webmail / portal is okay (I use desktop / iOS instead). Help pages are really good.
Friends and family or companies who use gmail they will have those messages. Those don't translate into products as easily. "Fun weekend with grandma say hi to sister" vs "purchased 3 day abortion pill from Walmart Pharmacy".
You may want to protect those personal messages between family/friends but in reality the valuable (profitable) information is in the boring what products are you buying/looking at, what segments can we group you into.
I migrated from Gmail to mailbox.org about a year ago, but Google Maps is the one Google app I can't seem to replace.
What, if anything, do you use for syncing with Google calendar? Companies tend to use it, and I find it all too easy to miss meetings.
In actuality it took about 20 minutes and was painless. They have a robust import process, it works better for iOS / macOS integration. Zero problems since then, lots of little features which are better, and their spam filters are both better in absolute terms (fewer false positives and negatives) and explainable when you want to know why something got the score it did.
It has been several years I was from time to time looking to Google alternative. But the amount of work and hassle to find an hosting service or self hosting this service was always a blocker.
Laziness at finest.
So when they started to blackmail me that I must use my credit card in order to use their previously free service. I decided to kick my ass.
I was already a ProtonMail user for another experiment with this service. After half an hour setting up everything in godaddy following proton mail how-to I finally migrated my own domain to ProtonMail, happily paying for their services.
The only thing is that as far as I didn’t pay a penny to google, I’m unable to connect to my account and backup 10years of mail. Thank you google.
Funny thing is that I can still connect to my account console mgt and succeeded to save all my keystore from chrome use. I’m still able to use chrome with the same account, except my email is not anymore managed by google but proton.
As a backup, I created an address at Infomaniak, a Swiss hosting company, they give free e-mail (without ads -- their business model is rather selling other services like e-mail on custom domains, hosting, cloud services, etc.) with 20 GB storage (see https://www.infomaniak.com/en/free-email). At the time I did it, they were requiring a Swiss mobile number (to limit the number of accounts people can get), not sure if now they accept numbers from other countries or not. In any case, it works great, both with webmail and standard SMTP/IMAP.
- they let me try all the features during the trial period unlike others whose free trial period is very restricted (I actually paid other providers to try things like using my own domain, sending mail out to external mailboxes)
- Runbox was cheaper
- liked their stance on privacy better than say fastmail
- good customer support in English
- can easily use email clients like mutt and mu own PGP keys without doing any weird stuff like uploading them to a server or using a proprietary protocol for encryption
In 2022, I highly recommend Runbox. But use your own domain so that if they decide to do mean things in the future you can just lift and shift elsewhere.
I set Gmail to forward everything to the new Fastmail email address and set a vacation message explaining that I've changed email addresses. Very painless.
In some HN discussions people said Fastmail's spam filtering is not as good as Gmail. That may be true - I dunno - but for me it has been a non-issue.
The thing I really like is it is soooo much faster than Gmail.
I've been happy with it ever since. In every conceivable way my experience with Fastmail is better than Gmail. I pay $50 a year for it.
The only Google product I interact with these days is Youtube. There simply is no alternative to that, unfortunately. (I'm a consumer, not a creator, so no: that alternative video site you're about to recommend to me will not work.)
The first email provider I switched to was Protonmail. I set up my own domain for easier portability in the future soon after that switch as well, which turned out to come in handy.
About half a year ago I switched again, this time to Mailbox.org. The only reason I made this switch, was due to Protonmail not supporting IMAP directly, but requiring their bridge application on desktop and their own mail app on mobile. With Mailbox.org I can use whichever IMAP/SMTP client I want now everywhere.
Spam detection with rspamd is surprisingly good.
If you like tinkering you might consider it as well.
I used this guide to do it: https://workaround.org/ispmail
But instead of mysql I use sqlite which is easier to work with.
I also built a small app to help me manage the database more easily: https://github.com/confuzeus/mailiness
It also is a DNS server. That is a surprisingly nice thing to have. It provides an API that makes a nice integration with LetsEncrypt for non-website certificates.
It's a 100% good thing if you are a technical type and do not want a corporation governing your email.
Running your own mail server is not hard at all.
The web app is the best desktop email interface I’ve used and the iOS app is the best mobile email interface I’ve used
Ive set it up so mail from my domain is forwarded to my free gmail account.
And I am in the process of moving my Custom Domains to Fastmail, the only thing that irks me is their mobile app refusing to open without an active internet connection.
> isn’t accessible via an email standard (IMAP, etc.)
> it’s $100/year
This must be a joke.
You’d think with the number of domain names I own I’d have one I liked
I then just imap it into gmail. My main concern isn't privacy. It's gmail suspending me for some stupid reason and leaving me locked out of my life.