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Comment by vincentkriek | Hacker News Reader

What is $normalemailprovider? I have been looking for an alternative that is more standard, but it seems like only Fastmail is big in this space. The rest are small shops that don't convey a lot of confidence.

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Big or not, Fastmail is a great service and one I’ve used for many years now.

Not sure what qualifies as "normal", but I've been happy with mailfence.com for a few years now. I rarely see them mentioned in privacy lists, which I appreciate, as I don't want them to get too much attention. :)

They're based in Belgium, and have a solid stance on privacy and security. They provide IMAP/SMTP access, calendar/CalDAV, contacts/CardDAV, custom domain names, filters, spam blocking, etc. It's a pretty well-rounded and maintained service. The web UI is not the most modern, but it's usable.

Yeah, no way mailfence is that privacy friendly. https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-news/how-cops-c...

The police were able to get a lot of info from mailfence to catch a stupid student who thought using a vpn and mailfence would enable him to send threats easily to the richest man in india. The police got info on how many accounts were from this country, how many of them were active, monitor the mail account for new mails etc..

No reputable email service will allow you to use it to commit crimes. If the activity is against their ToS, and they get a legal warrant to provide information to the authorities, then this goes beyond any reasonable expectation of privacy.

Mailfence is pretty open about this[1]. Their privacy policy[2] also seems reasonable. Their only obligation is complying with Belgian law, and I'll take that any day over a service within the Five Eyes jurisdiction.

[1]: https://blog.mailfence.com/transparency-report-and-warrant-c...

[2]: https://mailfence.com/en/privacy.jsp

Ah, good to know. Although, Crime means nothing when police can easily just register a fake case and ask to monitor your email id. India has fallen a lot in human rights ranking in this decade.

Fastmail is supposed to be good. But you can just buy your own domain with Email hosting. It is free with gandi.net. Or use https://www.infomaniak.com/

Infomaniak also sells email hosting for around 20 Euro per year, they are based in Switzerland. If you have your own domain, just type the domain name as you would buy the domain and if the interface says domain taken, select email hosting (the three dots).

Gandi mailboxes are not free anymore (discussed e.g. here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35080777).

C&P from the other thread:

"So, further to recent changes at Gandi, I've just got some more info from support which I've included below. I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027. When I purchased that service the offer was inclusive of 2 mailboxes for the duration of the contract, and now they're planning to remove those inclusive mailboxes and start charging me extra for them from next month.

To me, this sounds like a planned and fully intentional breach of contract."

Sorry, I was not aware that they changed. Currently I don't hold a domain with them. They were always a decent provider. This behavior seems very unfortunate.

Just note that fastmail‘s search is basically useless if you expect Gmail-like search (unless I am missing some sort of trick to get it working). The rest of Fastmail is excellent though.

I use thunderbird IMAP and honestly, the search is not great either. If I have trouble finding something, recoll normally does the job. It indexes thunderbird too. And should you have a ZIP attachement in thunderbird, it will index the content too. :-). I think you could even set up up with cuneiform that a PDF inside the ZIP attachment goes through OCR should it not be plain text.

https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/index-recoll.htm...

(I work for Fastmail). Our search is comparable and in some ways more powerful than Gmail's search. If you're having problems, please create a support ticket (or just email support@fastmail.com) and we'd love to look into that for you. Thanks!

Tell me more. I use Gmail at work and Fastmail at home, and I usually access all my emails via search. I much prefer Fastmail overall.

Why would someone expect a Gmail-like search when using not-Gmail?

Can’t say I’ve had many issues with Fastmail search at all. Google is known for search so they would naturally prevail for some searches, but Fastmail does just fine.

You can also get your own domain, and have FastMail host your e-mail with that. It has the benefit of not tying your e-mail address to any single e-mail hoster: you own the domain for it.

FastMail has excellent documentation to get this set up. Migrating there from GMail (were I already used my own domain) was a breeze.

I'll second this. Moved from Gmail as well.

I recently started using fastmail and am generally please with it. The only downside is that it's based in Australia, a country who's hatred of privacy would make even the NSA blush.

An FYI: Fastmail’s mail servers are located in the U.S.

Australian jurisdiction that can forcefully dictate any kind of spying and US where data stream tapping is the easiest, so it's double bad then

I usually suggest people to take a look at these: mailbox.org, runbox.com, mailfence.com, posteo.de (this last one doesn’t support custom domains). They’re all cheap enough, provide IMAP and POP, and are located in different countries in Europe.

i am with migadu for ~6+ years . all Fine.

sometimes some actions (mostly moving mails between folders - like deleting) are slow. But not a show stopper.

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