Proton Mail for example built it's business around privacy.
There is alot email is capable of that has been forgotten.
1. For example I am part of this mailing list that is like 30 years old. And it feels sort of like a small niche social network. There is alot of improvement that needs to be done in this space.
2. Alias generation. I really would like to subscribe to some news letters or place my email out in public but I don't want to do it with my real email for fear of being spammed.
3. Cataloguing & curating emails. It would be really nice if I could book mark different messages into different folders.
4. Read receipts. All email hosts claim to have this feature but I have actually failed to use them for every single service I am signed up to.
5. Make it easy to configure custom domain names.
6. Tagging doesn't work on Gmail's mobile app. It's so badly implemented on other services.
7. Have a good API why do I have to go to sendgrid?
Around the claim regarding privacy. But have you tried to sign up without providing some other email address or a phone number? https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-g...
https://cointelegraph.com/news/proton-mail-exposing-activist...
https://restoreprivacy.com/protonmail-data-requests-user-log...
But even if your IP is on their naughty list, you can delete that data once you have registered, and I would be very surprised if Proton secretly kept it after you delete it.
"You did not set a recovery method so account recovery is impossible if you forget your password. Proceed without recovery method?"
...which you can just click through.
Yep.
Here's a video of me doing it: https://streamable.com/8anw1v
If only one could give out an e-mail address, which would be a valid destination from a single, intended source ...
+1 for this.. I'd like to give out specific emails while filling forms and be able to deactivate/delete it as soon as i don't need it.
It's easy to unsubscribe from a shitty service or a newsletter, just delete the email and that's it.
They also have custom domain names, you do need to do the requisite DNS magic, but they give you step by step instructions where you just copy-paste stuff. And I think you can have them host the domain so they'll handle everything.
Fastmail labels ("tagging") works pretty well too, you just need to write the rules yourself, there is no fancy magic doing it automatically like Gmail.
My email is hperrin@port87.com.
When I want to give my email to a service, like Netflix, I wouldn't use that though. I'd use something like hperrin-netflix@port87.com. Then when Netflix sends an email there, Port87 will automatically create a pending "netflix" label for me to approve. All of Netflix's emails will go there. Each email address is separated from all other accounts, the email is automatically organized, and you can control whether you want notifications and to mark new email as read per label.
Then if I want to give my email to a friend, I would use something like hperrin-friends@port87.com. My "friends" label has screening enabled, so any new sender gets an email back asking them to click a link to prove they're human before their email is delivered.
Finally, I can share hperrin@port87.com publicly, because any email sent there gets an autoresponse with a list of addresses for my "public labels". The sender can choose which label is best for their message. For example, I have a lot of open source projects, so I have a public "opensource" label.
I've been using it for over a year now since I launched it publicly, and it's really a night and day difference over the more traditional style email services.
Some people get around this by using the plus sign, but how some systems treat plus signs can be unpredictable.
Most other providers I would have to pay 10-30x as much, just because I have several users and domains, at a grand total overhead cost of 0$ to the provider.
They have a lot of positive points, but I can give a few negatives to try to balance out the opinions:
* When sending emails to others, in my experience they usually arrive at spam. This could be because in those cases I was sending from domains less than one year old, but I don't think I've had this issue with other providers (e.g. Protonmail).
* Using them to send emails in any automated way (e.g. scripting) is against their TOS. I understand their reasoning, but I would have liked this rule to be relaxed a bit because I would really like to use it for sending notifications to myself, so I would be happy even with a restriction like "if sender and receiver are the same address (or part of the same mailbox), you're allowed to use scripts to send those".
* They don't guarantee any kind of SLA. If they go down, they go down. Not a problem most of the time, but during the start of The Pandemic they had a lot of downtime and that made me realize how painful it is to try to use email when the provider has flaky availability. They fixed it after ~3 months or so, but that was bad enough to make me stop using them for some time. When I heard they fixed it I gave them a second chance and haven't had any issues since then (it's been 3-4 years already and I haven't noticed issues). But this single experience is hard to forget, so I don't use them for anything critical (stuff I would need to read in less than 24 hours or so, much less respond), just in case. Even if SMTP should mostly ensure that you eventually receive emails, and that your sent emails eventually reach their destination, I still have the critical stuff sent to a Gmail or Outlook address.
Despite those points, I like their service enough that I still recommend them from time to time.
I don't care about individual email addresses. What I really want is to be able to handle asterisk@asterisk.example.com both for receiving but more importantly for sending.
Receiving is fairly easy with aliases and catch-alls. But for some reason all clients / providers make it really hard to send emails from any address you own.
I think there is money in this problem.
I'm not an expert, but I believe that each subdomain needs to improve its own spam score.
Getting to a point where you can automatically send emails from any domain is easy.
Getting it to arrive to any inbox is the expensive part.
In Thunderbird, you click the "From" dropdown, do "Customize From Address" and type the address you want to use. Works for me anyway.
I was buying a pair of shoes online and some kind of fraud flag was raised. They asked me to reply to their email to prove I owned it. I ended up replying from my actual account, as I didn't want to burn one of my actual address on a one-time thing. I never gave the email I sent from to anyone, and it has received 0 emails, I really didn't want to risk having it added to their email list by using it, but didn't feel like I had a lot of option. I went on a bit of a rant as a reply, explaining my whole setup, why wha they were asking was problematic, and warning them how irate I would be if the email I was sending from ever got spam in the future, I'd know it was from them.
Of course, the more I try to solve this email problem by using additional addresses, aliases, etc, the more I think I'm just creating a larger problem. If I could go back in time, I would probably not do any of it, and instead just have the 1 address that I use for everything to keep it easy. Instead of investing time in making new accounts, actually invest time in clicking unsubscribe, blocking, and training the spam filters... also, being very selective about where it's used, although that can be difficult these days.
I don't have the custom domains feature ready yet, but once I launch it, it sounds like it would fit your needs.
- don't train AI on my mails
- don't sell my data to advertisers.
- protect my data from overzealous law enforcement
Right now, I'm running my own mail server on a dedicated machine. I wouldn't mind getting rid of it. One feature i need is a configurable sub-adressing separator (not just "+").
If you use postfix & dovecot, the setting that might help you is recipient_delimiter
After years of training my family to use "U-C@D" to help identify where spam is coming from (because there's still an astonishing number of sites that refuse '+' as a valid email character), I realised I'd trapped myself into (probably) having to provide the email server forever because I've yet to find a hosted alternative that provides configurable/additional subaddseps.
Great to see who is leaking your address.
good balance for me...
I do but "a single alias per site" only works for one person domains, not a domain shared over a bunch of family members.
I know what you mean about sites that don't accept it. Microsoft even has the gall to call it an "invalid address" when you use a plus.
A secondary benefit for me is that Purelymail is cheap ($10/yr). But a major downside is that the CalDAV implementation doesn't yet support Accepted/Rejected scheduling responses. It's fantastic that they have CalDAV at all, but this one feature would seal the deal for me.
I don't mention it to suggest you could directly compete on that unlimited-users value prop, but it's an example along the lines that max_ suggests.
One that comes to mind is integration with recent ActivityPub / fediverse stuff. There might be cool design space there
Mail server projects are a different story though. There's no simple way to create a fully fledged mail server without weeks of pain to configure spam, routing, calendars, security... there are some preconfigured images in all major cloud platforms, but nothing like `apt install mail-server` that pops out a simple config assistant in an already existing server.
I've been running small mail systems for around 25 years. Just like learning to drive - lots of stuff to learn up front. Just remember to fill up every now and again and keep on top of maintenance.
I have no idea what "MUA's the that read directly off the spool" means.
I run a few Exim MTAs ie SMTP front ends. Some front MS Exchange and some front Dovecot imapd. They work fine.
No listener required, or the services, authentication and encryption that go with them. In this case I run email for myself. Email gets pushed from an Internet MTA with global addresses, to a local MTA that happens to be my workstation. I either read the email from the console, or ssh in through a jump host.
Another email service I want would be one that I have to authorize the sender before their mail gets into my inbox even if it's not classified as spam. Sure, that email can be routed to some dumping ground so I can sift through it if an expected message is missing, but by default nothing goes to my inbox unless I've routed the sender there. And when I "accept" a sender it should be trivially easy to route them to any mailbox or make a new one. And it should be trivial to manage those routing rules later. All this is already possible with existing services, but enough of a pain that I don't maintain it.
The last thing is a tough one: a way to port my existing email into the system and a guarantee that I won't lose my email if you shut down in a few years. Trying other email providers is not worth it if I won't be able to find anything from the past and I might be at risk of losing them in the future.
Look at Fastmail for a surprisingly popular service that gets most of this massively wrong.
Fastmail likes to brag about their JMAP protocol, and maybe JMAP is great and maybe it's not, but it's certainly the case that their iOS app is 100% nonfunctional when offline. I've been using various forms of email for quite a while. Microsoft's MAPI crud in all its incarnations works offline. POP3 works (albeit poorly) offline. IMAP works offline. Fastmail does not.
> does not issue network requests based on email content
How do you expect to combine these two goals?
I would expect: fair pricing, local (as in the country you live in) hosting (for legal reasons), features like using your own domain, maybe service for calDAV cardDAV etc. to tie up the bundle.
Also no user data aggregation, no excessive logging, etc.
Really, the one thing I would look for to recommend this to others is having that _and_ ease of use for non-techies.
I've also seen the idea of an email client organized as Facebook - with feed, groups, comments, DMs etc, but where all the data is sent as emails
Like for example Google One is $2/100GB and $10 for 2TB yet you can definitely get storage much cheaper than this, and bandwidth is close to, if not free on bare metal clouds.
I've been considering this myself. That or some IRCv3 offering.
If you go the commercial route you'll almost certainly end up building an ERP/CRM, as it's what a lot of companies seem want: a personalized ERP/CRM (not sure why, though it does kind of feels like just outsourcing an IT dept whenever this has come up in the past)
AFAIK, except 4 those are already solved, but not within one provider - without paying those mentioned $10/u/m.
On iOS, at least, you can do this using a `.mobileconfig` profile (which is just an XML plist file). Create that, get your user to access it via HTTP, messages, etc., and iOS will configure the mail account for them. I've used it when family members have lost/forgotten/wiped their details.
Some providers do seem to offer this, e.g. (random example from a search) https://support.mailroute.net/hc/en-us/articles/292348267548...
This is a few years back, so it might have changed.
I get that subscriptions pile up, but email is the cornerstone of your identity online. Your login and recovery for most services. Getting your mails through requires work these days. I think overall is good value.
This is really a good price, let‘s see if I get my wife to switch over.
There was a thread about this just a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40924055
Protonmail is increasingly Gmail-like in every respect -- with its AI "tools," with it asking you for personal information upon account setup, and in obliging cooperation with foreign courts -- so a new service which doesn't deviate from a focus on true privacy would rapidly find its niche.
The new hosting service does all the trust and anti spam/virus/phishing stuff, and maybe does or helps with the neat stuff you get from gmail (indexing and clever integration to calendar and travel/shipping integrations.) We'll either buy VPS or self host on hardware in our house the actual data.
For personal use I feel like we already have a very good set of email providers. For small businesses not really.
What I think is outside their target market, but what would be a great next step for projects with slightly more needs would be a Google Workspace/Outlook sort of service with a similar approach. Simple CRM features, shared contact management, calendars, signatures, etc. Roughly what Proton is doing without the Silicon Valley pricing, or maybe even Hubspot.
What I am thinking doesn't have to compete with the whole Office or Google Docs suite, or HubSpot. There is imo enough value in being an economic all-in-one email solution for "the rest of us". Point DNS there, get email, CRM, maybe even a small transactional mail quota and some marketing email features.
I have two projects I would onboard yesterday if this existed, and I have spent more than a hot minute thinking about going for it myself, just to scratch my own itch. The main reason so far that I haven't is that Migadu + Resend is enough for my needs at this time, and I can do without CRM for now.