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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

Let us stop using GMail:

* Google collects vast amounts of personal data, specifically through receiving all of your email and analyizing it.

* It builds elaborate user profiles and uses them to target you with ads designed to better influence you.

* Its hold on information (from different sources) has made it excessively powerful economically, and thus also politically.

* Google/Alphabet has long started to affect legislation, including through direct registered lobbying: ~15 Million USD in 2024 (opensecrets.org).

* It has been known to pass, and likely still passes, the information it collects - including copies of your email correspondence - on to the US government (Edward Snowden leaks).

and finally:

* There are multiple email providers, many of them quite good - both for pay and gratis. Naturally most of the gratis ones have their own interests, but nothing like Google.

View on HN

https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-be...

This should be seen as a encouraging to switch to something else rather than defeatist. Many of my communications do not touch Google services, professionally it has been judged as too risky, personally I keep a google account but also others.

Edit: You can create groups of people that are not affected by Google/Apple/Facebook, this should be seen as a goal.

This could be an interesting take, GDPR wise. Google handling personal emails of people that have no contract or business relationship with Google.

What's a good replacement? Needs to work on web and mobile (or desktop and mobile), have search, have labels, have automated filters.

I've been using AWS WorkMail since it was released. I prefer this arrangement because I can administer the related domain & DNS concerns in the same place.

$4/m seems nominal for a 50GB mailbox with no weird adtech shit built in.

Leaving Google for Amazon makes no sense to me, Amazon fits GP's list just as well.

This elevation of products into their parent organizations makes no sense to me.

Gmail != Google

WorkMail != Amazon

Gmail is targeted at consumers and is engineered to suck up your data to pay for itself. WorkMail is targeted at businesses and is engineered to not piss off IT administrators and middle management.

That's fair, still if I put in the effort to migrate, I would rather not do it to another company whose business is selling eyeballs. Amazon's business (maybe not WorkMail? who knows) is to sell you a maximum of stuff on their marketplace, building a detailed profile of you to recommend you more stuff.

I could also pay for a Google Workspace and stay with Gmail.

I've been using Fastmail.com since December, 2014 now and I'm still very happy with them. I use them with a few of my own domains and I've never had any issue sending or receiving any email. Recently, they even got a 1Password integration that allows you to directly create a masked email for a service from my 1Password UI. Search works perfectly, labels feel good to use and the filters are very flexible. If the UI doesn't allow you what to do, you could even directly write your own Sieve scripts.

First, I believe you're making the wrong assumption that a good replacement is web-based. The web is a poor mechanism interface for accessing email. Use a mail client! That will work on PCs, laptops and mobile apps - and you don't depend on your email provider for your usage experience; they all offer IMAP (and many offer POP3). That means you'll have search, labels, elaborate automated filters - including custom actions on your computer, which no web-based interface will offer you (I think). Most email providers do offer a web interface, and some of those are pretty nice, but I'd always consider them a fallback.

Anyway, among the popular providers, I am partial to ProtonMail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_Mail

it's Swiss, run by a non-profit, and originally crowd-funded. Over 100 Million users, IIANM. I am not a cyber-security expert, so I can't claim to have audited them for security or privacy bona fides (but maybe somebody has?).

I've also heard suggestions to try Tuta (tuta-nota), but have never tried it myself.

There are also many smaller providers. Specifically, many Internet access providers also provider email services. Not that they are super trustworthy, but - there's a good chance you're not just hading everything over to one of the behemoths like Google or Microsoft.

If you do end up on one of the bigger providers - it's probably best to be on one that's not linked to the government where you live. So if you're in a NATO country you could go for yandex or mail.ru and if in Russia then maybe GMX?

Unfortunately - wherever you take your email - when you write a GMail address, Alphabet has a hold of your correspondence again. So, we need to convince our friends to ditch Google as well.

I made no such assumption, I wrote "web (or desktop)". Web is what I have now.

A problem with desktop clients is that they are usually generic IMAP clients, meaning they have limited support for server-side search, non-standard features like labels, and creating server-side filters.

What are the best free replacements to gmail that are realistic to switch to? I.E well established and not poised to close down any time soon

You may have to temper your expectations. Free usually means "sells/uses your data to offset costs". If you're OK with that, there's no need to switch off of GMail. If you're not OK with that, you'll have to pay.

Also, hosting email under your own domain gives you the freedom to move from one email provider to another even if they do shut down.

I put my money where my mouth is. I wanted to degoogle and so pay $50/year for Fastmail. One feature I like is automatically snoozing certain emails. Most of my non-personal email is automatically snoozed until 6pm every day. This way I don't get multiple notifications throughout the day for emails that aren't time sensitive.

I was with you from day one and never started using gmail.

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