Ask HN: What is your favorite gmail alternative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your favorite gmail alternative?

12 pointswashedup12 comments

Looking for a light and simple email host as an alternative to the now bulky gmail/google complex.

Thunderbird on desktop, K-9 Mail on Android. Rackspace Mail hosts the mailboxes on all my domains. $2/mo/mailbox, 25GB storage, 100% uptime SLA, 24/7/365 phone/chat/email support, configurable backups. They have a webmail client but I don't use it; I prefer native apps.

http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/

I don't know of any gmail alternatives that exist.

Gmail is primarily a search based inbox. If you (like the person earlier) are making something based around IMAP then you're doing a 90's era web mail app. Nothing wrong with that, it's just not gmail.

My main gmail alternative would be going back and have a self-hosted one. For personal mail installing a mail server and if you want a web interface (plenty of good ones) to access it is not hard, and can be made pretty secure. But would miss excellent gmail spam filtering (not hard to add a spam filtering, what is hard is adding one as good as gmail one) and search (didn't tried any self-hosted mail search engine yet to judge).

If what worries you about gmail is privacy, then yahoo won't be an alternative. There are a few alternatives suggested in http://prism-break.org (including guidelines to install your own one)

http://www.gandi.net/ : 1 GB IMAP account included with domains - hosted in France. Another alternative (hosted in the US) is FastMail (see my review here: http://blog.workhere.io/my-experience-with-fastmail-as-a-gma...).

As for IMAP clients, I like http://airmailapp.com/.

This has been asked a gazillion times, but my personal pick is Fastmail.fm. I like both their web interface and their IMAP compatibility has never failed me.

Exactly. Thunderbird/IMAP from home, web from work.

They also have read-only LDAP access to the addressbook. If it allowed writes, I'd have thunderbird save contacts to it, but it's a step.

A domain for a project of mine uses GMail for e-mail (I don't trust my server with hosting a 99.99% up mail server: it's too cheap to be able to), while my personal website uses Microsoft Window Live Domains. My WLD is then used inside GMail though, so for the client I can't really give any good recommendation. The server for WLD seems fine, not good.

Outlook seems to be the only worthy competetor, but if your main goal is to get away from Google then I wouldn't say Microsoft is a much better option. Personally I use Gmail with my own domain and try to keep regular backups of all mail so that in the event things go south I can quickly move to another provider.

I've personally found Opera's Fastmail & Zoho Mail to be pretty good.

During the start of the whole NSA/Prism spying thing, many people mentioned that those were two they were switching to.

FastMail, while an Australian company, is hosted in the US.

Also, they've recently branched back off from Opera and are now an independent company.

I use http://rediffmail.com

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