Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#1

Post by ics » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 7:54 PM UTC

Fair and decent– well priced, solid data policies, easy to use or configure...

I've self-hosted in the past and would consider doing it again for privacy reasons, however a solid email provider would certainly save a lot of work on the spam/delivery side of things and could potentially make up for it in the general case. One of the things I'm concerned about though is finding a solution that would allow me to create/destroy aliases on the fly and add addresses across multiple domains (one user/mailbox) without paying exorbitant amounts, but other features like full IMAP support, two-factor authentication, and a fast interface are also desirable.

So far I've looked at: Rackspace, Fastmail, and Namecheap but I'm curious to see what people here (especially DevOps) are using and would recommend. Even though price is a controlling factor for me, I thought the discussion might be valuable since I'm sure the recent news is just one more reason why some people might feel uncomfortable relying on their Gmail accounts.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#2

Post by skram » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:11 PM UTC

THis has been asked several times.. but I'll go ahead and say I've been using Fastmail.fm for my personal email for several years now and have not had a problem with it.

For work, I've used self-hosted exchange (I didnt manage it), Rackspace, and most recently Microsoft Office 365 for my current startup. We're liking MS O365 but I wouldn't pay that much for my personal email hosting at this point.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#3

Post by lifeguard » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:15 PM UTC

Doesn't gmail do everything you ask for? $50 a year? It is the best if you don't care about control/privacy.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#4

Post by nodata » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:21 PM UTC

Fastmail has earned its name recently - it's freaking fast now. Much faster than gmail.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#5

Post by ics » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:22 PM UTC

lifeguard wrote: post #3

Doesn't gmail do everything you ask for? $50 a year? It is the best if you don't care about control/privacy.

But I do care about control and privacy. I have a few clients who I likely will be moving to Google Apps but it's not really what I'm looking for. That's $50/year per user, which is a fine price for the amount of space you get but far too much for me when I would much rather divide that 30GB into 30x1GB mailboxes. That being said, it looks like their alias features are very agreeable (30 addresses, 20 domains).

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#6

Post by workhere-io » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 8:46 PM UTC

I don't understand why people often suggest FastMail when it comes to privacy. FastMail's "servers are located in New York City with a backup in Norway" according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastmail.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#7

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 5:54 PM UTC

It's funny that people would flee from Gmail to other third-party mail providers out of privacy concerns, because it suggests they think their biggest privacy concerns are the NSA. But that's not true; in practice, you have much more to fear from criminals than the government; you can use simple means/motive/opportunity reasoning to arrive at this conclusion.

Meanwhile: no mail provider in the world has invested more resources in security than Google Mail. Google spends millions of dollars to ensure the security of the Google Mail platform. It also runs a public-facing bounty program --- one of the oldest and most reputable --- to solicit more vulnerabilities. It staffs a large and extremely well-regarded software security team to keep up with vulnerability classes and to research new ones.

Can you say the same thing about Fastmail.fm?

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#8

Post by lifeguard » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 6:35 PM UTC

ics wrote: post #5

lifeguard wrote: post #3

Doesn't gmail do everything you ask for? $50 a year? It is the best if you don't care about control/privacy.

But I do care about control and privacy. I have a few clients who I likely will be moving to Google Apps but it's not really what I'm looking for. That's $50/year per user , which is a fine price for the amount of space you get but far too much for me when I would much rather divide that 30GB into 30x1GB mailboxes. That being said, it looks like their alias features are very agreeable (30 addresses, 20 domains).

Ahh, I did not understand you wanted service for multiple users. It sounds like price is your main requirement.

>>Rackspace, Fastmail, and Namecheap

These are slightly lower quality than gmail IMO.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#9

Post by rotnewson » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 7:08 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #7

It's funny that people would flee from Gmail to other third-party mail providers out of privacy concerns, because it suggests they think their biggest privacy concerns are the NSA. But that's not true; in practice, you have much more to fear from criminals than the government; you can use simple means/motive/opportunity reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. Meanwhile: no mail provider in the world has invested more…

My understanding is that people went to fastmail to get away from google's tracking not the NSA.

Re: Ask HN: Fair and decent email providers?

#10

Post by ics » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 8:12 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #7

It's funny that people would flee from Gmail to other third-party mail providers out of privacy concerns, because it suggests they think their biggest privacy concerns are the NSA. But that's not true; in practice, you have much more to fear from criminals than the government; you can use simple means/motive/opportunity reasoning to arrive at this conclusion. Meanwhile: no mail provider in the world has invested more…

Admittedly I was asking this here primarily for small business suggestions– I certainly wouldn't expect a simple provider switch to pull the wool over the NSA's eyes. It's a silly thought for a business anyway, where the only people you might be trying to hide from are your competitors. As you said, for practical security Google's offerings are likely top notch and it gives me no qualms having some accounts with them. That being said, I think there's still room for someone to bring almost as much to the table security wise through focus and perhaps a tighter codebase, but beat them out for clear ("fair and decent") terms in regards to privacy and data handling.

Regarding Fastmail, as far as I can tell the new interface is one of the better ones around and it's a big help that they provide Yubikey authorization. I've been using Google Authenticator for a while now but in recommending it to others I've found people taking advantage of just about every opportunity to undermine its usefulness (i.e. backup codes not protected or used regularly when their phone is dead, disabling two-factor auth for a few days because they forgot their charger, or sharing app-specific keys...).