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Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

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Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#101

Post by majewsky »

akudha wrote: post #83
majewsky wrote: post #21

I use the mailbox offering of Posteo ( https://posteo.de ) and am very happy with it. They're a small business located in Germany that does not do any bullshit (no ads, no tracking, etc.), and ticks a lot of the checkboxes for ethical business (as much encryption as possible, careful examination of court orders instead of automated law enforcement access, exclusive usage of renewable energy, etc.). I usually go in vi…

Just one Euro per month per inbox? That is awesome, I wonder what their margin is

According to their own accounts, they have not taken any venture capital or loans. And they say they're donating to NGOs on a regular basis. I could also imagine that users' deposits are invested. (They use a pre-paid model, and e.g. I always send 25 or 50 euros at a time when recharging my Posteo account. An average of maybe 5 euros times 50,000 users is a quarter million in free cash.)

Source: https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#103

Post by dewey »

tmaly wrote: post #99
dewey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that. Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.

Is there a wild card feature to capture any address on a domain? I currently have multiple email addresses for a single domain. If I moved the email to fastmail, would I have to pay for each individual email on that domain?

Yes there’s a catch all address too.

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#104

Post by scruple »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #70
GLjEI4YbnGD27LB wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thirded, I too am quite happy enough with protonmail I decided to pay for their service.

Fourthed. I can see me transitioning, so far so good.

Here, as well. Very happy with protonmail.

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#105

Post by lgregg »

faissaloo wrote: post #102

You might want to take a look at cock.li, the guy who owns it is pretty dead set on keeping the feds away and is really hands off about what you use it for. I've been using it for my personal correspondence email for about a year now and it's been fine.

Those domain names are something else...

Why do you trust him?

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#106

Post by msh »

InternetOfStuff wrote: post #81
eeutb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is too expensive. They have no competition. I wish someone would come around and disrupt those prices.

There's also mailbox.org While their offerings differ in the details, by and large they offer the same thigns as fastmail.

Unfortunately they have stopped accepting credit cards. They now only take bitcoin and bank transfer (and cash by mail and some other non international stuff)

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#107

Post by nmjenkins »

smartt wrote: post #96
66d8kk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.

If you only want to receive mail at aliases it's easy: just setup an email catch-all on your domain ;-) To send is another matter; and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to easily do this with fastmail.

Just create a wildcard identity to match (*@yourdomain.com) – when you select this in compose, you will be able to edit the address.

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#108

Post by steaminghacker »

I run several mailservers but my main email addresses go to fastmail.

the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works.

I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal.

FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers.

my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes.

So these are for side projects. not for real work.

another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.

Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

#109

Post by WaltPurvis »

eeutb wrote: post #50
MandieD wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a lower price, someone would be doing it already. It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.

I disagree. Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. It simply doesn't add up. The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.

Wow. I've just been poring over the Fastmail website, reading about all their features, and wondering what the catch is, i.e., the price seems astonishingly low for everything Fastmail offers. I'm totally signing up.
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