Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by jolmg » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 11:13 PM UTC

66d8kk wrote: post #93

greenyoda wrote: post #2

You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)

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.

Tried that, once. I wish they had a simple web api for this.

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

#122

Post by jolmg » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 11:26 PM UTC

MandieD wrote: post #48

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.

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.

It only feels unlimited. It's actually limited to 600 aliases, which I think is good to avoid one account getting thousands and depleting the usable namespace for other users.

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

#123

Post by taneq » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 1:02 AM UTC

penglish1 wrote: post #119

Another happy fastmail.com customer here. I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise. There is certainly no way you can run your own…

> There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year)

If you're talking about self-hosting at home, then probably true unless you're using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the server.

You can get web hosting including email at your own domain for somewhere around $50/year, though. I think I'm paying $26/year for hosting and $13/year for domain registration (or thereabouts, it's a trivial amount anyway) which comes with as many email addresses as I want at the domain, 10GB storage, and some amount of web traffic (50GB/mo maybe?) that's never been an issue.

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

#124

Post by sliken » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

Jaruzel wrote: post #38

I find the worst part of running a private mail system is the spam. It morphs so often that you are always fighting a running battle just to keep it under control. Achieving a zero-spam target is almost impossible. The larger players (gmail/Office365) only manage to do it because they are handling millions of messages a day and have thousands of honeypot addresses just for spam catching. As a small player there's no…

Use one of the DNS based blacklists (amavis, mailfilter and other similar tools are supported on most linux platforms) and add greylisting. Sure if you want to go the extra mile you can train the filters, generally I find it not worthwhile.

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

#125

Post by randie63 » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 2:16 AM UTC

hidden_sheepman wrote: post #111

Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but checkout Tutanota https://tutanota.com/ I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.

+1

The new interface redesign is perfect and really snappy. The new mobile apps will be open source and for android also available on F-Droid app store

https://mail.tutanota.com/

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

#126

Post by nhumrich » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 2:17 AM UTC

penglish1 wrote: post #119

Another happy fastmail.com customer here. I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise. There is certainly no way you can run your own…

> even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info

It sure does: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo...

Because there are no ads in the paid version, (and because they are dealing with hippa/soc2 etc.) They have no need to look at your data.

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

#127

Post by gexcolo » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 3:09 AM UTC

lgregg wrote: post #105

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?

you shouldn't trust him, he gets google alerts and finds threads on hacker news and posts wacky comments like this one

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

#128

Post by trisimix » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 3:38 AM UTC

Obligatory check out protonmail

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

#129

Post by whatsstolat » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 5:27 AM UTC

repsilat wrote: post #118

cggarvey wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve run into sites that consider + invalid within an email address. It would also be easy for a site that wants to sell off user info to have a regex strip the +sitename from emails prior to selling the list.

The worst I've dealt with is a site that allows + within an email address for signup but not unsubscribe. They've been hitting my spam folder for years now...

Lucky you have the + to filter them out then.

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

#130

Post by matogato » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 5:29 AM UTC

happyvalley wrote: post #64

Happy user at mailbox.org They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even send them money by post for complete anonymity. Edit: You can use a custom domain

Another happy user at mailbox.org here!

Mail (with optional custom domain), calendar, address book, storage and XMPP for 1€/month.