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Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

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

#141

Post by newscracker »

eeutb wrote: post #42
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.)

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

I found it expensive as well in the past. Depending on your needs, you could look at Posteo.de and Fastmail.org. They're around half the price of Fastmail's lowest pricing tier, but have differences on number of aliases and a few other things. If you need a lot of aliases, Fastmail may be cheaper. Storage space, no ads, commitment to privacy are similar.

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

#142

Post by newscracker »

1ba9115454 wrote: post #3

Even if you secure your side of communications you're at the mercy of people who send and receive email to and from you. If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts. You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse. A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.

For me, it's all the commercial, financial and similarly sensitive emails that matter the most. Those companies are certainly not using a free Gmail account for the most part, and whatever paid service they use (GSuite or Outlook365 or other) wouldn't mine this information. With my use of a paid email service that has no ads and promises privacy, this part is handled. Personal emails from those who use Gmail would get mined and profiled, but that's a harder problem to solve. I do try to push people out of free email services and to paid ones that are cheaper and more suitable for privacy.

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

#143

Post by newscracker »

spondyl wrote: post #29

I can recommend the folks over at Migadu ( https://migadu.com ) which is a small Swiss email host. Their support is very responsive and I never had any issues while there. I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it. Performing an action on every email such as settin…

Anecdotal: whenever I contacted Migadu (as a potential customer), it didn't seem like they were reading the messages sent to them at all. Looks like they're either heavily understaffed or their technology isn't that great. I personally wouldn't recommend it.

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

#144

Post by bjrnio »

dod9er wrote: post #73

Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them. I was just going to start with https…

Check out github.com/hardware/mailserver, just finished setting it up for myself and feels great.

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

#146

Post by voltagex_ »

livingpunchbag wrote: post #97
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.)

OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure? A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would b…

Dreamhost's primary business isn't email. Fastmail's is.

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

#147

Post by Jaymoon85 »

jolmg wrote: post #120
TarpitCarnivore wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use a wildcard for this: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.

This is no good when you want to use the fastmail domain for the aliases. Ever since the twitter @N theft[1], I've learned to never use a custom domain email when signing up for anything. It just increases your attack surface. I prefer to leave it to fastmail to protect their own domain from hijacking. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...

You could forward all mail from a Gmail address to Fastmail, and then use username+service@gmail.com for each service you use. Might be considered security through obscurity, but if nobody knows your actual email domain except for the Gmail address, less likely to have it attacked. Goes without saying to protect that Gmail account at all costs though.

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

#148

Post by newscracker »

newscracker wrote: post #141
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.

I found it expensive as well in the past. Depending on your needs, you could look at Posteo.de and Fastmail.org. They're around half the price of Fastmail's lowest pricing tier, but have differences on number of aliases and a few other things. If you need a lot of aliases, Fastmail may be cheaper. Storage space, no ads, commitment to privacy are similar.

I meant to say Posteo.de and Mailbox.org and mistyped the latter above.

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

#149

Post by newscracker »

zhte415 wrote: post #5

For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com? You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app. I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.

It's still cumbersome or close to impossible to move out of Protonmail along with one's emails. The IMAP support is still in beta, and has been under consideration for a few years now. The easiest way to move out of Protonmail is to abandon one's emails there and start afresh somewhere else.

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

#150

Post by mdaniel »

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...

Just in case you haven't tried it, I have found that about 80% of the time, they have some frontend JS regex that blocks the form, but using the wizardry of one's choosing, if you managed to get the email address posted to the endpoint, all is well.
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