Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 589 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#191

Post by nadont8 »

danpalmer wrote: post #187
nadont8 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.

I don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people. Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.

It's expensive if you think of what it costs to keep a mail server online. They have a price that clearly shows to me that they have no competition.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#192

Post by brongondwana »

darekkay wrote: post #118
nvmr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switched to Fastmail many years ago when self hosting became too time consuming for me. Never looked back. I had to use their support only very occasionally and even then their reaction time and competence were outstanding. They do just one thing - email - and do that very, very well.

They do another thing: calendar. And I find it at least as good as Sunrise Calendar was before Microsoft shut it down.

There's a bunch of us at CalConnect in Karlsruhe right now working on improving calendar standards :)

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#193

Post by apatters »

Is there an open source email client which supports a conversation view similar to Gmail's? I find that to be an amazingly useful feature.

The other thing Gmail does which has a lot of potential is message labeling (e.g., newsletters automatically go into a separate tab/folder).

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#194

Post by charmides »

ggm wrote: post #184
charmides wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to respectfully disagree with you here. In a free market, pricing does have something to do with the cost of providing a service because companies that overcharge would quickly lose market share to competitors, especially in a wildly competitive space like email. Also, ten bucks a year has nothing to do with how much I'd personally be willing to pay for email. It is just my estimation of the amount you could c…

In a free market Bzzt. Notice how everyone recommended fastmail and nobody else? It's not a highly competitive free market. It's "hi, can anyone recommend a MacBook cheaper than the one apple make" time. Free markets reductionism not useful with no serious competitive pressure

Email is a highly competitive market with a low barrier to entry and thousands of companies offering similar services. It is nothing like hardware, so your comparison is bizarre.

By the way, I was asking for the point of view of an expert. If you are not an expert on email services, then I have no interest in hearing you speak condescendingly to me.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#195

Post by ar-jan »

nopacience wrote: post #123

Nowadays i recommend runbox.com. The services are good and when needed support is also good. Clients have given good feedback. In the past i have recommended protonmail and fastmail.

+1 for Runbox. Good prices, multiple custom domains possible, and an option to configure separate passwords per device/app.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#197

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

danpalmer wrote: post #187
nadont8 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.

I don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people. Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.

This is a clear case of a price being judged differently depending on where you live. 25$ is luxurious expensive meal out for me or 5-7 fast food meals.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#198

Post by nift »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #190
lvillani wrote: post #86

FastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't implement IMAP IDLE [1]. They are also the main sponsors behind the JMAP protocol [2] and some open source projects such as the Cyrus IMAP server. [1]: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-... [2]: https://jmap.io

Does Fastmail provide any kind of "bundling" or "priority inbox" features? Since using Inbox on Android, I can't imagine going back to being notified about every single email. Automatic bundling of messages and the custom rules that you can then set on those bundles is a killer feature. If nobody comes along with a decent alternative before Inbox is shutdown then I don't know what I'll do!

I don't know if fast mail provides it out of the box but I have started to test out spark: https://sparkmailapp.com/ as a replacement for Inbox. While it is a bit from as good as Inbox it can get the job done, and has bundling.

I simply set it up to archive when swiping (which is what Inbox seems to be doing). However, it's notifications are far from as good and you can't archive straight from the notification, which, to me, is a let down.

Furthermore, on iPhone 8 there is an actual loading screen when opening the app. Like, why? Everything is already stored in the phone and it should just look for new mail in the background?

So far from perfect, but what can one do when Google is killing stuff off.

One issue though: you have to be in the apple ecosystem as they do not support, anything but iOS/Mac OS.

Note: I'm not associated with spark in any way.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#199

Post by TsomArp »

danpalmer wrote: post #187
nadont8 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.

I don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people. Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.

I might be wrong, but I also think it is expensive. When I can have a 5 family plan from office365, including, word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, etc, with 1TB per account, 60 minutes of skype calls per account, etc, for 10 per month, 25 per month (for 5 people) only for email seems too expensive to me. The only thing lacking is custom email address.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#200

Post by wasd884 »

charmides wrote: post #139
bamboozled wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail has been also flawless for me since signing up. Highly recommended.

I think paid email services are a great idea, but $50 a year and 2 GB of storage for Fastmail seems expensive to me. Why not something closer to five or ten bucks a year? Can someone explain to me why this type of pricing makes sense?

It does seem expensive when you've been exposed to free (or heavily discounted) prices your whole life. This is because the others still charge this much, except the difference in revenue is made up by selling your data and pushing adverts (rather than charging you extra). Suddenly the extra $30-$40 per year doesn't seem so expensive any more.
Post reply on HN