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

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

#21

Post by majewsky » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:20 AM UTC

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 via IMAP, but their webmail looks pretty okay as far as I remember. The basic offering is 1 € per month for a mailbox, a CalDAV calendar and a CardDAV addressbook; but I think you can sign up for a free trial if you just want to have a look.

(Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)

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

#22

Post by dewey » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

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 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.

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

#23

Post by uncle_d » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:22 AM UTC

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.

Seconded - I am also very happy with ProtonMail.

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

#24

Post by hknd » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:28 AM UTC

low-maintenance email will not work. You get what you pay for, it will always either be high-maintenance, or you'll have to pay for the service. Unfortunately, fighting spam and keeping stuff up-to-date is not as easy as it should be.

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

#25

Post by dimitar » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

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…

They look great! However I don't seem to find an option to use a custom domain.

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

#26

Post by vortico » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

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.)

Seconded. This is the answer right here. I've been using it for my personal email for 3 years and company email for 1 year. Their support, web app UI, mobile app, data access policies, and prices are great.

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

#27

Post by maltalex » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:30 AM UTC

Self-hosting is tricky to get right and the cost of getting something wrong is high.

One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu

They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)

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

#28

Post by timwis » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

I left Gmail once, but what brought me back was its separation of "primary", "promotions", "forums", and "updates". I don't know how I'd get through my emails without that. Has anyone seen another service that does something like that?

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

#29

Post by spondyl » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:31 AM UTC

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 setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done.

Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.

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

#30

Post by lillecarl » Tue, Jul 03, 2018, 9:32 AM UTC

If you're OK with Putin reading your mail instead of Google if say Yandex is a great alternative!