After spending a few years in a similar situation, and not wanting to maintain my own server, I settled with using runbox.com.
It's an economical and privacy-oriented, mail provider which allows (necessary for my needs) using your own domain. They have very quick and excellent support (the few times that I needed it) and also offer a CalDAV/CardDav service. Their web interface is lacking (I believe it is about to be updated) but this is an non-issue for me science I use mutt. I'm not aware of a mobile app (I personally use and suggest the excellent K-9 mail OSS app).
Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
41–50 of 153 posts
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#42You 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.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#43Whatever email service provider you choose, make sure to still (a) keep backups of emails just in case (maybe sync an IMAP client periodically), and (b) use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.
> use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.
I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it.
I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun)
I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#44I've recently been having this problem with Gmail: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...
where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#45mail.com
It's free and ad supported. There's no way they're better than Gmail.
> "Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?"
You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#46I just moved all my email accounts to China.
Is thay supposed to be better?
If you assume that every hoster is reading your mails, then moving them to China would give you the advantage, that your content and your meta data are not relevant to your new Chinese hoster, so ad targeting etc. would be gone, because you probably don't check Chinese sites frequently
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#47I 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…
I've run my own email for years and I don't have a serious spam problem despite posting my email everywhere. I get maybe 1-2 spam messages a week. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#48You 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#49I 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…
I have not tried it yet myself, but heard good things about Proxmox Mail Gateway: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#50Earlier 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.
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.