Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make sure you setup SPF/DKIM/DMARC and you should be fine 99% of the time. - Disclosure, I work for dmarcian
Which FastMail does if you have them host your DNS!
Fast mail will host your DNS? Had not seen that...
Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
571–580 of 589 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good to know, thanks. Can you say how is the search functionality and indexing on the inbox on Fastmail?
Our search is built on top of the Xapian search engine. We blogged about the underlying tech a while ago. You can sign up a free trial and have a play pretty easily. https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/01/email-search-system/
Search works decently, but they index the whole message, including quoted text. So a search term shows up in the original message, as well as all the replies downthread.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our search is built on top of the Xapian search engine. We blogged about the underlying tech a while ago. You can sign up a free trial and have a play pretty easily. https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/01/email-search-system/
Search works decently, but they index the whole message, including quoted text. So a search term shows up in the original message, as well as all the replies downthread.
Yeah, we're working on identifying whether something is in quoted or non-quoted text. That one is quite tricky to get 100% right, so we err on the side of matching more messages.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#574If I switch from gmail and I set up automatic forwarding of my emails to my new service, does Google still read my mail? Is there any easy migration path from gmail to another service that doesn't involve updating my email for every service I've ever used?
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
As has been frequently pointed out, they could choose one account and serve that account a different webpage just once, and harvest their password in order to decrypt all their email in perpetuity. This would be a trivial change that would certainly go unnoticed.
I fail to see how this is any worse than any of their competition, which does server side encryption. At least with ProtonMail there is the chance of them being caught serving backdoored client-side pages - with server-side you would never know. I feel like the hate is a case of people thinking not being perfect is worse than being average or bad.
If protonmail is billed as a pgp replacement, then people will think it is reasonable to use protonmail's encryption instead of 'offline' encryption, when that's not the case at all.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#576I self host using hMailServer (open source) and Thunderbird. It's so user friendly, if you are capable of installing software generally, you'll also manage this with no problems (maybe some reading up if you don't know the difference between IMAP and POP3, but that's about it). The issue is that HMS is Windows-only, but the ease of use is superb compared to anything I've seen on Linux. And it's open source so I'm mod…
+1 hMailServer; Deployed it for a few clients who needed it to work with SQL Server. It was rock solid and hosted hundreds of domains and a ton of email accessed over various devices.
It's not glamorous software as its pretty basic but if all you need is basic, it will not disappoint you, and usually most of the needs of many folks is pretty simplistic.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#577Nowadays 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.
I am evaluating Runbox and Migadu right now; My only nitpick with Runbox is their pricing page, they need to clean it up and simplify it. Its information overload. I can always ask/click for more details but present me with the most basic info up front and centre.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI: They store your credentials on their servers. Its not like outlook/thunderbird where you credentials are stored locally.
Thanks for letting me know! Did not know that. That is quite scary to be honest and do you know the reason as to why they do this?
I believe that's only if you enable and use Send Later (because they need to be able to send an email in your name, even if your device is offline).
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unused IP, set PTR (seems important) and MX, SPF and DKIM, although I'm not sure how relevant the last one was. I can imagine that Gmail will block you if you try to send mail from an IP that was previusly used to spam.
Couldn't really work out why Gmail wanted to block me, yes obvs using SPF/DKIM/etc. - long trusted domain (15y), never any spam, whitelisted on client side. MS blocked it according to their third-party system because it was associated with another IP address [ie other IP was once used by same ISP] that had once had spam on it (wasn't currently blacklisted in any SBL). There's no way to check before you build out the…
I was not thinking about self hosting at home.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd much prefer it if there was just 1 docker container and not a whole compose stack. I much prefer 1 docker container == 1 service.
Well, there are multiple services involved in an email stack so I guess it does what you ask for.
What I mean is, what a person would honestly consider a service (such as e-mail, a website, a git server), not a technical definition of a service (a database, dovecot, php).
I should have been more clear.