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Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

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

#61

Post by kungtotte »

Multicomp wrote: post #31
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 the best. I make great use of the subdomain mailbox aliasing feature (website)@(username).fastmail.com

It's incredibly smooth and powerful to use that feature. Set up some folders and it will auto-sort things based on the e-mail address, including sub-folders (e.g .@.fastmail.com). It will also fall back on placing e-mail in the folder if there is no present.

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

#62

Post by some_account »

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 the best.

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

#63

Post by ar-jan »

bcrack wrote: post #41

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…

+1 for Runbox.

I do wish they had better filtering options.

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

#65

Post by smilesnd »

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.

Competition doesn't equal lower prices.

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

#66

Post by danpalmer »

eeutb wrote: post #50
MandieD wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The price seems reasonable to me. Bear in mind that they are much smaller than any popular free email provider because they charge.

Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS.

However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts.

Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.

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

#67

Post by nmjenkins »

eeutb wrote: post #50
MandieD wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc.

FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap.

On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres).

If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.

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

#69

Post by Semaphor »

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.)

Not that it's really needed, I've found out about fastmail on HN and it's regularly the most recommended email service here, but I've been a very happy customer for 5 years now. Support (the few times I needed it) was always quick and helpful.

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

#70

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB wrote: post #55
uncle_d wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded - I am also very happy with ProtonMail.

Thirded, I too am quite happy enough with protonmail I decided to pay for their service.

Fourthed. I can see me transitioning, so far so good.
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