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

Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 153 posts

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

#71

Post by chewz »

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.)

Another happy Fastmail user..

ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.

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

#72

Post by cschmidt »

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.)

I've used FastMail for years. You pay them money, so you are the customer, which is how it should be. Your data isn't being mined.

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

#73

Post by dod9er »

Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them. I was just going to start with https://mailcow.email/ on a cheap vps. But thanks to this thread I will also be evaluating migadu, seems a nice fit with even less hassle for me.

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

#74

Post by mrmondo »

Very happy Fastmail user here, it's great (and fast!) to use, I've _never_ noticed any outages, calendar always just works, search is excellent, it's device and OS agnostic and the organisation makes massive contributions to open source and mail related communities.

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

#75

Post by hvidgaard »

nmjenkins wrote: post #67
eeutb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (maintainin…

I love that you interact with users here :)

Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me.

Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label and received in 2018. Same with mails relating to scouting. Without labels I can only save it in one folder, and searches are not guaranteed to catch everything unless I constantly make sure a search captures the mail every time I would set a label on it.

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

#76

Post by shannongreen »

pmlnr wrote: post #32
maltalex wrote: post #27

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 )

It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you. [^1]: https://www.iredmail.org/ [^2]: https://mailinab…

I would still call it tricky. I consider myself pretty capable but after a month of unsuccessfully tracking down DKIM/SPF/DMARC failures for some recipients I just gave up and switched to Fastmail.

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

#77

Post by nmjenkins »

hvidgaard wrote: post #75
nmjenkins wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (maintainin…

I love that you interact with users here :) Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me. Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label an…

While promising future stuff is always dangerous, I’m pretty confident we will have something for you later this year.

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

#78

Post by seanwilson »

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.)

Just curious, but what do you need support for?

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

#80

Post by jazoom »

seanwilson wrote: post #78
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.)

Just curious, but what do you need support for?

I needed help with some slightly complex setting up of users and probably something else. Their support was good, as people here say.
Post reply on HN