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Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

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

#81

Post by InternetOfStuff »

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.

There's also mailbox.org

While their offerings differ in the details, by and large they offer the same thigns as fastmail.

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

#82

Post by segmondy »

lillecarl wrote: post #30

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

Yup, I use gmail but I also use Yandex with my own domain. Google is the greater evil if I had to pick between them, Russia & China. Any data I give to Google is more likely to be used against me in the USA than the other 2.

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

#83

Post by akudha »

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…

Just one Euro per month per inbox? That is awesome, I wonder what their margin is

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

#85

Post by toomuchtodo »

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.

Your expectations are unrealistic.

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

#86

Post by brongondwana »

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…

Thanks! There's a couple of us floating around here - but this article caught me during choir rehearsal, so Neil snuck in first :)

And I'll second the "it had better bloody be done this year!" - I'm keen to use it myself.

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

#87

Post by WA »

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

You can also do username+website@fastmail.com

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

#88

Post by brongondwana »

shannongreen wrote: post #76
pmlnr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I lasted just over a year of working at FastMail before I moved my personal stuff for my family over. I resisted for a bit - but I figured if I was getting in woken in the night to fix the FastMail system anyway, I might as well not be woken a second time if my family system went down!

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

#89

Post by wtd »

messutied wrote: post #79

No one using iCloud email? I’m giving it a try atm, I think if you’re in the apple ecosystem it can be a good choice, anybody else experimented with it?

iCloud (or its prior iterations) has had some bad press over the years ago about undisclosed filtering of inbound and outbound email and since then I haven’t considered them for email:

Outbound: https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filt...

Inbound: https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filter...

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