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Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

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

#91

Post by hvidgaard »

nmjenkins wrote: post #77
hvidgaard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm looking forward to it! It's the only thing I need to achieve an acceptable WAF, and finally get her to actually use it rather than keep using GMail.

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

#92

Post by cggarvey »

WA wrote: post #87
Multicomp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’ve run into sites that consider + invalid within an email address. It would also be easy for a site that wants to sell off user info to have a regex strip the +sitename from emails prior to selling the list.

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

#93

Post by 66d8kk »

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.)

Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.

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

#94

Post by fencepost »

I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive.

I wish I could bold this, but:

For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized.

Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering.

It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that.

GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.

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

#95

Post by moltar »

66d8kk wrote: post #93
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.)

Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.

You can use the plus system.

foo+sitename@yourdomain.com

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

#96

Post by smartt »

66d8kk wrote: post #93
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.)

Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.

If you only want to receive mail at aliases it's easy: just setup an email catch-all on your domain ;-) To send is another matter; and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to easily do this with fastmail.

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

#97

Post by livingpunchbag »

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.)

OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure?

A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...

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

#98

Post by TarpitCarnivore »

66d8kk wrote: post #93
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.)

Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.

You can use a wildcard for this: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html

I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.

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

#99

Post by tmaly »

dewey wrote: post #22
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 great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that. Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.

Is there a wild card feature to capture any address on a domain? I currently have multiple email addresses for a single domain. If I moved the email to fastmail, would I have to pay for each individual email on that domain?
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