Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

#1

Post by smaps » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

I’ve been getting on the privacy and anti-tracking bandwagon big time recently and am looking to replace gmail. What are good email services that allow you to use your own domain name?

Re: Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

#2

Post by gsimons88 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

Ha, I was just like you, just recently starting to look away from GMail, though mostly because of all the incessant and obtrusive ads.

I am using protonmail now, which has the option for a bunch of aliases that I really like, the web interface works fine though it's missing bells and whistles - I do miss the smart grouping of GMail! - and you get to use custom domains. It also provides encryption and you can even get VPN to go with it. Here's all the options you get per tier: https://protonmail.com/pricing

Still an early user, but so far quite happy with it!

Re: Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

#3

Post by jborak » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

I use ProtonMail and overall it works pretty good and the value is great. The product is focused on security first so I think user experience suffers a bit. It's works fine but if you previously used a mail client like Spark on your phone you'll definitely miss it.

The mobile app is okay, it's good enough for reading and sending short replies. The web interface is alright. I like to use the bridge application from ProtonMail on my desktop and use a mail client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail.

Re: Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

#4

Post by smt88 » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

There's no great way to know that your emails are private when they're hosted by a SaaS email provider. It's easy to get around third-party audits if you want to.

The most private solution by far is to self-host, but that's also very challenging these days.

And any email you send to a non-private service (Gmail, Yahoo, anyone's work account) is instantly going to be just as insecure as if you yourself used that other person's service.

What I'm getting at is that email is inherently a not-very-private communication method and you should try to avoid it. The amount of time required to make it more private is not going to have much benefit for most people (whose contacts will be using Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.)

You also can't easily or meaningfully get E2E encryption with email, so there's a lot of surface area to lose your privacy.

Re: Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

#5

Post by anuragsoni » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

I've been using Fastmail [1] for around five years now. I've been pretty happy with their service and I use it with my own domain name. I find the pricing to be reasonable, and their webmail interface is really fast, and I've found their spam detection to be really good.

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/

Re: Ask HN: Best Paid Gmail Replacement?

#6

Post by diehunde » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:49 PM UTC

Another happy ProtonMail user here. I've been using it for about 2 years now. You can also import you Gmail content to your proton account if you want. Their VPN also works really well.