Rackspace email hosting is $1/10 GB mailbox/mo for IMAP/POP Cheers
I was used to use Rackspace Cloud email, but the server was blacklisted on Network Solution so all my clients using NS weren't able to receive any of my emails... FAIL
Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
121–130 of 142 posts
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#122I pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail ( http://www.fastmail.fm ) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.)
I'm using fastmail for 5 years now. It's good, but not that great. My two problems are: 1. Spam false positives. I get order confirmations or mail list subscriptions sent to spam folder occasionally. 2. Search is really bad. by default it only searches subjects, and I think only in the current folder. Thinking about moving to gmail, provided those guys sort out privacy issues.
(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)
1. Just add addresses to your address book to whitelist. Also make sure you use Report Spam/Report non-spam on enough emails (200 of each) to activate your personal bayes db (see the Options -> Spam/Virus Protection near the bottom to see how many of each you've already learned)
2. At the moment, you do have to explicitly add body: to a term to do a body search. The first time might be slow as it indexes your email, after that it should be faster.
http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhance...
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#123I pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail ( http://www.fastmail.fm ) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.)
I'm using Fastmail to host email on my own domain (you can redirect MX records to them or just use their DNS servers). I read email mostly in Thunderbird via IMAP. At the end of the day your own domain is what you really want - you can host it on Fastmail or Google, and if any of them screw up you can move on to other hosting provider or to your own server.
(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)
For people that are concerned about lock in, I highly recommend this as well. Get your own domain, and then you're not tied to any one service. We have 10,000's of domains hosted at FastMail.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I must be getting old or sth, but I can't find a screenshot or a test login on the site.
I'm not sure they have any. Their marketing and communication tend to be pretty minimalist. I happen to like it that way. You can always get a free guest account to try it out. Or if you ask nicely enough, one of us who have accounts might be able to post a screenshot. ;)
(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail)
Hmmm yes, we don't really have any screenshots do we, we should probably fix that!
Hopefully even without a screenshot, we can convince people it's worth trying us out (there is the free Guest account, minimal storage, but you can at least look around the interface, and then upgrade if you like it)
Quick links to the two biggest things people want to know, features and reliability.
http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#125Related question, does anyone know of a mail webapp that allows you to have a unified inbox with multiple IMAP accounts? In other words, something like Thunderbird or Outlook Express but web-ified. I started doing a custom fork of RoundCube to do just this a few months back but never finished it...does anyone know of anything off-the-shelf that will do this?
Gmail supports this.. you just create each one as a google account, have them forward to the one you like best, and then set it up to let you send mail as each of the other accounts... I have about 50 google accounts and use my regular gmail this way...
This is something that Gmail does really well right now, what with the new 'Send via SMTP' feature. When I use a secondary account to send from my 'control center' account, the email appears in the SENT items in both accounts. Double Win for records.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#126GMX is not too bad
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Already mentioned by sucuri2 in another thread, but roundcube ( http://roundcube.net/ ) looks much more attractive. Still not GMail, but much nicer than squirrelmail.
If you pull down devel-threads from svn, add a couple of plugins, and tweak a few things, RoundCube IMO actually gets better than Gmail.
Interesting. I've liked Roundcube enough to use as a backup way to access mail, but I've never looked at the plugins.
What are some of the plugins that you find useful?
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a high possibility that Google's server is 10 times more secure than any average Joe's mail server. Even more secure than a security expert's server as well: http://www.darknet.org.uk/2009/08/dan-kaminsky-kevin-mitnick... Do you have time to manage and keep your server secure? Can you patch a new 0day in an hour, possibly not. On the other hand when men-in-black asks to Google yes they might give it away, wh…
Google's server may be 10 times more secure, but it's probably targeted about 10000 times as much as my own server.
Well even in that case attackers won't touch your data (since you aren't targeted), so you'll be still safe. If they are targeting you then it's the same thing.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.zimbra.com . Better in some ways, worse in others, but by far the most capable open source webmail available. I used it for a few years and loved it.
I always see Zimbra mentioned as a good open-source alternative to Gmail. But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise. Like mbreese, I have wondered for some years if an open-source version of Gmail existed, and also what would be necessary to reproduce the Gmail experience (on the backend side for example, to get to the same speed in search). But I always hear Zimbra which doesn't seem t…
> But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise.
My experience too, after using it for about a year. It's OK, but it's nowhere near as good as gmail.
Re: Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always see Zimbra mentioned as a good open-source alternative to Gmail. But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise. Like mbreese, I have wondered for some years if an open-source version of Gmail existed, and also what would be necessary to reproduce the Gmail experience (on the backend side for example, to get to the same speed in search). But I always hear Zimbra which doesn't seem t…
> But the demo always made me feel like it was a web-based Outlook UI-wise. My experience too, after using it for about a year. It's OK, but it's nowhere near as good as gmail.
I'm curious...what do you find Gmail does better than Zimbra?