I recommendation yandex domain.
What kind of privacy concerns are there with email providers based in Russia?
Ask HN: Good email host?
21–30 of 71 posts
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#22I was researching this. And still am.
I always come to conclusion that either I have to host mail for myself, or use Google Apps.
I can't trust Microsoft to host my email, nor I want to trust Rackspace (for some odd reason, two feedbacks I received were from people who had negative experiences with them). Zoho is nice choise, but they had multi-week outage year or two ago, with somewhat unclear notification to users.
Fastmail was always second choice, because it was more expensive for amount of mail I have now, which will need to be stored on their servers.
Also, as I'll be hosting email for family, I calculate for 5 accounts.
Google Apps came out to 25/month.
Self-hosting option came out to one Linode machine, plus one other VPS provider machine located in different location for backup MX. That came out to 15/month.
Fastmail was more expensive at the time (was I looking at business account for some reason?), but their pricing page -- https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/ -- shows that they are same price as Google. Can't seem to find their multi-year discount information.
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#23I was researching this. And still am. I always come to conclusion that either I have to host mail for myself, or use Google Apps. I can't trust Microsoft to host my email, nor I want to trust Rackspace (for some odd reason, two feedbacks I received were from people who had negative experiences with them). Zoho is nice choise, but they had multi-week outage year or two ago, with somewhat unclear notification to users.…
Hey sashk,
Sorry to hear you don't trust us. Is there anything I can clear up, or any questions I can answer? Feel free to email me directly - faisal.misle(at)rackspace.com. I'd love to hear any feedback/questions/concerns.
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#24Paying $4/month for email is worth it. I pay a lot more for a lot less elsewhere.
If you are on HN, I can all but guarantee you this - you've already spent more than $4 of your time even doing the research and posting on HN.
If you can't afford it, go get a minimum wage job somewhere and work for an hour. That covers the $4 right with a few bucks to spare...
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#25Very happy recent convert to KolabNow. They have a kind of ethical nerd deluxe service, based in Switzerland. It's not cheap (I pay about $10 a month, and that's only going to go up), but I'm very happy with it.
Pros:
- 100% green energy
- 100% Free Software (+ meaningful upstream contributions)
- Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture!
- Server for your contacts (CardDAV), calendar (CalDav), and
notes (IMAP)
- Swiss privacy laws (not what they used to be, but still outside
US, EU, N Eyes)
- They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG
events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm
glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing.
Cons:
- No 2FA :(
- Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for
the above)
- Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#26I recommendation yandex domain.
What kind of privacy concerns are there with email providers based in Russia?
This gets asked every time Yandex mail is mentioned. Nobody can answer this question. We can just speculate that Russia is evil and wants to read your emails. Just like Yahoo which scans and analyzes your emails apparently for NSA or Google which scans your emails for ads. Seems to me like privacy is a concern as long as your email isn't on your own server.
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#27Run your own!
Postfix. Not a miracle of simplicity to set up, but so far it's been bullet-proof while running.
Yup. It took me a couple of weeks of slow reading to make sure I was doing it exactly right (this included me learning how email works on a deeper level than I had before), but once I launched I've had no problems whatsoever, and so far really no maintenance (what there has been has been spamassassin-related).
Sometimes I think someone could build something on top of postfix that simply made executive decisions about security policies, and exposed a much-simplified subset of configuration options to the user.
On the other hand, once you know how all the mapping and rewriting systems work, it's actually a real pleasure to make use of them.
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#28Run your own!
I thought there is a high chance of getting blocked by spam filters if you're not using a reputable email host. Is this true at all?
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#29Personally, I've given in and just let Google raid my emails, but I have heard very good things about FastMail from quite a few people. The FastMail devs are pretty well known within the Australian open source community for being quite decent people, if that matters to you :)
Re: Ask HN: Good email host?
#30I recently had this exact question. I finally decided on Pawnmail (https://pawnmail.com/). It's free and you get 2 GB.
I was worried whether it'd randomly shut down, so I emailed the creator, http://pastebin.com/raw/eWG8RQqk, and it looks like it'll be safe for a while.
I have no idea whether using services like these is a good idea.