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Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

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31–40 of 76 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#32

I have been using Posteo for a few year ( https://posteo.de/en/help?tag=end-to-end ). Pro: - Cheap: 1€/month for 2 GBs mailbox - Basic functionalities such as Web interface, SMTP, POP3, CalDav, CardDav are all included. - They seem to take privacy and security seriously, including email encryption, 2FA signin or recently Autocrypt[1] - The warm fuzzy feeling of using 100% renewable energy for your email. Cons: - No c…

Another happy user of Posteo. In addition, they allow anonymous sign up and payments by mailing the cash.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#33
Gmail's labeling system is hard to beat. In particular, any given email can be in several "folders" (a.k.a. labels) at the same time.

All other services I have tried out so far do not replicate this approach so that an email can only be in one folder at a time. Of course, you can copy an email into several folders but then they are physically different emails on the mail server.

Despite this, I switched to the German provider www.mailbox.org as they do not index or process your emails in any other way. And in Germany, the authorities still have a hard time getting access behind the scenes. Further, mailbox.org allows the creation of mail aliases and also temporary addresses. The service is 3 € per month which is totally acceptable.

I see mailbox.org as a main competitor of Protonmail and Posteo.

EDIT: additionally, I am using my own domains that are redirected to my mailbox.org account.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#34

Zoho Mail and RunBox. Zoho has dedicated EU branch if you want that: https://www.zoho.eu/ https://www.zoho.com/ https://runbox.com/ FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc). RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works. Zoho Mail is also a…

Also using Zoho free for several years. Great service. They recently tightened up the free plan a bit but still very good.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#35

Zoho Mail and RunBox. Zoho has dedicated EU branch if you want that: https://www.zoho.eu/ https://www.zoho.com/ https://runbox.com/ FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc). RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works. Zoho Mail is also a…

I'm also using Zoho, since it was the only provider I could find that let me use my own domain for free. It's been working great so far. Up until fairly recently, I was using Pawnmail ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548307 ), but it became very unreliable. Half of my sent mail bounced, and then it just stopped working altogether. I use Thunderbird as a client.

I started off free, still have a couple accounts there free I think, but moved to paid because it was worth it to me.

Without the free offering i probably wouldn't have ended up on a paid plan so I'm glad they do it!

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#37

Zoho Mail and RunBox. Zoho has dedicated EU branch if you want that: https://www.zoho.eu/ https://www.zoho.com/ https://runbox.com/ FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc). RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works. Zoho Mail is also a…

I'm going to change to Zoho from Fastmail just for these reasons. A lot of additional tools for less price, although I'm really happy with Fastmail.

Fastmail is a great service if you only use e-mail and you don't usually use Google Docs.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#39
Privateemail works pretty well, 10€/y and I think it's like 3€ or 4€ per each extra email address. As mail client I use thunderbird and K9. I very much appreciate my privacy, so I would always use things that I can understand how they are making revenue without selling my data.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

#40
post #8

I (and a lot of other people around here) are enthusiastic FastMail customers. Hit any of us up off-site if you are interested in a referral code (10% off). It costs money, but you get a really solid webmail experience with real human customer support. The CEO is active here on HN and posts pretty solid things like this: https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electroni... I have a strong belief that FastM…

One issue I have with FastMail is the reuse of email addresses. It is possible to "hack" accounts on websites which were registered to expired email addresses by simply registering that email address anew and doing a password reset. This is very common in the domain space, where email addresses are publicly listed.

Does this affect custom domains, or is it only an issue with @fastmail.com accounts?
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