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Ask HN: What do you use instead of Gmail?

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

#41

Post by regecks »

vivan wrote: post #8
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

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.

There are other "security issues" too.

One is that you can send email as any other FastMail user, and it won't stop you. SPF passes and DKIM signatures signed (even for other customers' custom domains), totally impossible to tell the difference between a legitimate and spoofed message.

To be fair, DKIM is a borderline useless technology and doesn't really prove anything, but it still appears to be an intentional policy decision by FM to be "lax".

Interestingly enough they do track the real sender in mail headers (which I suspect enables them to mark their own official emails with "verified" badges), but it's a dynamic obfuscated value iirc so it's absolutely worthless for regular users.

It kind of makes my stomach churn when I consider that it's trivial for any other FastMail user to impersonate me, but OTOH, it's best not to be under the delusion that email is authenticated, so I'm staying with them.

Great service, despite my comments.

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

#42

Post by mysterypie »

jvannistelrooy wrote: post #28

I've been trying out Protonmail which I'm happy with, but in practice I'm still using Gmail. I'm reluctant to move away from my @gmail address, and inform all my contacts to use the new one. Besides that, I notice that orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain. I wish I could take my gmail address to another service.

> orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain

Sure, if you had the foresight to reserve your.name@gmail.com twelve years ago, but today you'll have to use your.name772@gmail.com. Chances are that you won't even get incredibly.obscure.name@gmail.com.

However, chances are better for your.name@fastmail.com, your.name@protonmail.com, etc.

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

#47

Post by geokon »

gmx.com

It's pretty straightforward, short URL and you can setup several aliases which is very convenient. It also has cloud storage. I don't really get what they're business model - so I'm not really sure what the deal is privacy-wise. I think they're based in Germany, so that's probably a plus

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

#48

Post by nothrabannosir »

I'm in the process of migrating to mailinabox (mailinabox.email) right now! Migrated last week, I'm currently in the evaluation period.

So far:

* imap search is inferior to gmail (slow, no "did you mean"), but I can live with it.

* greylisting is a pain, but I can live with it. Actually I'm on HN right now after alt-tabbing to wait for a "confirmation e-mail" to come through. Ironically, for an account on the mailinabox format to discuss spam issues :) which brings me to the real problem:

* SPAM. I assumed the spam filters would be worse, and I could live with that. The real problem is that it's a total black box. I have zero insight into how it works, or even IF it's working. Just drag into "junk" and hope for the best. It's very frustrating, and if this continues, I'm not sure if I can live with it :(

I'm getting ~10 messages per hour from the same sender and they all get through. I have dragged >100 of these to the junk folder, used some incredibly obscure command on the box (from a 4y old github issue) to see if it's actually being "counted" as spam at all: it is. Now what? Clearly something is wrong; either this filter is as dumb as a bag of nails or it's not working correctly. Good luck figuring it out. I have no idea where to start debugging.

Essentially, the promise of MIAB is that you shouldn't have to look under the hood. Hosting e-mail is notoriously hard, and they're trying to abstract it all away. The problem is: it's hard because the old tools have terrible UI. Absolutely awful. Arcane unix commands, weird process names, no visibility into nothing, incredibly unintuitive, config files all over the place, log files all over. Sure, it's open source, it can all be learned. But the mental overhead is equivalent to learning a new programming language. It's harder to learn than something like Photoshop, which, honestly, is not OK for what it is (messaging and spam filtering).

I'm weary of the direction this is going in. I'll give it another few weeks, but I'm afraid I'm taking on a responsibility I don't have time for. I don't want to manage dovecot, spamassasin, and what not; they're a full-time job. But with MIAB, at the end of the day, it's not really abstracting it away. It's just a nice setup script. In the end, you're still managing all that cruft, and when push comes to shove, you're on your own.

I advise against it :( Unfortunately.

Hopefully, one day, someone will make a holistic spam server for the new generation. A holistic system which handles everything: outgoing and incoming, SMTP and IMAP, TLS, spam filtering, storage, backups, user management, attachments, greylisting, logging, catch-alls, domain forwarding, all of it in one tool.

The danger of using different tools for everything is incompatibility. E.g. I'm using a lot of forwarding rules, internally. It might very well turn out that spamassasin has a hard time following those rules. Will it understand the internal forwards are not to be marked as responsible for the spam? that the first external received: line is the one to block? I have no idea. And I don't want to worry about it :(

I'd love to pay for a piece of server software which took care of it all, holistically.

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

#49

Post by alibarber »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #2

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…

Have very recently moved over to Fastmail from a hosted Exchange service (personal - own domains). Very pleased so far although my only issue was that I couldn't get SRV records to work properly on my domain (the DNS is at cloudflare, and I'm more than certain it was my own incompetence) which made setup on my iPhone a bit of a faff for calendar, contacts and mail compared to exchange. The web-interface is excellent for mail and calendar - for work I have to change between browsers and OSs regularly and it's worked perfectly with all combinations I've come across so far. Also very interested in the work they're going with JMAP as hobby projects of mine have led to me running my own mail servers and developing clients, and this new protocol looks very straightforward and lightweight.
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