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Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

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Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#141
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSFT doesn't read your email to target you with ads.

AFAIK Google doesn't do that anymore. Source: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...

That does say they don't read your email for ad personalisation, but it doesn't say they don't read your email.

Reading your email for data gathering is their entire business model so if they don't explicitly say they don't, you should assume they do.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#143
post #20

Outlook.com (free) and Office365 (a few $/month/user on your own domain) are both great options. I personally much prefer both the web client and the various app clients to gmail's equivalents.

I personally use hosted Exchange for $4/month¹ and think it's the best option out there. What matters to me is support is good, your email won't get detected as spam, they support push on iOS and they have datacenters in Europe, USA and Asia.

[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/exchange/exchange-online

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#144

Threads about email providers seem to be a prime target for astro turfers on HN. There are so many different providers, yet weirdly its always the same company with the most comments.

This has been going on for over a year now. A lot of astroturfing coupled with misinformation criticizing predominantly US-based incumbents. I think there are a few mods with a political agenda who are pushing this. Often the advertised replacement is an inferior product that doesn't even provide better privacy or securty than Google or whatever is being criticized. Interesting time to live in.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#146
I'm self-hosting my mail server using mailcow[0] for little over a year now and everything works fine. It comes with a admin interface to manage accounts and the SoGo webmail client[1].

Getting it up and running was also pretty easy. Create some DNS records as described in the documentation, cloning the repository and starting everything using docker-compose.

[0]: https://mailcow.email/

[1]: https://github.com/inverse-inc/sogo

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail has been also flawless for me since signing up. Highly recommended.

I think paid email services are a great idea, but $50 a year and 2 GB of storage for Fastmail seems expensive to me. Why not something closer to five or ten bucks a year? Can someone explain to me why this type of pricing makes sense?

Pricing 101: Price has nothing to do with the cost of providing the service, and everything to do with the value the customer puts on what they're buying.

The value you put on email is $10/year, so Fastmail doesn't represent good value. Other people obviously think its worth more. Fastmail are providing their service to those people.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#148
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yandex is a Russian mail-service. I wouldn't trust them. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13274443

Let's be honest: Any company must comply with local authorities in any country they work in. I'm pretty sure, that we can find such article about any major US based service and FBI/NSA/etc, for example. Same for major services from Europe. Because of this I pointed to ProtonMail before going further. By the way, this article is about "Yandex's online payment service" (this service can be compared to PayPal), which is…

US companies, in worst case, comply with democratic authorities. The whole separation of powers thing in US seem to work pretty well.

Also, Yandex's founder did make it to anti-Putin-sphere personal sanctions list..

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail has been also flawless for me since signing up. Highly recommended.

I think paid email services are a great idea, but $50 a year and 2 GB of storage for Fastmail seems expensive to me. Why not something closer to five or ten bucks a year? Can someone explain to me why this type of pricing makes sense?

Because if you have 10,000 customers paying $50 that's much nicer than having 100,000 customers paying you $5.
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