Without evidence, just observation, can someone here explain to me why it seems every top comment and their child comments have sort of a corporate shill objective?
Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
171–180 of 589 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fastmail is paid and very costly while Gmail is free, not very good alternative for me.
Gmail is not free, you just pay in non-monetary terms. It's up to you to decide how you want to weight your priorities.
Privacy is important, but money is a non negotiable priority if you don't have it.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#173Zoho Mail is a strong option. Comes with mobile apps, supports all standard protocols (IMAP/POP/ActiveSync), includes Calendar and many other modules. Zero tracking. Zero ads. Beyond Mail, Zoho offers several apps that can replace most of what Google offers. From Docs to office suite, note-taking to chat and many more. (Disclosure: I am with Zoho)
I will add that we use Zoho at work and have issues with emails about weekly. Their web interfaces are not very well designed although they do work OK.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#174Earlier 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?
$50 gets you 25Gb according to their pricing page.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#175a true alternative has not to be hosted in a country of the Five Eyes group.
I switched to mailbox.org and I am really happy.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gmail is not free, you just pay in non-monetary terms. It's up to you to decide how you want to weight your priorities.
Privacy is important, but money is a non negotiable priority if you don't have it.
That's fair enough (and I am using gmail precisely because I have no way to pay another service provider -- banking while living in a country that you are not a permanent resident of is tricky). However, the entire thread is about what service should you use if you are worried about privacy.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#177How about Amazon WorkMail?
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I need to respectfully disagree with you here. In a free market, pricing does have something to do with the cost of providing a service because companies that overcharge would quickly lose market share to competitors, especially in a wildly competitive space like email. Also, ten bucks a year has nothing to do with how much I'd personally be willing to pay for email. It is just my estimation of the amount you could c…
...companies that overcharge would quickly lose market share to competitors
This is only true for companies offering equivalent products, and that is never the case in tech because there are so many intangible factors.
In this case, one of Fastmail's intangible benefits is that they're not Google. Maybe Fastmail's customers think that's worth $50 ... but it has zero impact on Fastmail's costs.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Still searching for a good Android mail app... K-9 Mail has served me very well over the years! https://k9mail.github.io/about.html Edit: Highlights for me: - IMAP Idle support: e-mails appear instantly, configurable on a by-folder basis. - Mature and stable: it's been around forever, updates are infrequent, it just works. - Free software: apache license - No fanciness: it is very traditional-email oriented. The on…
I use K-9 Mail too, and while I think it's great (fast and customizable) I think it could use some gestures or more in general a UI revamp to reflect the fact we are not using Ice Cream Sandwich anymore :)
Actually K-9 already has a nice UI in "master" branch but for some unknown reasons it's not released yet :(
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#180FastMail. It's one of the few third party hosts to support push email on iOS with the native Mail app (it's a custom protocol based on APNS), since Mail doesn't implement IMAP IDLE [1]. They are also the main sponsors behind the JMAP protocol [2] and some open source projects such as the Cyrus IMAP server. [1]: https://fastmail.blog/2016/12/21/what-we-talk-about-when-we-... [2]: https://jmap.io
FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.