Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

Once you add the words like Gmail or replace Gmail or instead of Gmail then no, it's not thousands of companies offering similar services. Running a service in Port 457 is the least of the offerings. It has to have spam detection as good as Postini, sieve, IMAP, utf-8 support, tls certificate management, a web portal, DNS and related domain management.

The killer is five nines availability. That's pricey.

I used to run mailsystems and maintain mailsystems code in the 1980s. I don't do it now because it has too many moving parts. I got a grandfathered domain into hosted by Google and it's worth a damn sight more than the apparent market force bottom price.

Hardware or software or service your competitors have to be comparable or at least bearable to apply price pressure. I do not judge fastmail as price competitive because they (like apple) are competing in quality. Not price.

What? If you're an EU citizen you're "under GDPR" no matter who your provider is.

> What email service is best for privacy?

There's no simple answer, because it comes down to your threat model.

What do you want to keep private? Just content? Or also metadata, including your identity and the identities of your correspondents?

And who are your adversaries? Random cybercriminals? Competitors? The email provider? Criminal investigators? Foreign intelligence agencies? Your government's intelligence agencies?

> With the recent thread on privacy in Chrome, I'm thinking of switching off Gmail.

OK, so the email provider is considered an adversary.

If that's the case, the only prudent option is end-to-end encryption, done locally, and not using the provider's services. But that's barely workable. Most correspondents won't cooperate. Configuring clients correctly is nontrivial, to avoid attacks like Efail. Also, there's no forward secrecy, and metadata is not encrypted.

For privacy at that level, you ought to be using something with forward secrecy, like Signal. And if anonymity really matters, you ought to be using something that does P2P via Tor .onion services, such as Briar or Ricochet.

But anyway, you could use email with end-to-end encryption, use pseudonyms, and minimize metadata with some mix of VPN services and Tor. And then use providers with better reputations about privacy and security. Such as Autistici, CounterMail, Posteo, ProtonMail, Riseup, ScryptMail, Tutanota or VFEmail.

However, there's no guarantee that any of them will refuse "lawful" access. For example, Autistici acknowledges that they might "lose control" over their servers, perhaps through seizure by police, or that their servers could "run into accidents that could undermine [their] security".[0] And Riseup redefined their warrant canary policy to exclude investigations of individual users, or groups of users, that don't put Riseup users generally at risk.[1]

Even so, you're arguably OK as long as they can't decrypt messages, don't know who you or your correspondents are, or where y'all are located.

0) https://www.autistici.org/faq

1) https://riseup.net/about-us/press/canary-statement

edit: alphabetized provider list

I use both ProtonMail and Zoho Mail. - If you go for better security, ProtonMail. I use this for my personal email. - If you need better UI/UX & some other utilities, use Zoho Mail. It's free though.

So, there are two separate-but-related products here.

The first is e-mail.

The second is an extremely hard-to-validate promise of future work, such that (a) cutting-edge security and privacy protections are maintained; (b) properly designed regular backups and redundant infrastructure ensure your e-mails won't be lost; (c) staff ethics, training and oversight will protect against insider threats; (d) protection against spam and phishing will be effective - but will not block legitimate e-mails; (e) e-mails you send will get delivered and not marked as spam or silently discarded, even when sending to the likes of gmail; (f) no e-mails sent to you will be silently discarded or otherwise lost; (g) if issues do arise, that they will respond promptly and competently; and (h) as webmail technology advances and market conditions change, they will keep up-to-date and stay in business.

There's no way for me to validate most of these things. Instead, we rely on a supplier's "reputation" - an amalgamation of their past performance, their visibility and their marketing.

There are many e-mail providers. There aren't many e-mail providers widely known as reputable.

In other words, Fastmail doesn't face much price competition within the market of "e-mail services recommended by users of Hacker News" even if they do within the market of e-mail services generically.