I’ve had a very good experience with Fastmail (as others have commented as well I see) for heavy email use, calendaring & contact syncing across 7~ iOS and macOS devices.
Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
361–370 of 589 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing to keep in mind about Fastmail is that all their servers are hosted in the US and they have no plan about changing this (I asked). Post-Snowden this means you can be quite sure that all mails will end up being analysed by the US authorities
I'm an European, but I don't mind. First of all when making such a choice, you have to identify who the enemy is. If you're talking about global enemies, like the NSA, then IMO without end-to-end encryption you're screwed. And if you're targeted directly, you're screwed regardless, given they have the capability to use whatever vulnerabilities they can find in your router, your phone, your OS, your browser, etc. If i…
Good user.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't feel like FastMail is that expensive for most people. Obviously, compared to free, it's expensive. But in real terms, I pay $70 every 2 years for it - works out about £25 a year for me, which is about the price of a meal out. I think that's worth it for secure and powerful email. I've never found it to be expensive.
It's also expensive compared to rolling my own. Using the standard plan, I'd be paying 200$/y for just a single address for each of my family members. Personally, I want at least 2 myself. Compare that to the ~120$/y I pay for my main VPS which has plenty of spare resources to handle not only my family's email, but also for some clients AND, since I make the rules, I also don't need services like Sendgrid for sending…
That is really great if you don't have any outbound deliverability issues due to IP reputation on a VPS host! Under those circumstances, that sounds like a great arrangement.
I think that is not quite the norm, lots of these hosts (and home internet connections) tend to have rather bad reputations, and chasing down the various RBLs can get really old really fast, especially since the most common response is to silently blackhole so you don't get a bounce.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
$3 per month is very costly?
Comparing Office 365, then yes it is very very costly. Such services should earn money at scale. The basic plan should cost around 5$/year.
In my 6+ years of being forced to use Office 365 for one of my accounts - it is a flaming POS. Plagued by poor performance, regular (unexplained!) outages and has series issues with data consistency and don’t even get me started on it’s terrible rules system.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#365Other than supporting the company that is the reason you are leaving gmail (free), what are the thoughts on just paying for gsuite for $5/$10 a month since the privacy statement on gsuite is clearly stated?
I'd like to avoid google, but the email service is pretty damn good (spam filter especially)
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also development and maintenance costs? Someone needs to build that web UI, android and iOS apps, kick those servers when they misbehave, answer the phone or reply to your enquiry?
Except for the apps, cloud hosting providers already give you all of that for a better price. I also don't want an app... IMAP is a standard, you know.
IMAP is an evolving standard still! We've had a handful of new RFCs extending IMAP just this year.
(your FastMail subscription also goes towards paying for work on improving the standards and developing open source software to support them)
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#367FastMail. 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
Same here. FastMail with a custom domain name. First I was planning to self host. But I thing mails are quite touchy and doing it myself may be a risk.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
$3 per month is very costly?
I'm using my own domain, so it's $5 per month. Considering that I'm using VPS for less than $1 per month, that price seems absurdly high. I would consider paid mail for $5/year with 25GB storage and fastmail features, otherwise free mail looks much better.
> VPS for less than $1 per month
What kind of VPS are you getting for less than $1 a month?
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#369I've been using mailbox.org with a custom domain for over two years now. Although it's not free, the plans are quite cheap(starting from EUR 1/month). Have not had a single issue with it.
Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?
#370> 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 age…
> > With the recent thread on privacy in Chrome, I'm thinking of switching off Gmail. > OK, so the email provider is considered an adversary. I don't think Gmail is considered an adversary, it's just that you can now no longer log in to Gmail without also logging in to the same account in Chrome, which is a stupid non-user-friendly feature.
Why is that an issue if you trust Google? Indeed, in that case, they're doing something that is user-friendly. Because stuff arguably works more reliably if you're logged in to both Google and Chrome.
And if you don't trust Google, they're at least effectively an adversary. In the most favorable light, that they're doing something that might compromise your privacy.