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Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

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Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#411
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you're absolutely right, details that are sensitive in nature should be encrypted using end-to-end encryption. Otherwise you won't be safe regardless of email provider, as the other correspondents will often be using a US email provider anyway. If your threat model includes an actual threat from organizations like the NSA, then I'd say you have bigger problems than the choice of email provider. EDIT: I self hos…

Interestingly, as a self-hoster your email is much more prone to metadata analysis than anybody who is hosted at one of the big providers and has most of their email transferred to other big providers down TLS-protected port 25 streams.

This would be a privacy Vs anonymity tradeoff, right?

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#413
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIUC, no judicial order is required for collecting. Only for looking at collected data; but agencies get creative around these processes, so I wouldn't count on legal protection from snooping.

But there's nothing to circumvent if the host isn't in the USA.

Unless you're sticking to countries that hang their hat on digital privacy, hosts outside the USA are also likely to be snooping with varying levels of competency. "Not USA" isn't a good enough filtering criterion.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#414
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but ProtonMail is under GDPR I thought GDPR was European union? Protonmail is in Switzerland.

I haven't read this yet so can't summarise, but here it is: https://protonmail.com/blog/gdpr-email-compliance/

Lots of people are "under GDPR". Us for example :)

https://fastmail.blog/2018/05/24/gdpr-is-here/

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically the problem was datacentre network reliability, power reliability, and the pointlessness of having one EU datacentre which isn't reliable enough to run production out of. We'd still need to replicate to a second datacentre for multi-site safety. At that point, why bother? We'd have to run two EU datacentres to have data only in EU, and we'd still be under the same actual legal jurisdiction (Australia) eithe…

We haven't ever given data to US authorities directly, we point every single request from anyone to the Mutual Assistance Treaty with Australia, and that would be the same regardless of where servers are. The EU is outside the jurisdiction of FISA courts, whereas New York is not. I am definitely not an expert or lawyer, but I would think this is not just security theater. I was always hoping that Fastmail offer hosti…

But fastmail and the admins are under Australia law. This makes all attempts to do anything an international incident. FISA cannot do anything directly, they need to contact Australia for help. FISA can order NYI to put in a wiretap - but why bother when we already know there are wiretaps in all the major peering points on the internet.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 1-XS server costs 2€ every month and it could perfectly handle the email of hundreds of users. They are charging you more only for yourself, and that's not even factoring in the economies of scale. https://www.scaleway.com/virtual-cloud-servers/#anchor_start...

Fastmail has employees that have to be paid. You're paying that money instead of the time required to maintain your own email server.

I understand that, but paying 100x what a VPS would cost, that's a rip-off. (100x because a VPS can handle the email of 100 people or even more.)

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#417

Zoho 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)

To be honest, I would stay away from Zoho. I know a couple of friends who work there and they frequently mention having access to raw email contents with minimal supervision. That's now how I want my email to be treated by the company hosting my email services.

What??? >>>> " having access to raw email contents with minimal supervision "

Is this is big company? How many clients do they have? This comment must be emailed to all of them...

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It's cool you spend your time and money doing things you like (regardless of whether those RFCs will be implemented by email servers and clients) but don't make your customers pay for it. Set up donations or something.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#419
post #206

Does anyone know a (preferably self-hosted, but can be commercial) mail client that is as as good Gmail for power users? I always found it rather straightforward have a custom domain and even operate my own mail server, but haven't been able to do the same for the client. The features most important to me are: - Gmails speed and accuracy in search, especially on large mailboxes (100k+ emails) - this one is usually th…

How about Zoho mail

Do you work for Zoho Mail?

Look at the revealing comments above..

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#420
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do another thing: calendar. And I find it at least as good as Sunrise Calendar was before Microsoft shut it down.

How do you use their calendar? Do they have a special app or are you talking about the calendar integrated in mail app?

I use their calendar with various apps like Fantastical or Timepage. It's standard CalDAV and should work with any decent calendar app, including defaults like Apple calendar.app.
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