Anyone know of a good alternative for Google Voice? This is the stickiest service for me; there are lots of email options but it doesn't seem there's many services that offer a phone alias with call forwarding and a full web interface for not only voicemail but texting. Rolling my own through Twilio or something seems like an option but then I'm back to paying per text message or other event (I don't mind paying for a good service along these lines, but I'm reluctant to get into a metered situation).
Moving Away from Gmail
51–60 of 287 posts
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#52Unaffiliated, I found migadu ( https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html ) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need. As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many address…
I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email and setting tags, deleting etc. Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite su…
They did a full UI update and have a bunch of new features. Some are still buggy but support is responsive. Some of the new cool things they have are identities: different logins to send and receive all to the same mailbox, but externally looks different.
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#53It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
Static IPs aren't getting easier to acquire.
You only need a public IP, not necessarily static. My ISP offers public IPs via pppoe and dynamic DNS. I was able to install my mail server with docker-mailserver [1] without much effort. There are some quirks, but it's worth trying out.
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#54One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years, but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that many websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it problematic if you have a decades worth of accounts tied to gmail.
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#55The sad thing like others have mentioned is that most people don’t own their own email address. Their address is tied to the client. Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off for ToS violations. I wrote about it more here https://meagher.co/own-your-email/
You ditched Gmail for... Gsuite. Is this a joke?
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#56I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone. But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be. EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate servic…
The bus factor is a potential issue. Legal terms & conditions probably aren't as the corrupt civil law systems of nearly all polities make legal redress unavailable or hopelessly impractical to all but the wealthy (who probably aren't looking at $10 pa mail). Ordinary people don't read legals, partly out of laziness, but partly from a (correct) judgement that they are irrelevant to them.
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#57It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
It may not be difficult, but it's not trivial, either. It's an enormous time sink. The older you get, the less free time you have. Is this how you want to spend it?
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#58It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
Running a (1) mail server is not enough. You need fault tolerance. And then of course spam filtering, DKIM and whatnot, maybe a nice web interface, ... Running an SMTP server is easy. The rest? Not so much. Rolling your own is great. However, it's not for most people and requires constant monitoring and maintenance.
For personal mail?
I don't need fault tolerance if it is going to be down for 10 hours I don't care. If I run it I am going to fix it anyway and retry registration process for whatever I needed mail.
Spam filtering use 10minute mail or something for crap that you don't care. Give your mail address to people and companies you actually want to deal with. Better just keep some spam box on free provider where you sign up for crap.
I don't care about web interface I have multiple boxes anyway so I have to use client app where I can see all stuff at once. (why people think you can have only ONE "THE ONE" mail address for everything?)
DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two. Mostly what people do is that they receive stuff (registration mails for crap).
That said, if you send out bulk mail like in 1k a day you really need DKIM, SPF, DMARC and stuff.
If you run company email server it might be better to do it with email provider or get marketing to send mass mails with mailchimp or sendgrid.
When you want to run mail server for friends and family you are just being silly and if there will be 10 hours downtime you would not care about... Guess what your brother in law wanted to sign up for free month april on por..ekhm...pluralsight and he is going to be mad at you (and you should not tell that to your sister).
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#59email is such a critical part of my digital life that is stability and convenience are the critical factors which can overweight some shortcomings in features and UI.
So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are: 1. Stability. Google as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller companies? 2. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed very professionally. I am pretty comfortable with my email data being safe with them. 3. Security. My guess is that the Google security team has more people than the whole development team of Purelymail or even Fastmail. They know how to resist attacks from state actors, massive DDOS, etc. 4. Spam filters. Having 1 billion active users Gmail has a unique ability to detect spam. Smaller providers, no matter how good are their antispam algorithms are, just do not have access to such amount of data.
That said, I share some of your concerns about Gmail and thinking about moving to ProtonMail.
Re: Moving Away from Gmail
#60One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years, but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that many websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it problematic if you have a decades worth of accou…
I just kept my Gmail account but receive virtually zero email on it.