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Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

infomaniak.com

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Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#61

Post by ylee »

systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

>There is no such thing as free.

I agree, which is why I've been paying for Pobox.com since 1996. $20 a year for three forwarding aliases of your choice. Fastmail purchased the company a few years ago but I've noticed no changes.

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#62

Post by karamanolev »

systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

I do agree that Swiss laws are generally good, but consumer protection is significantly worse than for example the EU. For many things, a EU person will take something for granted and get screwed over, mostly in terms of strange socially accepted norms + "if it's in the AGB (terms of service) good luck arguing/defending".

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#63

Post by rafram »

dgiol wrote: post #16

Mmm, "privacy-friendly". It asks for a phone number (it's mandatory during sign up), which can only be obtained with an official ID...

> only

I vaguely remember Google making moves toward killing it, but last I tried it, Google Voice let you get a number without providing any ID whatsoever.

And only postpaid phone plans require ID in the US.

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#64

Post by harha »

p1necone wrote: post #12

Is there a https://killedbygoogle.com/ equivalent for startups that promised 'forever'/'lifetime' service and then shut down a few years later?

I wonder if companies can be held liable by customers and/or competitors if they break that promise.

My (very brief, IANAL) intro to civil law in Switzerland covered an interesting detail in contracts: contracts (or parts) need to follow “good morals” to avoid being invalidated [0], an example of which would be that the contract shouldn’t bind the parties for perpetuity.

So this part of the contract couldn’t be enforced by the other party (the customer), while the provider actively advertised it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this would be seen as bad advertising and would lead to potential compensation for customers and competitors, if they stop providing the service.

[0]: https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19110009/...

Edit: added the English translation of the link.

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#65

Post by merlinscholz »

systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

Is there any reason to switch to fastmail from an Microsoft 365 business account? Microsoft offers mail, 1tb cloud storage and more for essentially the same price.

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#66

Post by systemvoltage »

ylee wrote: post #61
systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

>There is no such thing as free. I agree, which is why I've been paying for Pobox.com since 1996. $20 a year for three forwarding aliases of your choice. Fastmail purchased the company a few years ago but I've noticed no changes.

FastMail is an amazing company. Their UI is old school and packs a punch. Their mobile app is fantastic. They also invented some new JSON based email standard: https://jmap.io/

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#67

Post by dchest »

andrewshadura wrote: post #56
red_admiral wrote: post #52

Let me get this right: a Swiss company, offering email FOR LIFE, hosted on a Montenegro domain? What's the backup plan if that domain becomes unavailable for whatever political reason in the future? I would personally assess the risk of some damned stupid thing happening in the Balkans that loses them the domain higher than the same thing happening to a .ch address, and perhaps a bit too high for a service whose main…

This is hilariously wrong. When did something like that happen the last time in Montenegro?

In 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.yu

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#68

Post by davexxx »

systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

Swiss guy here, surprised to see Infomaniak on the front page of HN!

I wouldn't say companies like this come and go: Infomaniak was my first (dial-up!) internet provider in 1995 and I still have my email there. Back then they used to be a small computer shop ran by passionate hackers in Geneva, organising demo scene competitions and such, and now and they grew up and are one of the biggest and most interesting internet company in Switzerland.

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#69

Post by Fnoord »

systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

Right now its only available for the Swiss.

Honestly, it depends where you are from.

Given that I am from Europe, when I host in the same country as I am from (ie. The Netherlands), I am only dealing with local law. The only problem I could have, is when I am dissident according to my country. I'm not though, and if I was I'd have to host in a country unfriendly to mine.

Fastmail is an Australian company. I don't believe Australia has strong privacy laws. EU, at least, has GDPR. For most people, The Netherlands is an excellent place to host your data.

If you consider non-US cloud services, you end up in Europe as well. For example Hetzner, Jottacloud, TransIP just to mention a few.

You should also ensure they use a local domain. For example, thepiratebay.org isn't local if you consider the service is from Sweden (and if its hosted in The Netherlands, neither is thepiratebay.se). Ik.me uses the .me ccTLD; Montenegro. Not a country known for its civil rights, AFAIK.

That being said, I don't believe in 'lifetime' either. Lifetime just means 'as long as we last'. Its a risk an early adopter takes to invest. If the service succeeds, yes they might have lifetime. If it fails, it was an expensive purchase.

Case in point: Emby. I bought a lifetime license. Then they changed to closed source in version 4, and it lead to me switching to the last 3.x fork, Jellyfin. License useless.

The weird thing here, is that they provide the e-mail supposedly lifetime and free. TANSTAAFL, so the default should be suspicion. They don't do advertising. What's their profit model?

Re: Ik.me: a free email address for life developed and hosted in Switzerland

#70

Post by omnimus »

monkin wrote: post #60
systemvoltage wrote: post #45

Folks - pay $5/month for Fastmail, Migadu, ProtonMail, or self host + your own domain name. Companies like this come and go, it’s a good chance you’ll still own the domain name. There is no such thing as free. They’ll nag you for hosting on their site. UI will degrade over time. Something will give, if not now, at some point in the future. Lifetime is a bold claim. I’m being cynical but this smells like an attempt to…

+1 for Migadu or ProtonMail, both offer great service, but Migadu with $19 yearly plan and amount of features is just incomparable to any other service.

Worth noting i suspect they had some issues and maybe the company was sold? It was quite young company. I had it for few years but there was very litle activity, no bug fixes, updates, messages. It was a bit worrysome.

Now they have changed branding and pricing so hopefuly its moving again.

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