Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but checkout Tutanota https://tutanota.com/
I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.
Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
111–120 of 153 posts
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#112No one using iCloud email? I’m giving it a try atm, I think if you’re in the apple ecosystem it can be a good choice, anybody else experimented with it?
I’ve recently switched most of my old gmail account to ICloud. Extremely easy to use with the iOS and Mac system. I’m (currently) ok with apple handling my email data, much more so than google. Have had no issues whatsoever.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#113For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com? You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app. I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.
I've been using Protonmail for quite a while. It's excellent.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#114For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com? You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app. I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.
Protonmail is great. It has all features necessary but at the same time it's not creepy at all - like Gmail is.
Apart from that, in fact I have this long-term project to self-host all my stuff. So far I managed to do this only for my calendar (using Apple's CalDav server). E-Mail is my next goal but even if I have it running, I'll start transitioning slowly. After all I think it's not that much maintanance effort once it's setup as long as it's managed through Ansible or Docker.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus ( https://cyrusimap.org/ ) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintainin…
I love that you interact with users here :) Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me. Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label an…
Use of Tags/Labels on mobile/web is something that's keeping me on Gmail, or I'd be willing to look elsewhere.
An example of how GTD is possible through tags and labels: http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you. [^1]: https://www.iredmail.org/ [^2]: https://mailinab…
> It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security, high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups, spa…
> None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started, but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally managed service.
Depends what kind of security, availability is a part of it. When you forget your password (or it gets hacked and someone changes it), you can just re-deploy the whole thing. On Gmail you might be screwed. On self-deploy backups seem mandatory, which mail user backs up his or her E-Mails?
As far as I have heard, if SPF, DKIM etc etc is properly configured, blocking won't happen. I don't have this running yet but this is my next project. Probably I'll go with postfix, there are bizillion plugins for exactly these things and the configuration will be automated with Ansible. So once it's up and running, I expect this to be pretty much care-free.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#117Happy user at mailbox.org They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even send them money by post for complete anonymity. Edit: You can use a custom domain
I like their inbox encryption feature, all inbound mail is automatically encrypted with your gpg key. This means that mails downloaded to clients must be decrypted with your gpg key, and it's impossible to read mails in your inbox with their webmail thing. This means that if your device is stolen, your emails (their contents) are still encrypted.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also do username+website@fastmail.com
I’ve run into sites that consider + invalid within an email address. It would also be easy for a site that wants to sell off user info to have a regex strip the +sitename from emails prior to selling the list.
The worst I've dealt with is a site that allows + within an email address for signup but not unsubscribe. They've been hitting my spam folder for years now...
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#119Another happy fastmail.com customer here.
I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise.
There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year), even if the hardware itself were free, and you were not counting the cost of the internet service (eg: using your own home internet), and you were willing to accept that you might fail to update some things, sometimes, etc. If you value your time at all. Even at say, minimum wage.
Not to mention the deliverability issues etc.
If you just love doing it, then, by all means, do it. Just don't imagine it is somehow less than $50/yr, or comparable in quality.
I do wish Fastmail had more competition, even if it cost a bit more, and (as the Fastmail folks here have said) the competition participated in open standards and contributed to open source. I think others are "in the works" particularly with (even more) security/privacy emphasis. But, IMHO, eg: protonmail does not currently directly compete. We'll see what pans out.
Re: Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.
You can use a wildcard for this: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.
This is no good when you want to use the fastmail domain for the aliases. Ever since the twitter @N theft[1], I've learned to never use a custom domain email when signing up for anything. It just increases your attack surface. I prefer to leave it to fastmail to protect their own domain from hijacking.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...