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Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

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Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is paid and very costly while Gmail is free, not very good alternative for me.

For the privacy, quality, and features it offers at the reasonable price of $50/year, I would say that it's a fantastic alternative. It'd be hard-pressed to find anything free that is on par.

Well. Since all their servers are US based, talking about privacy like talking about Gmail : none knows what's going behind ...!

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail has been also flawless for me since signing up. Highly recommended.

I think paid email services are a great idea, but $50 a year and 2 GB of storage for Fastmail seems expensive to me. Why not something closer to five or ten bucks a year? Can someone explain to me why this type of pricing makes sense?

$50/y gets you 25 GB of storage.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#183
post #102

Posteo [1] They are based in Germany, are very privacy conscious (anonymous payments and registration) and offer full encryption support. With k9mail as mobile app I've been very happy so far [1]: https://posteo.de/en

I had contact with Posteo support and can confirm they are very helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pricing 101: Price has nothing to do with the cost of providing the service, and everything to do with the value the customer puts on what they're buying. The value you put on email is $10/year, so Fastmail doesn't represent good value. Other people obviously think its worth more. Fastmail are providing their service to those people.

I need to respectfully disagree with you here. In a free market, pricing does have something to do with the cost of providing a service because companies that overcharge would quickly lose market share to competitors, especially in a wildly competitive space like email. Also, ten bucks a year has nothing to do with how much I'd personally be willing to pay for email. It is just my estimation of the amount you could c…

In a free market

Bzzt. Notice how everyone recommended fastmail and nobody else? It's not a highly competitive free market. It's "hi, can anyone recommend a MacBook cheaper than the one apple make" time.

Free markets reductionism not useful with no serious competitive pressure

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#186
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use K-9 Mail too, and while I think it's great (fast and customizable) I think it could use some gestures or more in general a UI revamp to reflect the fact we are not using Ice Cream Sandwich anymore :)

Actually K-9 already has a nice UI in "master" branch but for some unknown reasons it's not released yet :(

Thanks for the heads up, apparently they are (were) working on it: https://github.com/k9mail/k-9-design

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#187

FastMail. 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

FastMail is good, but it's very expensive. I'm waiting for more competition in this space. I think, as people turn away from Google (and thus Gmail), more competition will arise and we'll finally see fair prices.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#188
For the self-hosted folks there are:

https://mailcow.email/ - dockerized, works with multiple domains, sogo for groupware. Compared to mailinabox's single disk, it has 6 docker volumes to keep track of.

https://mailu.io/ - dockerized, it has a section on kubernetes deployments, which i find weird, but I guess could make sense for companies

https://mailinabox.email/ - no docker, no multiple domains, roundcube, nextcloud for groupware. Main disadvantage or advantage, depending on your perspective is that you need a mailinabox server per domain.

And then this is the more hands on version, which I guess would be sovereign as ansible deployment.

https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

IMHO sovereign puts too many attack vectors on a single machine.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#189
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, I use their calendar web app on Desktop (the one next to Mail). For mobile, I sync individual calendars into my Android Calendar ("CalDAV-Sync"). My biggest issue with the Google Calendar was the syncing rate of 24 hours for iCal feeds. On Fastmail, new events appear quite fast (and I can force the update manually, if I need to).

I wanted to create a group calendar between myself and my wife. We both use FastMail. Gave up after fighting for a day with weird errors.

FastMail sent me an email that said our calendars are not in sync anymore.. way too often.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#190

FastMail. 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

Does Fastmail provide any kind of "bundling" or "priority inbox" features?

Since using Inbox on Android, I can't imagine going back to being notified about every single email. Automatic bundling of messages and the custom rules that you can then set on those bundles is a killer feature. If nobody comes along with a decent alternative before Inbox is shutdown then I don't know what I'll do!

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