Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

news.ycombinator.com

221–230 of 589 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I might be wrong, but I also think it is expensive. When I can have a 5 family plan from office365, including, word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, etc, with 1TB per account, 60 minutes of skype calls per account, etc, for 10 per month, 25 per month (for 5 people) only for email seems too expensive to me. The only thing lacking is custom email address.

It's £25 a year or £2 a month.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's expensive if you think of what it costs to keep a mail server online. They have a price that clearly shows to me that they have no competition.

What do you get for less than $35 per year? A cheap VPS? Are there plans for less than $3 per month these days?

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...

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#226
I self-host SOGo on my own machine, it gives me mail + calendar + contact sync. Finally moving off from gmail feels so great.

For others I recommend office365--fairly inexpensive, excellent support, and available either in the EU or entirely within Germany.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#227
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be wrong, but I also think it is expensive. When I can have a 5 family plan from office365, including, word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, etc, with 1TB per account, 60 minutes of skype calls per account, etc, for 10 per month, 25 per month (for 5 people) only for email seems too expensive to me. The only thing lacking is custom email address.

It's £25 a year or £2 a month.

The standard plan is $5 per user per month, so for 5 users that's $25/mo.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Google doesn't do that anymore. Source: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...

That does say they don't read your email for ad personalisation, but it doesn't say they don't read your email. Reading your email for data gathering is their entire business model so if they don't explicitly say they don't, you should assume they do.

Their business model is reading your email for ad personalization. How else would they make money from reading it?

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#229
post #99

I've been with Zoho Mail for a few months now and have had a great experience with them so far! Great security features, calendar support, as well as DNS management. I've also heard good things about FastMail and Proton mail. Compare and find out which service best suites your needs/budget. https://www.zoho.com/mail/?zmc=zoho-fa

Proton Mail uses angular1 though https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient, pretty old

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#230

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.

Fastmail is on par or cheaper than Google's equivalent G Suite email service to business.
Post reply on HN