Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

news.ycombinator.com

271–280 of 589 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#271

I'm self-hosting my mail server using mailcow[0] for little over a year now and everything works fine. It comes with a admin interface to manage accounts and the SoGo webmail client[1]. Getting it up and running was also pretty easy. Create some DNS records as described in the documentation, cloning the repository and starting everything using docker-compose. [0]: https://mailcow.email/ [1]: https://github.com/invers…

I'd much prefer it if there was just 1 docker container and not a whole compose stack. I much prefer 1 docker container == 1 service.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#273
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Email seems like more of a free market than most things considering the incredibly low barrier to entry. You can even host your own email server, you can't reasonably do that with a lot of the software that you use every day. Just because a particular provider is good and cheap and has a lot of satisfied customers doesn't make it any less of a free market.

It just feels like a truism. Absent a formal regulation oversight any market is free in these terms. Were not comparing Japanese gold plated apples and trader Joe floor dropping oranges with mould on, were looking for competition in the sense BMW competes with Mercedes and Lexus. Google is giving away some thing of huge value, which is highly reliable spam free email. They "charge" your privacy which is beyond price. If you seek equivalent functionality the software cost alone for the one I regard as comparable is 350 dollars which as a purchase amortised out is $10 a month over three years but I have to spend another $10 a month to host it, and I still have a single point of failure. So price wise fastmail may be enormously good value or expensive depending how you feel: there are not a heap of competent competitive alternates. Maybe five? Sure, that's a competitive market in Herfindahl Hirschman Index maybe? But in practice it's not far off a duopoly. Google or o365, fastmail or proton. It's a pair of competing entities not one market.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#275

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?

mailbox.org and posteo.de are both 1€ per month. I haven't used either though.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#276
post #72

If you need strong privacy, then go to ProtonMail. Otherwise, try https://yandex.com . For personal domains you can use https://connect.yandex.com , which is free (with ads) for unlimited users or $3 per user per month (available in several countries) without ads. I've been using Yandex Connect for quite long time (free and paid). They are very good. Yandex Connect goes with Email (fully unlimited), Cloud Storage, Wi…

Be careful, Russian secret services have an official access to all communication on their servers. If your threat model includes bad actors from Russia — it's a no go.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their "end-to-end" encryption claims as well as their schtick about being hosted in Switzerland make it abundantly clear that I will never trust their security. I would go so far as to use almost any other major email provider over ProtonMail.

Sorry, can you go into more detail? I don't understand your concern.

No OP, perhaps one could think they make such a big thing about security to try to attract lucrative accounts, which they then have backdoors into.

As you can't verify their claims, all you can do is trust. If you want end-to-end encryption you should be gpg encrypting every mail, not relying on the unverifiable word on a provider. Any provider worth its salt will know that, thus wouldn't actually advertise an insecure (as verify can't be done) system as a secure one.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#279
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonMail does have an IMAP bridge you can setup locally.

(Only for Windows and Mac OS, though) https://protonmail.com/bridge/install

IMAP on Linux does work as well. It's a stable beta. I use it w/o any issues.

Re: Ask HN: Best alternative to Gmail?

#280
post #159

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

One thing to keep in mind about Fastmail is that all their servers are hosted in the US and they have no plan about changing this (I asked). Post-Snowden this means you can be quite sure that all mails will end up being analysed by the US authorities

> mails will end up being analysed by the US authorities

I read somewhere that servers located in the US are actually safer from drag net eavesdropping b/c a judicial order is required.

Post reply on HN