Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

151 points by livingpunchbag 8 years ago | 149 comments

Hello

I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.

I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.

I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.

What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?

Thanks a lot.

greenyoda 8 years ago |

You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)

dewey 8 years ago | |

Fastmail is great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that.

Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.

tmaly 8 years ago | | |

Is there a wild card feature to capture any address on a domain? I currently have multiple email addresses for a single domain. If I moved the email to fastmail, would I have to pay for each individual email on that domain?

vortico 8 years ago | |

Seconded. This is the answer right here. I've been using it for my personal email for 3 years and company email for 1 year. Their support, web app UI, mobile app, data access policies, and prices are great.

Multicomp 8 years ago | |

Fastmail is the best. I make great use of the subdomain mailbox aliasing feature (website)@(username).fastmail.com

kungtotte 8 years ago | | |

It's incredibly smooth and powerful to use that feature. Set up some folders and it will auto-sort things based on the e-mail address, including sub-folders (e.g <parent>.<subfolder>@<username>.fastmail.com). It will also fall back on placing e-mail in the <parent> folder if there is no <subfolder> present.

WA 8 years ago | | |

You can also do username+website@fastmail.com

cschmidt 8 years ago | |

I've used FastMail for years. You pay them money, so you are the customer, which is how it should be. Your data isn't being mined.

Semaphor 8 years ago | |

Not that it's really needed, I've found out about fastmail on HN and it's regularly the most recommended email service here, but I've been a very happy customer for 5 years now. Support (the few times I needed it) was always quick and helpful.

livingpunchbag 8 years ago | |

OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure?

A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...

voltagex_ 7 years ago | | |

Dreamhost's primary business isn't email. Fastmail's is.

66d8kk 8 years ago | |

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.

TarpitCarnivore 8 years ago | | |

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.

smartt 8 years ago | | |

If you only want to receive mail at aliases it's easy: just setup an email catch-all on your domain ;-) To send is another matter; and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to easily do this with fastmail.

moltar 8 years ago | | |

You can use the plus system.

foo+sitename@yourdomain.com

jolmg 8 years ago | | |

Tried that, once. I wish they had a simple web api for this.

chewz 8 years ago | |

Another happy Fastmail user..

ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.

herhor 8 years ago | |

Same here. Another one (which has a free tier) is mailfence.com, but I prefer fastmail's UI :-)

EnderMB 8 years ago | |

As a service, it's fantastic. The only issue I've had with Fastmail is if you ignore a new email notification on their Android app, you won't receive future email notifications. Not a huge problem, unless you're receiving time-sensitive emails.

ssss11 8 years ago | |

I second FastMail they’re fantastic

seanwilson 8 years ago | |

Just curious, but what do you need support for?

jazoom 8 years ago | | |

I needed help with some slightly complex setting up of users and probably something else. Their support was good, as people here say.

eeutb 8 years ago | |

Fastmail is too expensive. They have no competition. I wish someone would come around and disrupt those prices.

MandieD 8 years ago | | |

If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a lower price, someone would be doing it already.

It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.

newscracker 8 years ago | | |

I found it expensive as well in the past. Depending on your needs, you could look at Posteo.de and Fastmail.org. They're around half the price of Fastmail's lowest pricing tier, but have differences on number of aliases and a few other things. If you need a lot of aliases, Fastmail may be cheaper. Storage space, no ads, commitment to privacy are similar.

csomar 8 years ago | | |

They offers lots of configuration and customization with that price. Maybe you mean somebody offer a simple, straightforward product with no customization at a lower price?

InternetOfStuff 8 years ago | | |

There's also mailbox.org

While their offerings differ in the details, by and large they offer the same thigns as fastmail.

smilesnd 8 years ago | | |

Competition doesn't equal lower prices.

some_account 8 years ago | |

Fastmail is the best.

zhte415 8 years ago |

For 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.

blablabla123 8 years ago | |

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.

kertis 8 years ago | | |

Protonmail isn't bad, agree. But I don't like their mobile Android client because it can't group emails (each email even response is new one). But again I am using free version, so no complains. :)

Google mail is more feature-rich of course.

newscracker 7 years ago | |

It's still cumbersome or close to impossible to move out of Protonmail along with one's emails. The IMAP support is still in beta, and has been under consideration for a few years now. The easiest way to move out of Protonmail is to abandon one's emails there and start afresh somewhere else.

uncle_d 8 years ago | |

Seconded - I am also very happy with ProtonMail.

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8 years ago | | |

Thirded, I too am quite happy enough with protonmail I decided to pay for their service.

wowtip 8 years ago | |

I have a free Protonmail account set up since a couple of years back. But I found the lack of calendar always pushed me back to G Apps. I think the search functionality also was a bit lacking.

maxk42 8 years ago | |

I've been using Protonmail for quite a while. It's excellent.

penglish1 8 years ago |

Another 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.

nhumrich 8 years ago | |

> even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info

It sure does: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo...

Because there are no ads in the paid version, (and because they are dealing with hippa/soc2 etc.) They have no need to look at your data.

taneq 8 years ago | |

> There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year)

If you're talking about self-hosting at home, then probably true unless you're using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the server.

You can get web hosting including email at your own domain for somewhere around $50/year, though. I think I'm paying $26/year for hosting and $13/year for domain registration (or thereabouts, it's a trivial amount anyway) which comes with as many email addresses as I want at the domain, 10GB storage, and some amount of web traffic (50GB/mo maybe?) that's never been an issue.

majewsky 8 years ago |

I use the mailbox offering of Posteo (https://posteo.de) and am very happy with it. They're a small business located in Germany that does not do any bullshit (no ads, no tracking, etc.), and ticks a lot of the checkboxes for ethical business (as much encryption as possible, careful examination of court orders instead of automated law enforcement access, exclusive usage of renewable energy, etc.). I usually go in via IMAP, but their webmail looks pretty okay as far as I remember. The basic offering is 1 € per month for a mailbox, a CalDAV calendar and a CardDAV addressbook; but I think you can sign up for a free trial if you just want to have a look.

(Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)

dimitar 8 years ago | |

They look great! However I don't seem to find an option to use a custom domain.

nachtigall 8 years ago | | |

+1 for Posteo, but they do not offer custom domains. See 3rd question at https://posteo.de/en/site/faq

If you want this, then I'd check out https://mailbox.org

See https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individua...

akudha 8 years ago | |

Just one Euro per month per inbox? That is awesome, I wonder what their margin is

majewsky 8 years ago | | |

According to their own accounts, they have not taken any venture capital or loans. And they say they're donating to NGOs on a regular basis. I could also imagine that users' deposits are invested. (They use a pre-paid model, and e.g. I always send 25 or 50 euros at a time when recharging my Posteo account. An average of maybe 5 euros times 50,000 users is a quarter million in free cash.)

Source: https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability

Jaruzel 8 years ago |

I find the worst part of running a private mail system is the spam. It morphs so often that you are always fighting a running battle just to keep it under control. Achieving a zero-spam target is almost impossible. The larger players (gmail/Office365) only manage to do it because they are handling millions of messages a day and have thousands of honeypot addresses just for spam catching. As a small player there's no way you can compete with that.

My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be.

I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me.

If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.

dmm 8 years ago | |

I've run my own email for years and I don't have a serious spam problem despite posting my email everywhere. I get maybe 1-2 spam messages a week. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist.

sliken 8 years ago | |

Use one of the DNS based blacklists (amavis, mailfilter and other similar tools are supported on most linux platforms) and add greylisting. Sure if you want to go the extra mile you can train the filters, generally I find it not worthwhile.

hoechst 8 years ago | |

I have not tried it yet myself, but heard good things about Proxmox Mail Gateway: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway

mada360 8 years ago |

You could try mail in a box - https://mailinabox.email/. It's really quick and easy to set up and is generally secure, I couldn't imagine someone would target a single mail server over a massive host like gmail or hotmail.

This website https://www.privacytools.io/ is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.

1ba9115454 8 years ago |

Even if you secure your side of communications you're at the mercy of people who send and receive email to and from you.

If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts.

You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse.

A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.

newscracker 8 years ago | |

For me, it's all the commercial, financial and similarly sensitive emails that matter the most. Those companies are certainly not using a free Gmail account for the most part, and whatever paid service they use (GSuite or Outlook365 or other) wouldn't mine this information. With my use of a paid email service that has no ads and promises privacy, this part is handled. Personal emails from those who use Gmail would get mined and profiled, but that's a harder problem to solve. I do try to push people out of free email services and to paid ones that are cheaper and more suitable for privacy.

avaika 8 years ago | |

Well, the scenario where only part of information about you is available for a single provider is still much better, when it has all of it.

dvfjsdhgfv 8 years ago | |

I wish more people understood that.

fencepost 8 years ago |

I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive.

I wish I could bold this, but:

For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized.

Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering.

It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that.

GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.

maltalex 8 years ago |

Self-hosting is tricky to get right and the cost of getting something wrong is high.

One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu

They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)

pmlnr 8 years ago | |

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://mailinabox.email/

maltalex 8 years ago | | |

> 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, spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things. Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots...

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.

marticode 8 years ago | | |

...and then you need to deal with all the blacklists. I once tried hosting an email server and found out at least one major American ISP was blacklisting everything from Digital Ocean. And when that happens, good luck reaching someone to get out of their list.

shannongreen 8 years ago | | |

I would still call it tricky. I consider myself pretty capable but after a month of unsuccessfully tracking down DKIM/SPF/DMARC failures for some recipients I just gave up and switched to Fastmail.

spondyl 8 years ago |

I can recommend the folks over at Migadu (https://migadu.com) which is a small Swiss email host. Their support is very responsive and I never had any issues while there.

I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it.

Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done.

Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.

ganlub 8 years ago | |

Migadu works great most of the time, but it takes forever to get a reply from their support.

newscracker 8 years ago | |

Anecdotal: whenever I contacted Migadu (as a potential customer), it didn't seem like they were reading the messages sent to them at all. Looks like they're either heavily understaffed or their technology isn't that great. I personally wouldn't recommend it.

steaminghacker 8 years ago |

I run several mailservers but my main email addresses go to fastmail.

the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works.

I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal.

FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers.

my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes.

So these are for side projects. not for real work.

another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.

mehrdadn 8 years ago |

Whatever email service provider you choose, make sure to still (a) keep backups of emails just in case (maybe sync an IMAP client periodically), and (b) use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.

isostatic 8 years ago | |

> use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.

I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it.

I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun)

I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.

synchrone 8 years ago |

https://cloudron.io/ has a very decent email setup plus a lot of other apps all one-click installable.

Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.

nebulon 8 years ago | |

More information on how email works on Cloudron can be found at https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

fredsted 8 years ago |

Virtualmin is a little old-school, and hosting-oriented, but you can easily set up a mail server with SPF, DKIM, SSL w/ LetsEncrypt, etc. out of the box. I've never had any problems in over 5 years with sending or receiving and I just turn on automatic updates for Debian. Only issue is if the IP you get from the hosting provider is blacklisted, so remember to check that before you start setting it up. I use DigitalOcean for hosting.

Rjevski 8 years ago | |

Watch out for vulnerabilities though. I always recommend staying away from such "panels" like Plesk, cPanel, etc. Virtualmin is no exception.

SwellJoe 7 years ago | | |

Our security history is pretty good, and we provide a wide variety of security features like 2FA, TLS with Let's Encrypt certificates, various password and login policy options, etc.

I would argue that non-technical users are safer using Virtualmin (I can't speak to the security history or features of any other panels) than doing it themselves, because it's easy to make security mistakes when doing it yourself if you don't have a lot of time to research all the options. If someone can invest the time to learn how to manage all of their own services, and can invest the time to build out all of the security features included in a default Virtualmin installation, then absolutely removing the GUI is removing one vector of potential attack; you should always turn off services you don't need. But, based on history, I can say with reasonable confidence that Virtualmin is probably not going to be the way an attacker gets in (it's probably going to be weak passwords, old software, poorly designed custom web apps, etc.).

Disclaimer: I work on Virtualmin.

Rjevski 8 years ago |

Office 365? It's a paid product from the ground up so they're less likely to terminate your account, and they actually have support.

> having phone apps reading all my email

That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.

timwis 8 years ago |

I left Gmail once, but what brought me back was its separation of "primary", "promotions", "forums", and "updates". I don't know how I'd get through my emails without that. Has anyone seen another service that does something like that?

dod9er 8 years ago |

Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them. I was just going to start with https://mailcow.email/ on a cheap vps. But thanks to this thread I will also be evaluating migadu, seems a nice fit with even less hassle for me.

bjrnio 8 years ago | |

Check out github.com/hardware/mailserver, just finished setting it up for myself and feels great.

laurent123456 8 years ago |

I use OVH https://www.ovh.com for emails and domain (as well as VPS) and never had any problem with them. They have a built-in spam filter, which is pretty efficient.

milani 8 years ago | |

I experienced having my account suspended all of a sudden with no notice; the problem livingpunchbag is trying to avoid.

laurent123456 8 years ago | | |

I've been with them for nearly 10 years for shared web hosting, domains, emails and VPS, and never had such problem. Customer support is not as good as it used to, but still ok. Did they say why your account was suspended?

bcrack 8 years ago |

After spending a few years in a similar situation, and not wanting to maintain my own server, I settled with using runbox.com. It's an economical and privacy-oriented, mail provider which allows (necessary for my needs) using your own domain. They have very quick and excellent support (the few times that I needed it) and also offer a CalDAV/CardDav service. Their web interface is lacking (I believe it is about to be updated) but this is an non-issue for me science I use mutt. I'm not aware of a mobile app (I personally use and suggest the excellent K-9 mail OSS app).

ar-jan 8 years ago | |

+1 for Runbox.

I do wish they had better filtering options.

amelius 8 years ago |

Whatever service you try, make sure that you literally own your email address (i.e. domain name), so you can always walk away without problems.

th0br0 8 years ago |

How about https://kolabnow.com/ ? You can also self-host Kolab.

carlos22 8 years ago | |

Kolabnow is rather expensive and we had a lot of problems with it. The up-time was also very upsetting. Experience was 2 years ago.

Self-hosting of Kolab is not very flexible and a lot of work. We use self-hosted SoGO now and are very happy.

canada_dry 8 years ago | |

I recently joined Kolab to host mail and my calendar. Their customer service is so-so. They also have had some weird certificate issues that prevent my caldav from sync'ing properly - which is kinda inexcusable.

The one thing I like about them is privacy.

E.g. the employees don't have access to your mail. Period. Their policy requires them to have your specific approval to access your account/mail.

wastedhours 8 years ago |

I use https://zoho.eu - decent apps, reasonable tools, similar configuration to GApps.

Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and fairness perspective.

kotrunga 8 years ago |

Use protonmail.com.

They're the best, and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail.

bjrnio 8 years ago | |

> and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail

Can you elaborate?

kotrunga 7 years ago | | |

tldr- they both seem to be very secure email providers, with some differences. To fully grasp differences, read the links referenced below.

I've done some research, but not much. I should have researched more before speaking, so if I'm wrong, please let me know! I just want to have the most secure email. Anyway... here are a few things I've found. I'm no security engineer, so others may have more insight.

First thing is the location of the datacenters. Protonmail's servers are apparently under 1000 meters of solid rock in a bunker, and they claim it could even survive a nuclear attack. (And, they aren't in the US) (https://protonmail.com/security-details) Even if that's there for marketing purposes, it's kind of cool.

To compare, FastMail also has good security, but it's based in New Jersey, and I don't think it could survive a nuclear attack ':) (https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html)

That stuff is important, but unless something crazy happens, I doubt there is going to be any serious physical attacks on the servers. But, you never know.

ProtonMail is open source, and I know some of FastMail is too. Not sure if it all is or not.

ProtonMail has end-to-end encryption, and while FastMail has encryption, it's not 100%, and on the above /security.html link, it seems employees have access to some data, and full encryption is still a work in progress.

From the link: 'At this stage, some system log data (which could contain personal information) is temporarily stored on un-encrypted disks on individual servers, however we have an ongoing project to bring encryption to all system logging as well.'

Probably the biggest thing is when a company is forced to hand over data. ProtonMail keeps a Transparency Report, so the world knows about everything dealing with this. (https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/)

ProtonMail is under Swiss law, and FastMail is under AU law. They both claim to not answer to US claims, but FastMail does have servers in the US, so I'm not sure how that all works.

Anyway, you can read more on their sites from the links provided. Hopefully some of this was helpful.

mrmondo 8 years ago |

Very happy Fastmail user here, it's great (and fast!) to use, I've _never_ noticed any outages, calendar always just works, search is excellent, it's device and OS agnostic and the organisation makes massive contributions to open source and mail related communities.

hidden_sheepman 8 years ago |

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.

happyvalley 8 years ago |

Happy 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

craftyguy 8 years ago | |

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.

matogato 8 years ago | |

Another happy user at mailbox.org here!

Mail (with optional custom domain), calendar, address book, storage and XMPP for 1€/month.

MaryTurner 8 years ago |

You can try servermx.com the give all the features commonly provided for an email account and also some extra ..you can try the service for free (30 days) no credit card required Mary

TangoTrotFox 8 years ago |

I have only positive things to say about tutanota: https://tutanota.com/

messutied 8 years ago |

No 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?

gzu 8 years ago | |

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.

wtd 8 years ago | |

iCloud (or its prior iterations) has had some bad press over the years ago about undisclosed filtering of inbound and outbound email and since then I haven’t considered them for email:

Outbound: https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filt...

Inbound: https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filter...

hux_ 8 years ago |

I just moved all my email accounts to China.

ganlub 8 years ago | |

Is thay supposed to be better?

Lunatic666 8 years ago | | |

If you assume that every hoster is reading your mails, then moving them to China would give you the advantage, that your content and your meta data are not relevant to your new Chinese hoster, so ad targeting etc. would be gone, because you probably don't check Chinese sites frequently

Major_Grooves 8 years ago |

I've recently been having this problem with Gmail: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...

where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?

hknd 8 years ago |

low-maintenance email will not work. You get what you pay for, it will always either be high-maintenance, or you'll have to pay for the service. Unfortunately, fighting spam and keeping stuff up-to-date is not as easy as it should be.

togusa2017 8 years ago |

I use protonmail. No complaints

grizzles 8 years ago |

wildduck.email looks pretty good for a modern mail architecture w/ failover.

arisAlexis 8 years ago |

protonmail works very well and is very secure

laamalif 8 years ago |

for security paranoid minds: protonmail.com

homero 8 years ago |

33mail

lillecarl 8 years ago |

If you're OK with Putin reading your mail instead of Google if say Yandex is a great alternative!

segmondy 8 years ago | |

Yup, I use gmail but I also use Yandex with my own domain. Google is the greater evil if I had to pick between them, Russia & China. Any data I give to Google is more likely to be used against me in the USA than the other 2.

bambamboom 8 years ago | |

The boogeyman dnc used to hide their mistreatment of Sanders and the resulting loss.

Szero 8 years ago |

cock.li

trisimix 8 years ago |

Obligatory check out protonmail

faissaloo 8 years ago |

You might want to take a look at cock.li, the guy who owns it is pretty dead set on keeping the feds away and is really hands off about what you use it for. I've been using it for my personal correspondence email for about a year now and it's been fine.

lgregg 8 years ago | |

Those domain names are something else...

Why do you trust him?

gexcolo 8 years ago | | |

you shouldn't trust him, he gets google alerts and finds threads on hacker news and posts wacky comments like this one

pavanear 8 years ago |

Fast mail is great services

airbreather 8 years ago |

mail.com

Rjevski 8 years ago | |

It's free and ad supported. There's no way they're better than Gmail.

chiefalchemist 8 years ago | | |

> "Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?"

You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.