Ask HN: What email service do you use for personal accounts and services

12 points by jeksn 5 years ago | 17 comments

Trying to do some digital cleanup and after writing down all the services i'm using it's a bit of a mess. Different services uses different email accounts. In an ideal world it would all be consolidated under one email, but that seems impossible at this point.

Interested in your setups. Do you use Gmail or another service to sign up for stuff?

Bonus question: How many email accounts do you regularly use?

coffeemaniac 5 years ago |

I recommend setting up an aliasing service no matter which provider you ultimately use. Blur or Anonaddy (sure there are others..) will give you a burner email unique for each new service you sign up for which forwards to your real email, and if one day one of them gets spammy or is sold to a data aggregator, you can just get rid of it entirely.

If I'm going to be actually corresponding a lot with an address (these days this is the exception in my email usage) I'll skip this middleman and make an alias/sending identity in fastmail.

To more fully answer your question, I believe I now have hundreds of unique email addresses in use. But it doesn't feel that way.

ocdtrekkie 5 years ago |

I moved everything to Fastmail. Sometimes I'll create an alias if I want to easily control a funnel of emails, but usually the one email address rules them all.

The big thing is to use an email address at your own domain so you can switch to new email providers in the future. Using an @gmail address is being unnaturally chained to one company.

stevekemp 5 years ago |

For 20ish years I ran my own mailserver, on a Debian box. All my mail was accessed directly via mutt/lumail, from beneath ~/Maildirs

Last year I trialed fastmail, but didn't like it, so now I'm paying for GSuite. I have two users setup - a domain admin, and my own "real" user.

I've been using unique addresses at my domain ("reddit@example.com", "lwn@example.com", etc) so I had to setup an address-map to get around the alias-limits. But that niggle aside I've been enjoying the way it all works out.

dyingkneepad 5 years ago |

Just don't forget that email is generally used for password resets, so if you have the same email for everything and someone gets access to your email, they may be able to reset all your passwords.

I'm in the process of switching all my services to a domain I own, so I will be a little less screwed in case google decides to randomly shoot me (like they do sometimes).

nomoreservices 5 years ago |

I've been using https://mailbox.org and really like it.

I only disclose my actual email address to a few people. For everything else, I set up specific addresses such as shopping@, health@, bank@, etc using a domain I own, and all those forward to the Mailbox address and get filtered accordingly.

mxxx 5 years ago |

Started using fastmail about six months ago. Very happy. One account for a handful of different domains and addresses.

Shared404 5 years ago |

I have two main emails - one for actual correspondence and one for signing up to services and such.

I also spin up new emails for trials and such every once in a while, and delete/abandon them afterwords.

I do most of this through ProtonMail. You can't use your own mail client with them without paying, but their webmail is fine enough.

cpach 5 years ago |

G Suite. Gmail is great IMO. I only use one account, and I have my own vanity domain.

vmurthy 5 years ago |

Newsletter subscriptions + other random stuff = Gmail

Bank + stock investing account + other valuable stuff = own domain powered by O365 "Essentials" mail for ~$2 pm. Working well :). Didn't want Google snooping on these. So..

tmearnest 5 years ago |

I gave up on self hosted mail about a year ago. It’s one of the best things I did for my nerves. Now I use Microsoft hosted mail. It’s $5 bucks a month, and it’s (probably) not as data mined than Google.

bickeringyokel 5 years ago |

I use protonmail with a custom domain, and simplelogin.co for throwaways

zzo38computer 5 years ago |

I run my own server, using different addresses at the domain for each service I sign up with and also for each person I communicate with; all of them are set up as aliases to one account.

helph67 5 years ago |

I have been using Fastmail for many years and make good use of aliases to allow recognised items to be delivered into a identifying folders.

jmercouris 5 years ago |

I use the one provide by my domain name registrar. I get 5 email accounts for free with Gandi.

I regularly use 2 email accounts, one work, one personal.

alexmingoia 5 years ago |

I have one email for everything and use Fastmail.

Don’t make life complicated by using multiple emails.

nunez 5 years ago |

G-Suite though moving to Office 365 is in the backlog.

csergiu 5 years ago |

I use burnermail.io