Ask HN: Email Provider for Main Account?

27 points by agent008t 1 year ago | 27 comments

Which email provider would you recommend for your main account? (Banking, government + other important stuff)

With Gmail, I am concerned that I could get arbitrarily locked out of my account with no recourse. Also, I wouldn't mind moving away from Google in general to support a more decentralized internet. If it is based outside of the US, even better. But these considerations are secondary.

So I am looking for something secure, reliable, and usable (good search, not getting overrun with spam) that I could use for the next few decades. Privacy is only important insofar as reasonable security is concerned (vague, I know, but my point is that practicality is more important).

What do you use and what have been the pros and cons?

svennek 1 year ago |

I have my own domain (that I share with relatives), and use mailbox.org for hosting it.

I chose them after a rather lengthy search.

Reasons for choosing them(pros)

- multiple "payment accounts" can share the same domain (securely), which was my primary reason for choosing them.

I.e. I cannot access my brother's mail in any way, even if we share the same domain, because he is his own admin.

- you can pay extra for more space (i.e. additional storage on a per gigabyte basis)

- extra "domains" and "aliases" for the mailboxes are possible and free (for a given number dependent on your subscription level)

- German company (i.e. EU company, which I care a lot about).

- They seem like an old-fashioned unix company that respect privacy, so my risk of being data harvested or used for ai training seems miniscule

- They seem to be financially stable and (if I remember correctly) around 40 employees which is a reasonable size

- They have a full online office suit (which I do not use)

Reasons not to (cons)

- you pay per mailbox, not per domain

- their business plans starts to expensive for my taste (so my business domain is at another hoster) as the business is basically revenueless currently. Shouldn't be a problem, if the business is "real".

I want to stress, that I am only a customer, no partner or affiliate or receive any benefit of writing this.

KomoD 1 year ago | |

How long have you been using them for?

I've been with Google Workspace for a few years now but I feel like it might be time to move.

> - multiple "payment accounts" can share the same domain (securely), which was my primary reason for choosing them.

That's a cool feature

os2warpman 1 year ago |

I have paid for Fastmail for over a decade and there have been no cons I can think of.

I use my own domain and turned on wildcards so each service gets a different email address to try and spam.

andyjohnson0 1 year ago |

Fastmail. You pay for the service, so you are the customer.

Been using it for years with my own domain. Rock solid and good support, with no cons that I can think of. Fastmail will sell you a domain but I register mine with CloudFlare.

n0ot 1 year ago |

I use a custom domain with iCloud+. That works for me because I'm very much in the Apple ecosystem, but I can easily move somewhere else whenever it's no longer the best option for me, and I did just that when I moved from Proton to iCloud. I've set this up for my wife as well. It can be as simple or as hard as you want it to be, but above all, I'd strongly encourage you to use a domain you own. Email has become our de facto identity, and we should be in control of it.

eftepede 1 year ago | |

+1 to this. I was using Fastmail and it was very good, but since I'm already paying for Apple One, I decided to switch my e-mail (in my own domain) to iCloud+ to.

The only con I see is: there is no way to add separate 'mailboxes' to it. I can register multiple addresses, but it's still one account, thus one mailbox.

nuker 1 year ago | |

What if you lapse domain renewal for some reason and someone buys it? Some serious accident or life event? I do the same but i use icloud as main one.

msh 1 year ago | | |

you can prepay many domains for up to 10 years.

isaachinman 1 year ago |

Personally, I use iCloud+ for custom domain hosting. I migrated from Gmail about a year ago. Yes, it's a walled garden, but a lesser of two evils for sure.

And if you have email accounts spread across multiple providers, check out the email client I am currently building:

https://marcoapp.io

Supports anything that supports IMAP/SMTP, but crucially is cross-platform (desktop + mobile apps).

overu589 1 year ago |

Register your own domain, forward it to wherever, if you get locked out reroute to a secondary service for the recovery. Gmail is fine.

aprilnya 1 year ago |

I was using Proton Mail for a while with a custom domain, which was great as a single user with a single domain. Phenomenal email service and the other apps they offer are cool too.

I ended up switching to Migadu however, as nowadays I need to have multiple domains, and multiple people might need to have accounts on some of them.

- Pros of your own domain: migrating to a new provider is really easy (don’t need to change your email address everywhere), your email provider can’t kick you out and make you lose everything

- Cons of your own domain: if you forget to renew it, you lose your email, but it’s pretty hard to forget to renew it IMO

bigfatkitten 1 year ago |

I'm pretty happy with Fastmail. Web mail and calendaring UI is really nice, search works well and is super fast. Company is headquartered in Australia, but I think they have significant infrastructure in the US.

palata 363 days ago |

First, I would suggest you get your own domain. That way you are not bound to a provider. I had Proton, then moved to Fastmail, and finally to Migadu. I didn't have to tell anyone because I owned my domain, therefore the address did not change.

HenryBemis 363 days ago |

I will echo what (almost) everyone else wrote. Get your own domain. Lock it every way to Sunday, so you don't lose it. Extend it 10y at a time. Use gmail as a backup.

In both Gmail and the Domain Registrar give them 'everything' passport, etc. so even if you manage to lose it somehow, you can prove yourself to be you/the real owner, and get it back (no more "oh I used a free online SMS website to register").

If you got a best-friend-in-the-world, and they have the same setup (their own domain) you can crisscross and be each other's recovery 'email'.

sen 1 year ago |

Fastmail + custom domain for ~15 years.

Entire extended family doing the same now and never had a single issue.

lesser23 1 year ago |

Fastmail these days with a custom domain.

I was on protonmail for years. But I found the integrations were not compatible with my ideal workflow. Their iPhone app also crashed all the time for me and you can’t use regular mail clients. For PCs you can use the bridge with a client but I found nothing like that for the phone.

WRT proton I think it was overkill for my use case. If I need complete secrecy I can use GPG over email.

I find Fastmail to be cheaper, faster, and more compatible for every day use. I also really like the email alias feature which I use all the time. Fastmail and a standalone VPN was significantly cheaper than protons offerings as well.

At the end of the day as long as you use a custom domain it doesn’t really matter where you go. Even Gmail works fine here. To me it just matters where you will compromise on usability for secrecy.

bigfatkitten 1 year ago | |

The additional secrecy features provided by Proton seem like a waste of time when the bulk of your mail is exchanged with (and stored by) Microsoft and Google users.

outlore 1 year ago |

I suspect Google and Microsoft control the world’s spam filters, and given their history of anticompetitive behavior, moving to another provider might hurt your deliverability. I recommend Google Workspace with a custom domain

mr_person 1 year ago |

I have had good experiences with Proton. I pay for the business tier so that I can manage multiple domains… but that’s not your average setup.

Literally my only complaint is that the new-ish vanilla SMTP service does not play well with systems like DMA or Postfix, so I have issues using it for cron emails on my servers.

Everything else has worked pretty much perfectly since I migrated over.

Edit: I echo other commenters though, get your own domain regardless of where you host it. That way you can always pack up your toys and go somewhere else if required

helph67 1 year ago |

Have been using Fastmail for >15 years and recommend it. Use multiple aliases to direct incoming email to separate inboxes, helps sort by preferred categories.

ColinWright 1 year ago |

Others have said something similar, but I'll put my thoughts for completeness:

* Get your own domain so you can move it if necessary;

* Download all your email regularly ... don't rely on the host storage;

* The above is as a backup ... if you get locked out of a host you can point your domain somewhere else, but you risk losing existing data;

I work almost exclusively locally, downloading everything, but still have the webmail interface for when it's more convenient.

urda 1 year ago | |

What are folks using (beyond a regular mail client like Thunderbird) to back up Gmail boxes?

brokegrammer 1 year ago |

Just use gmail because using your own domain or something weird like pm.me can freak some companies out depending on where you live. I tried using my own domain at a bank once and they started questioning whether it was a fake email or something.

Use gmail then setup a tool like imapsync to sync all your mail to another mailbox.

KomoD 1 year ago | |

"something weird"

There's nothing weird about pm.me

> I tried using my own domain at a bank once and they started questioning whether it was a fake email or something.

So just say "Yes, that is my actual email" and the issue is solved.

burgerzzz 1 year ago |

[flagged]

andyjohnson0 1 year ago | |

I get the rationale, but I feel that this is bad advice.

A well-run, reputable domain registrar will give you plenty of warnings when a domain is coming up for renewal. And when the domain expires there is usually [1] a period afterwards when it can be retrieved before anyone else can buy it.

Set the domain to auto-renew, make sure the registrar has your payment details, set calendar reminders. Its not difficult.

The alternative is gmail or similar, where you can lose access to your email, and perhaps the root of your digital "identity", at the whim of some hair-trigger algorithm [2] and be left unable to even communicate with the provider to get it fixed.

So get a domain from a decent registrar. Pay several years in advance. Keep your payment and contact details up to date.

[1] based on my experience of Cloudflare and other registrars

[2] plenty of examples of this on HN and elsewhere

aprilnya 1 year ago | |

I completely disagree… the upsides of having a domain completely outweigh the downsides for me

Domains are cheap, $10 a year, and you can set up auto renew, or renew them for years in advance.

Most registrars also send you alerts (e.g. the registrar I use, Porkbun, sends alerts at 60, 30, 5 days before expiry)

Migrating to a new email service is a colossal task if you don’t use your own domain which you can just point at the new one, and if your email service decides to kick you out, you lose access to all the same accounts as if your domain expired.

My domain expiring is totally within my control. My email provider kicking me out is not.