Ask HN: Alternative to Proton Mail?

9 points by OhMeadhbh 30 days ago | 8 comments

So I wanted to get away from GMail because I don't want to depend on a service that could just go away at any moment. Now I need to get away from Proton because they can't keep the air conditioners in Franfurt running.

What are the alternatives people are trying? I would like to have:

a. A service that can run for a week without going down for hours at a time.

b. Custom domains. Ideally I would like all messages to a particular domain routed to my in-home server with an online web-mail interface for the last couple of months.

c. Don't barf on PGP or S/MIME.

d. IMAP or POP. If I can't just get simple message routing to/from my local server, I'll take IMAP (preferably) and POP (if I have to.)

e. A service that can run for a week without going down for hours at a time.

I guess I get what I deserve. The "S" in "ProtonMail" is for "Service Level Agreement."

toomuchtodo 30 days ago |

FastMail. They've working to support an EU region first class. Great uptime imho.

Fastmail offers EU data region - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223082 - August 2026 (296 comments)

OhMeadhbh 30 days ago | |

Do you know if they have multiple data centers and can fail-over when one barfs? I'm willing to pay a little extra for a SLA. Also, cyberinsider.com thinks Fastmail is in bed w/ the feds cause they have data centers in the states. Is that accurate? meh. I dunno.

https://cyberinsider.com/email/reviews/fastmail/

Thx for the info, though.

toomuchtodo 30 days ago | | |

"What is your threat model?"

If you want to stay entirely outside of the reach of the US gov, stick with Proton and eat the outages. If you are willing to take on some more risk, try Fastmail. Consider the subject comms and whether higher risk comms should instead be in something like Signal.

atmosx 29 days ago | | |

They do have fallback, they keep backups in the US. So if you want backup / data EU sovereignty it’s not really going to cut it. I don’t remember them having an outage the last many years… nothing that affected me at least.

dlcarrier 30 days ago |

I just recently signed up for Infomaniak (www.infomaniak.com) which I believe meets all those requirements, although I can't speak for their uptime, because I haven't used it long enough.

It does let you use IMAP on the free account, which is what drew me to them.

OhMeadhbh 30 days ago |

I would email a link to this post to Bart (Butler), but my email service isn't working at the moment.

mkbkn 30 days ago |

There's Kagi Mail.

4lx87 29 days ago |

iCloud. Great price. Great service. And Apple has better privacy safeguards and internal processes in place for protecting your email from their employees than FastMail or anyone besides maybe the encrypted mail providers like ProtonMail.