9 ms·
Ask HN: Gmail alternatives?
Where do you go? Any experiences?
- alaithea 17y agoI pay a small amount yearly for an account at FastMail (http://www.fastmail.fm http://www.fastmail.fm) They have a very solid IMAP service, and a robust (though not Gmail-fancy) web interface. In the five years or so that I have had an account with them, I think I could total up about a half hour of downtime that I can recall, so they are very stable. I recommend them highly. (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer.)
- hga 17y agoI've only been a customer of FastMail since August, but I strongly echo alaithea's recommendation. I use the web interface for preview and POP to Eudora for the real thing. Pretty much total satisfaction. You also get space for a static web site and file sharing. Pay enough (but not much) and you can use your own domains.
- euroclydon 17y agoWhat about the SPAM filter?
- alaithea 17y agoI find it to work pretty well, as long as I keep it trained by moving stuff that gets past it into the Junk folder. You can fine-tune lots of its settings (change thresholds, etc.) in the control panel.
- Maro 17y agoI must be getting old or sth, but I can't find a screenshot or a test login on the site.
- alaithea 17y agoI'm not sure they have any. Their marketing and communication tend to be pretty minimalist. I happen to like it that way. You can always get a free guest account to try it out. Or if you ask nicely enough, one of us who have accounts might be able to post a screenshot. ;)
- Maro 17y agoPlease do, I'm curious.
- decode 17y agoHere's my junk mail folder: http://i.imgur.com/2IwpW.png http://i.imgur.com/2IwpW.png
- alaithea 17y agoHere's an interview with the founder, which includes a screenshot of a message view. http://www.emailserviceguide.com/2009/10/interview-with-jeremy-howard-of-fastmail-fm/ http://www.emailserviceguide.com/2009/10/interview-with-jere...
- robmueller 17y ago(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail) Hmmm yes, we don't really have any screenshots do we, we should probably fix that! Hopefully even without a screenshot, we can convince people it's worth trying us out (there is the free Guest account, minimal storage, but you can at least look around the interface, and then upgrade if you like it) Quick links to the two biggest things people want to know, features and reliability. http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html http://www.fastmail.fm/help/overview_reliability.html
- kmt 17y agoI've used FastMail for about 8 years now. It's an extremely solid service. They just do one thing and that's email. No spam issues.
- DenisM 17y agoI'm using fastmail for 5 years now. It's good, but not that great. My two problems are: 1. Spam false positives. I get order confirmations or mail list subscriptions sent to spam folder occasionally. 2. Search is really bad. by default it only searches subjects, and I think only in the current folder. Thinking about moving to gmail, provided those guys sort out privacy issues.
- robmueller 17y ago(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail) 1. Just add addresses to your address book to whitelist. Also make sure you use Report Spam/Report non-spam on enough emails (200 of each) to activate your personal bayes db (see the Options -> Spam/Virus Protection near the bottom to see how many of each you've already learned) 2. At the moment, you do have to explicitly add body: to a term to do a body search. The first time might be slow as it indexes your email, after that it should be faster. http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhanced_Search_Syntax http://wiki.fastmail.fm/index.php?title=NewInterface#Enhance...
- DenisM 17y agoI'm making orders from all kinds of online stores, there is no way I will add them all to the address book. Especially so because I don't know their address before they send me something, and I don't care about it after their first order confirmation/tracking number email.
- vl 17y agoI'm using Fastmail to host email on my own domain (you can redirect MX records to them or just use their DNS servers). I read email mostly in Thunderbird via IMAP. At the end of the day your own domain is what you really want - you can host it on Fastmail or Google, and if any of them screw up you can move on to other hosting provider or to your own server.
- robmueller 17y ago(FYI, I'm one of the owners/developers of FastMail) For people that are concerned about lock in, I highly recommend this as well. Get your own domain, and then you're not tied to any one service. We have 10,000's of domains hosted at FastMail.
- falsestprophet 17y agoZoho Mail offers most of the Gmail feature set (including support for custom domains) with an adequate user interface.
- pasbesoin 17y agoDo you have any impressions or, perhaps better, specific experiences with their approach to / respect for security and privacy? (Or, does anyone who happens to read this?)
- CoryMathews 17y agoHow is spam on zoho mail?
- sridharvembu 17y ago(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho). We use Zoho Mail for our own 1000 employees. My company email address has been around and active for 13 years. I get 450 spam messages a day. Zoho Mail typically misses catching 1 or 2 a day; far more important to me, I can trust is not to have false positives (genuine mail going into spam). We invite you to try it out. On our business model: Zoho.com is free for individuals, without advertising. For businesses & domain based email, first 10 users are free, again without advertising. We charge $50/user/year (note: per YEAR) from the 11th user. We do not believe in the advertising model for Zoho. Our business model is subscription based, with a generous free edition. We find this model to be financially viable.
- vaksel 17y agoYou can just get Google Apps...since they release features for that 6-7 months after regular gmail gets them, you'll have plenty of warning if they release something like Buzz. + I doubt they'd be stupid enough to bring buzz to their business users.
- uptown 17y agoI disagree. I'm guessing that's exactly what they're planning. Enterprise microsharing.
- simonk 17y agoThey already announced they are two months away from releasing buzz for Google Apps. Edit: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-coming-soon-for-businesses.html http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/02/google-buzz-com...
- jonknee 17y agoWith Google Apps they usually let the administrator turn on and off features, I bet they do the same with Buzz.
- al3x 17y agoGoogle has announced their intention to bring Buzz to Google Apps. The nice thing is that as a Google Apps administrator, you can pick and choose which features/products are available to your users (ie, you). So even if they do make Buzz available to Google Apps Gmail, you don't have to enable it. Of course, you can just turn it off in regular ol' Gmail as well.
- superjared 17y agoThe two features I want are conversations and easy archival.
- mcantor 17y agoIt might be instructive if you included why you are trying to avoid Gmail in your OP, so we can avoid suggesting other apps that might have the same issues. For example, do you dislike it because of privacy concerns? Or because it's a web app? Etc.
- Maro 17y agoI think the Gmail UI is excellent and I love it, but I'm starting to have privacy concerns.
- oomkiller 17y agoGoogle Apps Premium, unless you're Iranian/Chinese. Then use Hushmail etc
- intranation 17y agoIs Google Apps premium guaranteed to actually protect you from the aforementioned privacy concerns? It's still on Google's servers.
- jrockway 17y agoThe government can subpoena your own server in your own house just as easily as they can subpoena Google's servers. So who are you hiding from? If it's the government, then you must use strong cryptography no matter where you host your email, and you must ensure that everyone you communicate with is as paranoid as you. (I would encrypt all my email, but nobody else I talk too will. So it doesn't work.) If it's advertisers you want to avoid, just run your own server and stop worrying so much. People have been doing it for years. (Although, I run my own mailserver and am inundated with spam. Thousands of messages a day. So you aren't really avoiding advertisements, you are just avoiding advertisements for stuff you might actually want :)
- imasr 17y ago
- sucuri2 17y agoIf you are looking for open source and to host yourself, roundcube is pretty good and has a powerful interface
- sahaj 17y agoi've looked but haven't found anything nearly as good as gmail. the most useful feature to me, that other services do not offer, is push (sync) email, contacts, and calendar.
- dan_the_welder 17y agoMy tiny hosting company Varialhosting offers POP and Imap. I did a quick search and there are tons of providers that offer Imap.
- dan_the_welder 17y agoNot my personal company, the one I use... which is tiny. They have treated me well, I have not noticed any downtime, but I am not very sensitive to that. They also allow virtual domains, so I have three websites, two very low traffic, for the price of one.
- Mark_B 17y agoI have an account on GMX.com as a backup account. So far so good - minimal spam (well none so far) has reached my inbox and they are always adding in features like Facebook integration.
- jonathanmarcus 17y agoZimbra may be a good option, particularly now that its not controlled by Yahoo anymore.
- blender 17y agoRackspace email hosting is $1/10 GB mailbox/mo for IMAP/POP Cheers
- davidedicillo 17y agoI was used to use Rackspace Cloud email, but the server was blacklisted on Network Solution so all my clients using NS weren't able to receive any of my emails... FAIL
- scorciapino 17y agoI'm currently using sup (http://sup.rubyforge.org/ http://sup.rubyforge.org/), which has labels and threads like Gmail, but is Free as in Freedom, runs on ncurses and, ironically, has a much better search mechanism, which was the main reason I switched from Gmail. There is also notmuch (http://notmuchmail.org/ http://notmuchmail.org/), which is still alpha, but aims to be faster and more scriptable than Sup.
- cschep 17y agoCool! I don't know how long it would have taken me to find Sup, but it looks awesome. I love hacker news.
- sandGorgon 17y agovery nice - someone who has used sup should put it up on wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-mail_clients ). I see every other client - mutt, pine, etc. there
- vimalg2 17y agoAny improvement over Gmail/Apps search index is worth a look. Thanks.
- jdietrich 17y agoRun your own mailserver. If you don't trust Google with your data, there's nobody else I would trust. There are plenty of open-source webmail apps if that matters to you.
- mrduncan 17y agoAny recommendations for open-source webmail?
- modoc 17y agoI've been really happy with Claros Mail: http://www.claros.org/web/showProduct.do?id=1 http://www.claros.org/web/showProduct.do?id=1 Way nicer than SquirrelMail.
- avolkov 17y agopostfix + squrrelmail there's also this - http://lmgtfy.com/?q=open-source+webmail http://lmgtfy.com/?q=open-source+webmail
- jbr 17y agohttp://squirrelmail.org/ http://squirrelmail.org/ is out there. Can't personally recommend, since I've used gmail exclusively since I got an invite, and desktop mail apps (plus hotmail) before that. My college used squirrelmail before they switched to http://www.horde.org/webmail/ http://www.horde.org/webmail/.
- dotBen 17y agoAssuming you are ultimately comparing 'shared/managed' email hosting vs self-managed/self-hosted then Spam (well, filtering spam) is the biggest issue you have to resolve. Try turning off spam checking on any email address that's been around the net a few years. The upside of GMail (and other shared-services) is that you are benefiting from their collective wisdom of incoming spam landscape - they see the bigger picture from everyone's accounts in aggregate... which is why their spam filters are so much more effective than bayesian filtering -- which is the only tool you have if you 'go it alone' on email With an email address that dates back to 1994 and listed all over Usenet before we knew it would be indexed by DejaNews/Google, I need the spam protection and so I'll always go shared-hosted (Gmail for now).
- andrewtj 17y agoBayesian filters aren't the only anti-spam tool around. I've found Greylisting to be quite effective myself - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
- dpifke 17y ago...which is why their spam filters are so much more effective than bayesian filtering -- which is the only tool you have if you 'go it alone' on email This is not true at all. Of the top of my head, I can think of three different distributed message hashing services (Razor, Pyzor, and DCC) that function similar to a shared Bayesian filter, not to mention all the various IP and URI blacklists that collect and share data about bad actors. I've actually done mail server installs where I've turned off the local bayes filters to improve results because they were getting confused by low volumes. SpamAssassin comes with just about every Linux distribution and is used by major ISPs, so you're not "going it alone," you're leveraging what a huge percentage of the internet population is already using. It's not without effort (maybe 15-30 minutes/week of tweaking when something slips through), but my personal email setup gives me as good or better results than my infrequently-used Gmail account.
- vaporstun 17y agoRelated question, does anyone know of a mail webapp that allows you to have a unified inbox with multiple IMAP accounts? In other words, something like Thunderbird or Outlook Express but web-ified. I started doing a custom fork of RoundCube to do just this a few months back but never finished it...does anyone know of anything off-the-shelf that will do this?
- grandalf 17y agoGmail supports this.. you just create each one as a google account, have them forward to the one you like best, and then set it up to let you send mail as each of the other accounts... I have about 50 google accounts and use my regular gmail this way...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- vaporstun 17y agoYeah, I currently do that as well, but in the spirit of this thread, I'm looking for a non-Gmail way of doing this...
- vimalg2 17y agoThis is something that Gmail does really well right now, what with the new 'Send via SMTP' feature. When I use a secondary account to send from my 'control center' account, the email appears in the SENT items in both accounts. Double Win for records.
- intranation 17y agoJust wanted to give a shoutout to Tuffmail: http://www.tuffmail.com/ http://www.tuffmail.com/ . Their spam protection is excellent, and very configurable. They also have the fastest IMAP servers I've had the pleasure of using. Their web interface isn't anything special, but at least it's proper IMAP so you can use whichever desktop client you like.
- lmkg 17y agohttp://www.lavabit.com/ http://www.lavabit.com/ They (claim to) use some sort of encryption scheme such that they do not have access to the data on their own servers. I don't know enough about crypto to verify, but if your concern for moving away from Google is privacy and/or security, it's probably worth at least a cursory glance.
- tectonic 17y agoHere's the description. Can anyone tell us if this seems secure? http://lavabit.com/secure.html http://lavabit.com/secure.html
- invisible 17y agoIt doesn't seem very secure that they give out their security measures. I mean, "To increase the randomness of our hash outputs...combines the password with the account name," so now I know they use an account name so what is the point in that tiny part? Many little parts of this just give away stuff that should be secret in my opinion. That doesn't necessarily make it insecure, just a dumb idea if something ever did go wrong. Overall the process sounds good if you just want to store data on their server and not have it be readable if someone happens to come across a "dead" HDD that lavabit threw away. Oh, on a similar note: how do they decrypt these messages after you have verified your user/password during sign in if it requires the plaintext password to decrypt each message? By storing the password in a plaintext session database?
- datums 17y agoI've been using http://www.zenbe.com/mail http://www.zenbe.com/mail for the past 3 months. Shareflow looks interesting.
- mrmxyzptlk 17y agoI would recommend this too except zenbe personal is shutting down soon... http://blog.zenbe.com/personal-shutdown/ http://blog.zenbe.com/personal-shutdown/
- rapind 17y agoInteresting that the motivation seems to be privacy concerns. I could care less about privacy but I'm getting tired of gmail's underperformance (your results may vary). Gmail speed has become Intolerably slow over the past 6 months. I love everything else about it though and wish there was a paid alternative with the same Interface. And no it isn't premium. I had that and it was no better. I think I'm on a bad cluster or something and google support has been horrendous. I love 90% of googles products so don't assume this is flame / bashing.
- ubulgaria 17y agohttp://fastmail.fm http://fastmail.fm is my poison of choice.
- AdamN 17y agoJust use the PGP plugin for Gmail on Firefox. Then it doesn't matter who has access to your email so long as they don't have the private key.
- andrewcooke 17y agono-one has mentioned runbox - http://www.runbox.com/ http://www.runbox.com/ that's who i was thinking of switching to (i want to be able to use google "anonymously", and it's tricky when also logged in to gmail). i scanned through the mail providers listed on wikipedia and that seemed the best. hosted in norway, iirc. surprised no-one else has mentioned it here, though.
- pmax 17y agoI have used Runbox in the past and was very pleased with them.
- queensnake 17y agoTry scroogle for that; you can make it your default search engine in both Mozilla ... and Chrome!
- haasted 17y agoAnyone have experience with atMail? (http://atmail.org/ http://atmail.org/)
- pWneD 17y agoMy ISP uses AtMail. It's decent, almost never get spam but the interface is a bit weird, I suppose you could get used to it though.
- vimalg2 17y agoI've run this argument through my head several times. Here's what you should like about Gmail: 1) Google infrastructure is probably more secure than any server you could set up quickly. 2) Google handles all those pesky issue with IP blacklists, Spam, etc that you'll be forced to deal with on a DIY server. Granted, there are solutions for each of these; Its your valuable time, in the end. On the other hand, for a DIY mail-server: you truly don't gain much besides having an accessible dump of your mailbox(in the event that all the gmail-specific datacenters get nuked in a single day?) ISPs can and probably wil sniff your plain text email traffic now/in near future due to external police state pressures. I live in India, and sadly I envision this place turning into a police state by sheer incompetence on the part of the administration who pass half-baked net-nanny laws. The only solution to email privacy: Hard-to-reverse Encryption of the text (typically GPG). Most of the crowd here know this well. But making email encryption transparent and easy-to-use would be a killer product for those customers that value privacy. FireGPG is trying , but Gmail code changes keep breaking stuff sometimes.(http://blog.getfiregpg.org/2009/11/05/gmail-issues-fixed/ http://blog.getfiregpg.org/2009/11/05/gmail-issues-fixed/) Redundancy/Backup is another issue altogether. You should probably keep backup IMAP dumps in a geographically distant location if you fear Gmail will just cease to exist one day(without any warning).
- cnouri 17y agoI work at Rackspace and we see choosing our email solutions as alternatives... http://twitter.com/solevangelist/statuses/9028774642 http://twitter.com/solevangelist/statuses/9028774642
- tybris 17y agoIf find Google Apps for your Domain to be a good Gmail alternative ;-).
- Kilimanjaro 17y agoThis is the right time for Mozilla to offer mymail@firefox.com Millions will flock to them. Instant win.
- sburgess 17y agoUnless of course they don't/can't offer all the advantages aforementioned here.
- nfnaaron 17y agoHere's a comparison of web mail providers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers From that list I use fastmail.fm for outgoing (smtp). (Reasons of historical accident.) $5/year, no ads, satisfied so far. Another alternative is to go the shared host route. Plus: you'll get a shell account without having to/being able to administer a virtual box (and mail server), it's just an account. I've used pair.com for about 10 years to host my domain. Imap/pop access, or webmail. (Their webmail actually isn't that great, but it works.) Enthusiastic recommendation for pair. Go register somewhere reputable (pairnic.com is good), then go host your domain somewhere (I like pair.com). Pairnic and pair are the same company, and conveniently integrated, but you can use either separately or not at all if you like. I get so many allowed email accounts with a minimal plan on pair.com that I don't bother remembering it anymore.
- agravier 17y agoGMX is not too bad
- voltolibro 17y agoDear Fastmail, I hate Gmail and desperately want to find another email/webmail service. I want to switch to something that feels more secure, something that does email well without any of the extra junk they have been adding to my Gmail account. I don't seem to be alone. I consulted several friends with more "tech cred" than me, and they pointed me to a few Gmail alternatives, with Fastmail at the top of the list. I went to your website and after browsing for about a minute, I wanted to scratch Fastmail off my list. Your website came across as clunky, cold, and BLAH. It seemed like the website was designed about five years ago, and it didn't really instill confidence that your service would be a user-friendly experience or something that I could transition to without a huge amount of effort. I decided to check out another Gmail alternative on my list called "Roundcube". The Roundcube site was simple but elegantly designed. More importantly, it didn't feel like it was trying to put me to sleep. The site laid out its features via simple navigation structure, basic colors, a nice screenshot, and a non-cluttered layout. I wanted to hug it. It gave the vibe that they offered an email service that would make the transition away from Gmail extremely painless and straightforward. I relayed my thoughts to a techie friend, and he reiterated that your service is far superior to Roundcube. I trust my friend, and I will probably sign up for an account with you. But seriously... There are so many people out there right now who desperately want to break free of their Gmail shackles. The moment is ridiculously ripe for another service to step into that vacuum and offer a refuge to all of these people. Your email service might be truly awesome, but your website is total cryptonite for people who are ready to make the switch. Welcome us with open arms, and we will come in droves!! Sincerely yours, Volto Libro