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Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.

by eximius 10y ago

teach 10y ago
I hear nothing but good things about Fastmail. I'm pretty sure Gmail is the best free provider, but Fastmail is probably the best paid one.
detaro 10y ago
Fastmail seems to be getting a lot of love. I like mailbox.org (from Germany, so maybe not the fastest in US). There are many providers of hosted Exchange or other Groupware, at least some of them have to be good.
Silhouette 10y ago
But if there are no good providers Mail is the lingua franca of the Internet. There are many, many alternatives to just getting an account with one of the handful of well-known huge providers and being locked in to whatever they want to do to you afterwards. Just about any ISP will provide the necessary servers to send and receive electronic mail. Plenty of hosting services will let you keep your own mail store in a remote, always-on location. Either of these also works fine with your own domain with any decent provider, and either costs a modest amount to run for something so important and useful. If you are limiting your options to a specific type of webmail service then of course you're going to be stuck with whatever downsides that comes with, but that's far from your only option.
drdaeman 10y ago
If there are no good providers, you can always set up your own¹², or hire an engineer to do this for you. ___ ¹) On a leased hardware, network and address, but with proper backup and failover strategies, hosting providers are interchangeable (or one can always host on their own hardware) and it's somewhat less likely ICANN or your local registrar would yank your domain name registration than Google would do so to your account. ²) There are (nearly) one-click solutions for this, like https://cozy.io/ https://cozy.io/ or https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
- the_common_man 10y ago
  See cloudron.io as well.

Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.

by eximius 10y ago

Thats the easy part. But if there are no good providers, it doesnt matter that you can switch to the next bad one.

teach 10y ago

I hear nothing but good things about Fastmail. I'm pretty sure Gmail is the best free provider, but Fastmail is probably the best paid one.

detaro 10y ago

Fastmail seems to be getting a lot of love. I like mailbox.org (from Germany, so maybe not the fastest in US). There are many providers of hosted Exchange or other Groupware, at least some of them have to be good.

Silhouette 10y ago

But if there are no good providers Mail is the lingua franca of the Internet. There are many, many alternatives to just getting an account with one of the handful of well-known huge providers and being locked in to whatever they want to do to you afterwards. Just about any ISP will provide the necessary servers to send and receive electronic mail. Plenty of hosting services will let you keep your own mail store in a remote, always-on location. Either of these also works fine with your own domain with any decent provider, and either costs a modest amount to run for something so important and useful. If you are limiting your options to a specific type of webmail service then of course you're going to be stuck with whatever downsides that comes with, but that's far from your only option.

drdaeman 10y ago

If there are no good providers, you can always set up your own¹², or hire an engineer to do this for you. ___ ¹) On a leased hardware, network and address, but with proper backup and failover strategies, hosting providers are interchangeable (or one can always host on their own hardware) and it's somewhat less likely ICANN or your local registrar would yank your domain name registration than Google would do so to your account. ²) There are (nearly) one-click solutions for this, like https://cozy.io/ https://cozy.io/ or https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/

the_common_man 10y ago
See cloudron.io as well.