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Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?
because switching to another email provider is not enough if most people are still using gmail...
- soundpuppy 9y agoProtonmail
- itazula 9y agoI like Protonmail, I use it. But one should realize that search works only on the headers, because, well, the content of your mail is encrypted ... doh!
- ry4n413 9y agoOffice 365 Business - Outlook
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- billconan 9y agooutlook.com or self hosted I guess
- iscottj 9y agogmx.com
- fwgwgwgch 9y agoHow does it matter if most people are still using Gmail? Email is a very open and widespread protocol. I'd continue using email 100%.
- davewasthere 9y agoBecause even if you're not on gmail, almost everyone you're emailing will be... therefore, your emails are on Gmail by default.
- fwgwgwgch 9y agoOK I misunderstood. Good point.
- 8_hours_ago 9y agoI switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few years ago and couldn’t be happier. I much prefer to pay for a product than be the product.
- benjaminl 9y agoFastmail is a great standards based Gmail alternative. They use Cryus Imap under the hood and give back to the community. It is both powerful and easy to use. They were the only ones to be able to accommodate my formally self hosted overly complicated email setup. For the truly esoteric needs, they support custom Sieve code. [1] For business purposes Office 365 is great. It has the full power of Exchange under the hood. (I was recently able to setup forwarding only email addresses to external email addresses, without needing new licenses or setting up mailboxes.) [0] - https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/ https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/ [1] - https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html
- sk1pper 9y agoI second FastMail. I originally tried Proton, but the iOS app is kind of annoying. FastMail seems really polished on all platforms. Setting up custom domain was a breeze.
- some_account 9y agoI recommend Fastmail as well. I payed like 10 dollars per year at first but now I pay 20 dollars since I have a lot of stored email. It's absolutely worth it. The user interface is very modern and fast, and these guys actually do care about privacy. There are lots of good blog posts from them too, which always makes a lot of sense and are not written in enterprise language (full of you know what).
- monkeydreams 9y agoI'll hop on the bandwagon as well. They are a great bunch of techs who give a shit about privacy, technology and service. In other words they work hard at things I give a shit about.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- davidbwire 9y ago[Zoho](https://www.zoho.com https://www.zoho.com)
- propogandist 9y agoFastmail the outrage with facebook? the ability to read your mail keeps gmail free.
- ShorsHammer 9y agoGmail has the best spam prevention. I'd love to hear arguments against this, but its why i stay.
- ioddly 9y agoI have a gmail and fastmail address (the fastmail address is plastered all over the internet in plaintext as well), I can't say I've noticed much of a difference between the two.
- hargup 9y agoAgree with this, I have been using Fastmail for almost 3 years and its spam filter works pretty well for me.
- shubhamaggarwal 9y agoZoho Mail - https://www.zoho.com/mail https://www.zoho.com/mail
- O_H_E 9y agoProtonmail
- nathanbuckley 9y agoProtonmail. Works great for my needs. While very secure, is still open source. And I'm always one to belive in open tech.
- Doctor_Fegg 9y agoI’m using Runbox. Better pricing for multiple accounts than Fastmail since the latter ditched their family plan. The webmail interface is a bit clunky but otherwise I’m very happy with it.
- pujjad 9y agoPosteo - https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en "Green, Secure, Ad-Free"
- rmwaite 9y agoLavabit: https://lavabit.com https://lavabit.com It looks like you can run the server on your own hardware, but I have not tried this so YMMV. https://github.com/lavabit/magma https://github.com/lavabit/magma
- lucideer 9y agoThere are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page. In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to: what do I use email for and how else can that work. I had already mostly switched from email to instant messaging (Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, Riot.im, etc.). These have some of their own problems but that's a different discussion so the remaining use-cases are: - open source code mailing lists: Github issues, dependent on adoption but most seem to have moved here - private company PM emails: many moved to Slack which I detest, or an issue tracker which is not so bad, or other dedicated PM software. There's usually not much individual choice here though unless you're running the company. - newsletter updates: these typically come from services like MailChimp so using non-Google email to receive these is fine. - account confirmation: highly dependent on adoption but SMS is becoming an alternative here often - official correspondences: job applications, etc. There is no alternative. Possibly a space with room for disruption but it would be incredibly challenging. Generally though, many options sub a federated technology with a lot of user choice (email) for a centralised walled garden. While I'd recommend Riot.im for the messaging part, my main comment here would be that it would be nicer to just have a built-in email client feature or plugin that alterted you in an obvious manner to the service you were communicating with (doing lookups on the To:/Cc:/Bcc: fields before you send. AND a not-just-for-geeks viable alternative to Gmail that could gain ground over time.
- fwgwgwgch 9y agoUp voted because I'm one of the guilty people you mentioned I wish there were a standard of sorts in im space. It's not signal because it doesn't allow for saving conversations.
- Shoothe 9y ago> standard of sorts in im space. XMPP? Check out https://conversations.im/ https://conversations.im/ and https://dino.im/ https://dino.im/ Encrypted, federated and modern.
- probably_wrong 9y agoWhile not for everyone, I ditched Gmail for my own self-hosted server. I started gradually with low-profile accounts, and moved slowly towards more and more important things. It's a lot of fun, if you're into server stuff.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- p2t2p 9y agoOh, didn’t read your question carefully as well. IDK, there is no viable alternative as of now. Asynchronous, federated messaging system that replicates messages to every host in the chain (you have it in sender’s client, on recipient server and on recipients devices, all of them, provided its IMAP). I don’t know, I really think it is wrong to speak about email as about particular tech. It is bunch of protocols and technologies that form a _concept_. It is hardly possible to replace the concept. If you change everything, but keep the way people interact with it you will get same email simply delivered through different protocols. Like Fido. Almost the same thing but through different protocols. I think we’d better off advocating for people to pay for their email services than change the concept of email itself.
- arpa 9y agoEmail. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.
- lucideer 9y agoYes. This. The unique link solution is a tricky one, transmitting the credentials is a chicken egg problem. Something like keybase.io is designed to solve this kind of problem but of course not everyone uses PGP and they never will. It will remain a tricky problem.
- arpa 9y agoThe only way to transmit credentials, I believe, unfortunately, is via out-of-band communication, e.g. sms/IM/phone/face-to-face. Not exactly convenient, but if you need the message to stay secure from human adversary, it is probably the only way. If your adversary is a machine (your peer in gmail is in control of his/her account, and is not wiretapped by an actual human/you simply don't want google to feed on your emails/you are not an enemy of mossad), a captcha would probably do, along with something like we see in email verification links.
- acct1771 9y agoKolabNow (Switzerland). Read their webpage before brushing off. Underrated.
- tinus_hn 9y agoIf you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to the internet? Because Google is a major presence on the internet... This question doesn’t really make a lot of sense. What are you trying to achieve?
- orionblastar 9y agoI need GNUPG to encrypt messages from my friends when we brainstorm ideas and inventions. So I use Thunderbird with Engimail I have Yahoo and Gmail accounts and set up message filters. I'd like to have a webmail address that does GNUPG on it, but the average user does not use encryption. Also I dislike having to give out my cell phone to verify because I get junk calls when they sell my info.
- mirimir 9y agoMy main complaints with Gmail are, 1) snooping content and metadata; 2) resisting anonymity; and 3) nuking accounts without recourse. For anonymizing identity and metadata, I use Tor. Which I access via nested VPN chains, just in case. To secure content, I use GnuPG. That is, Thunderbird with Enigmail and TorBirdy. I've found both vfemail.net and cock.li to be decent no-bullshit providers, and both have Tor onion mail servers. Sure, some of your correspondents may use Gmail. But there won't be anything useful for Google to see.
- marssaxman 9y agoWhat do these things have to do with each other? Why would you need an "alternative to email" just because you stopped using Gmail?