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Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

151 points by livingpunchbag 8y ago

Hello I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again. I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me. I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists. What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc? Thanks a lot.

greenyoda 8y ago
You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)
- ssss11 8y ago
  I second FastMail they’re fantastic
- herhor 8y ago
  Same here. Another one (which has a free tier) is mailfence.com, but I prefer fastmail's UI :-)
- dewey 8y ago
  Fastmail is great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that. Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.
  - tmaly 8y ago
    Is there a wild card feature to capture any address on a domain? I currently have multiple email addresses for a single domain. If I moved the email to fastmail, would I have to pay for each individual email on that domain?
    - dewey 8y ago
      Yes there’s a catch all address too.
    - LaxisB 8y ago
      i set this up for my fastmail account a couple weeks ago. go to settings -> aliases and create an alias for * this also allows you to write from any email address in your domain (when composing, change the sender dropdown to your *-alias, and the 'from' line appears and is editable
- vortico 8y ago
  Seconded. This is the answer right here. I've been using it for my personal email for 3 years and company email for 1 year. Their support, web app UI, mobile app, data access policies, and prices are great.
- Multicomp 8y ago
  Fastmail is the best. I make great use of the subdomain mailbox aliasing feature (website)@(username).fastmail.com
  - kungtotte 8y ago
    It's incredibly smooth and powerful to use that feature. Set up some folders and it will auto-sort things based on the e-mail address, including sub-folders (e.g <parent>.<subfolder>@<username>.fastmail.com). It will also fall back on placing e-mail in the <parent> folder if there is no <subfolder> present.
  - WA 8y ago
    You can also do username+website@fastmail.com
    - cggarvey 8y ago
      I’ve run into sites that consider + invalid within an email address. It would also be easy for a site that wants to sell off user info to have a regex strip the +sitename from emails prior to selling the list.
      - repsilat 8y ago
        The worst I've dealt with is a site that allows + within an email address for signup but not unsubscribe. They've been hitting my spam folder for years now...
        whatsstolat 8y ago
        Lucky you have the + to filter them out then.
        mdaniel 8y ago
        Just in case you haven't tried it, I have found that about 80% of the time, they have some frontend JS regex that blocks the form, but using the wizardry of one's choosing, if you managed to get the email address posted to the endpoint, all is well.
- eeutb 8y ago
  Fastmail is too expensive. They have no competition. I wish someone would come around and disrupt those prices.
  - MandieD 8y ago
    If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a lower price, someone would be doing it already. It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.
    - eeutb 8y ago
      I disagree. Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. It simply doesn't add up. The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.
      - danpalmer 8y ago
        The price seems reasonable to me. Bear in mind that they are much smaller than any popular free email provider because they charge. Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS. However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts. Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.
      - nmjenkins 8y ago
        > Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/ https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap. On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres). If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.
- some_account 8y ago
  Fastmail is the best.
- Semaphor 8y ago
  Not that it's really needed, I've found out about fastmail on HN and it's regularly the most recommended email service here, but I've been a very happy customer for 5 years now. Support (the few times I needed it) was always quick and helpful.
- chewz 8y ago
  Another happy Fastmail user.. ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.
- cschmidt 8y ago
  I've used FastMail for years. You pay them money, so you are the customer, which is how it should be. Your data isn't being mined.
- seanwilson 8y ago
  Just curious, but what do you need support for?
  - jazoom 8y ago
    I needed help with some slightly complex setting up of users and probably something else. Their support was good, as people here say.
- 66d8kk 8y ago
  Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.
  - moltar 8y ago
    You can use the plus system. foo+sitename@yourdomain.com
  - smartt 8y ago
    If you only want to receive mail at aliases it's easy: just setup an email catch-all on your domain ;-) To send is another matter; and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to easily do this with fastmail.
    - nmjenkins 8y ago
      Just create a wildcard identity to match (*@yourdomain.com) – when you select this in compose, you will be able to edit the address.
  - TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
    You can use a wildcard for this: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.
    - jolmg 8y ago
      This is no good when you want to use the fastmail domain for the aliases. Ever since the twitter @N theft[1], I've learned to never use a custom domain email when signing up for anything. It just increases your attack surface. I prefer to leave it to fastmail to protect their own domain from hijacking. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picking-up-the-pieces-after-the-n-twitter-account-theft/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...
- livingpunchbag 8y ago
  OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure? A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    Dreamhost's primary business isn't email. Fastmail's is.
- EnderMB 8y ago
  As a service, it's fantastic. The only issue I've had with Fastmail is if you ignore a new email notification on their Android app, you won't receive future email notifications. Not a huge problem, unless you're receiving time-sensitive emails.
1ba9115454 8y ago
Even if you secure your side of communications you're at the mercy of people who send and receive email to and from you. If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts. You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse. A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  I wish more people understood that.
- avaika 8y ago
  Well, the scenario where only part of information about you is available for a single provider is still much better, when it has all of it.
- newscracker 8y ago
  For me, it's all the commercial, financial and similarly sensitive emails that matter the most. Those companies are certainly not using a free Gmail account for the most part, and whatever paid service they use (GSuite or Outlook365 or other) wouldn't mine this information. With my use of a paid email service that has no ads and promises privacy, this part is handled. Personal emails from those who use Gmail would get mined and profiled, but that's a harder problem to solve. I do try to push people out of free email services and to paid ones that are cheaper and more suitable for privacy.
airbreather 8y ago
mail.com
- Rjevski 8y ago
  It's free and ad supported. There's no way they're better than Gmail.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    > "Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?" You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      My point was that it was ad supported and so had the exact same drawbacks as Gmail, but in addition being much less advanced.
zhte415 8y ago
For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com? You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app. I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.
- uncle_d 8y ago
  Seconded - I am also very happy with ProtonMail.
  - GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
    Thirded, I too am quite happy enough with protonmail I decided to pay for their service.
    - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
      Fourthed. I can see me transitioning, so far so good.
      - scruple 8y ago
        Here, as well. Very happy with protonmail.
- maxk42 8y ago
  I've been using Protonmail for quite a while. It's excellent.
- blablabla123 8y ago
  Protonmail is great. It has all features necessary but at the same time it's not creepy at all - like Gmail is. Apart from that, in fact I have this long-term project to self-host all my stuff. So far I managed to do this only for my calendar (using Apple's CalDav server). E-Mail is my next goal but even if I have it running, I'll start transitioning slowly. After all I think it's not that much maintanance effort once it's setup as long as it's managed through Ansible or Docker.
mehrdadn 8y ago
Whatever email service provider you choose, make sure to still (a) keep backups of emails just in case (maybe sync an IMAP client periodically), and (b) use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.
- isostatic 8y ago
  > use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something. I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it. I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun) I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.
homero 8y ago
33mail
mada360 8y ago
You could try mail in a box - https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/. It's really quick and easy to set up and is generally secure, I couldn't imagine someone would target a single mail server over a massive host like gmail or hotmail. This website https://www.privacytools.io/ https://www.privacytools.io/ is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.
fredsted 8y ago
Virtualmin is a little old-school, and hosting-oriented, but you can easily set up a mail server with SPF, DKIM, SSL w/ LetsEncrypt, etc. out of the box. I've never had any problems in over 5 years with sending or receiving and I just turn on automatic updates for Debian. Only issue is if the IP you get from the hosting provider is blacklisted, so remember to check that before you start setting it up. I use DigitalOcean for hosting.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Watch out for vulnerabilities though. I always recommend staying away from such "panels" like Plesk, cPanel, etc. Virtualmin is no exception.
  - SwellJoe 8y ago
    Our security history is pretty good, and we provide a wide variety of security features like 2FA, TLS with Let's Encrypt certificates, various password and login policy options, etc. I would argue that non-technical users are safer using Virtualmin (I can't speak to the security history or features of any other panels) than doing it themselves, because it's easy to make security mistakes when doing it yourself if you don't have a lot of time to research all the options. If someone can invest the time to learn how to manage all of their own services, and can invest the time to build out all of the security features included in a default Virtualmin installation, then absolutely removing the GUI is removing one vector of potential attack; you should always turn off services you don't need. But, based on history, I can say with reasonable confidence that Virtualmin is probably not going to be the way an attacker gets in (it's probably going to be weak passwords, old software, poorly designed custom web apps, etc.). Disclaimer: I work on Virtualmin.
th0br0 8y ago
How about https://kolabnow.com/ https://kolabnow.com/ ? You can also self-host Kolab.
- carlos22 8y ago
  Kolabnow is rather expensive and we had a lot of problems with it. The up-time was also very upsetting. Experience was 2 years ago. Self-hosting of Kolab is not very flexible and a lot of work. We use self-hosted SoGO now and are very happy.
- canada_dry 8y ago
  I recently joined Kolab to host mail and my calendar. Their customer service is so-so. They also have had some weird certificate issues that prevent my caldav from sync'ing properly - which is kinda inexcusable. The one thing I like about them is privacy. E.g. the employees don't have access to your mail. Period. Their policy requires them to have your specific approval to access your account/mail.
synchrone 8y ago
https://cloudron.io/ https://cloudron.io/ has a very decent email setup plus a lot of other apps all one-click installable. Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.
- nebulon 8y ago
  More information on how email works on Cloudron can be found at https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/ https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/
Rjevski 8y ago
Office 365? It's a paid product from the ground up so they're less likely to terminate your account, and they actually have support. > having phone apps reading all my email That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.
hux_ 8y ago
I just moved all my email accounts to China.
- ganlub 8y ago
  Is thay supposed to be better?
  - Lunatic666 8y ago
    If you assume that every hoster is reading your mails, then moving them to China would give you the advantage, that your content and your meta data are not relevant to your new Chinese hoster, so ad targeting etc. would be gone, because you probably don't check Chinese sites frequently
laurent123456 8y ago
I use OVH https://www.ovh.com https://www.ovh.com for emails and domain (as well as VPS) and never had any problem with them. They have a built-in spam filter, which is pretty efficient.
- milani 8y ago
  I experienced having my account suspended all of a sudden with no notice; the problem livingpunchbag is trying to avoid.
  - laurent123456 8y ago
    I've been with them for nearly 10 years for shared web hosting, domains, emails and VPS, and never had such problem. Customer support is not as good as it used to, but still ok. Did they say why your account was suspended?
majewsky 8y ago
I use the mailbox offering of Posteo (https://posteo.de https://posteo.de) and am very happy with it. They're a small business located in Germany that does not do any bullshit (no ads, no tracking, etc.), and ticks a lot of the checkboxes for ethical business (as much encryption as possible, careful examination of court orders instead of automated law enforcement access, exclusive usage of renewable energy, etc.). I usually go in via IMAP, but their webmail looks pretty okay as far as I remember. The basic offering is 1 € per month for a mailbox, a CalDAV calendar and a CardDAV addressbook; but I think you can sign up for a free trial if you just want to have a look. (Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)
- dimitar 8y ago
  They look great! However I don't seem to find an option to use a custom domain.
  - nachtigall 8y ago
    +1 for Posteo, but they do not offer custom domains. See 3rd question at https://posteo.de/en/site/faq https://posteo.de/en/site/faq If you want this, then I'd check out https://mailbox.org https://mailbox.org See https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individual-domains/ https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individua...
- akudha 8y ago
  Just one Euro per month per inbox? That is awesome, I wonder what their margin is
  - majewsky 8y ago
    According to their own accounts, they have not taken any venture capital or loans. And they say they're donating to NGOs on a regular basis. I could also imagine that users' deposits are invested. (They use a pre-paid model, and e.g. I always send 25 or 50 euros at a time when recharging my Posteo account. An average of maybe 5 euros times 50,000 users is a quarter million in free cash.) Source: https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability
hknd 8y ago
low-maintenance email will not work. You get what you pay for, it will always either be high-maintenance, or you'll have to pay for the service. Unfortunately, fighting spam and keeping stuff up-to-date is not as easy as it should be.
maltalex 8y ago
Self-hosting is tricky to get right and the cost of getting something wrong is high. One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)
- pmlnr 8y ago
  It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you. [^1]: https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.iredmail.org/ [^2]: https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
  - marticode 8y ago
    ...and then you need to deal with all the blacklists. I once tried hosting an email server and found out at least one major American ISP was blacklisting everything from Digital Ocean. And when that happens, good luck reaching someone to get out of their list.
  - maltalex 8y ago
    > It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security, high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups, spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things. Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots... None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started, but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally managed service.
timwis 8y ago
I left Gmail once, but what brought me back was its separation of "primary", "promotions", "forums", and "updates". I don't know how I'd get through my emails without that. Has anyone seen another service that does something like that?
spondyl 8y ago
I can recommend the folks over at Migadu (https://migadu.com https://migadu.com) which is a small Swiss email host. Their support is very responsive and I never had any issues while there. I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it. Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done. Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.
- ganlub 8y ago
  Migadu works great most of the time, but it takes forever to get a reply from their support.
- newscracker 8y ago
  Anecdotal: whenever I contacted Migadu (as a potential customer), it didn't seem like they were reading the messages sent to them at all. Looks like they're either heavily understaffed or their technology isn't that great. I personally wouldn't recommend it.
carlhjerpe 8y ago
If you're OK with Putin reading your mail instead of Google if say Yandex is a great alternative!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bambamboom 8y ago
  The boogeyman dnc used to hide their mistreatment of Sanders and the resulting loss.
- segmondy 8y ago
  Yup, I use gmail but I also use Yandex with my own domain. Google is the greater evil if I had to pick between them, Russia & China. Any data I give to Google is more likely to be used against me in the USA than the other 2.
wastedhours 8y ago
I use https://zoho.eu https://zoho.eu - decent apps, reasonable tools, similar configuration to GApps. Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and fairness perspective.
amelius 8y ago
Whatever service you try, make sure that you literally own your email address (i.e. domain name), so you can always walk away without problems.
Jaruzel 8y ago
I find the worst part of running a private mail system is the spam. It morphs so often that you are always fighting a running battle just to keep it under control. Achieving a zero-spam target is almost impossible. The larger players (gmail/Office365) only manage to do it because they are handling millions of messages a day and have thousands of honeypot addresses just for spam catching. As a small player there's no way you can compete with that. My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be. I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me. If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.
- dmm 8y ago
  I've run my own email for years and I don't have a serious spam problem despite posting my email everywhere. I get maybe 1-2 spam messages a week. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist.
- hoechst 8y ago
  I have not tried it yet myself, but heard good things about Proxmox Mail Gateway: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway
- sliken 8y ago
  Use one of the DNS based blacklists (amavis, mailfilter and other similar tools are supported on most linux platforms) and add greylisting. Sure if you want to go the extra mile you can train the filters, generally I find it not worthwhile.
bcrack 8y ago
After spending a few years in a similar situation, and not wanting to maintain my own server, I settled with using runbox.com. It's an economical and privacy-oriented, mail provider which allows (necessary for my needs) using your own domain. They have very quick and excellent support (the few times that I needed it) and also offer a CalDAV/CardDav service. Their web interface is lacking (I believe it is about to be updated) but this is an non-issue for me science I use mutt. I'm not aware of a mobile app (I personally use and suggest the excellent K-9 mail OSS app).
- ar-jan 8y ago
  +1 for Runbox. I do wish they had better filtering options.
Major_Grooves 8y ago
I've recently been having this problem with Gmail: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/gmail/-isLElPcsOo/ym26YaEEAgAJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm... where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
I have only positive things to say about tutanota: https://tutanota.com/ https://tutanota.com/
happyvalley 8y ago
Happy user at mailbox.org They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even send them money by post for complete anonymity. Edit: You can use a custom domain
- craftyguy 8y ago
  I like their inbox encryption feature, all inbound mail is automatically encrypted with your gpg key. This means that mails downloaded to clients must be decrypted with your gpg key, and it's impossible to read mails in your inbox with their webmail thing. This means that if your device is stolen, your emails (their contents) are still encrypted.
- matogato 8y ago
  Another happy user at mailbox.org here! Mail (with optional custom domain), calendar, address book, storage and XMPP for 1€/month.
laamalif 8y ago
for security paranoid minds: protonmail.com
dod9er 8y ago
Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them. I was just going to start with https://mailcow.email/ https://mailcow.email/ on a cheap vps. But thanks to this thread I will also be evaluating migadu, seems a nice fit with even less hassle for me.
- bjrnio 8y ago
  Check out github.com/hardware/mailserver, just finished setting it up for myself and feels great.
mrmondo 8y ago
Very happy Fastmail user here, it's great (and fast!) to use, I've _never_ noticed any outages, calendar always just works, search is excellent, it's device and OS agnostic and the organisation makes massive contributions to open source and mail related communities.
messutied 8y ago
No one using iCloud email? I’m giving it a try atm, I think if you’re in the apple ecosystem it can be a good choice, anybody else experimented with it?
- wtd 8y ago
  iCloud (or its prior iterations) has had some bad press over the years ago about undisclosed filtering of inbound and outbound email and since then I haven’t considered them for email: Outbound: https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filtering-your-outgoing-mobileme-email-exclusive/ https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filt... Inbound: https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filtering-makes-icloud-an-unreliable-option.html https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filter...
- gzu 8y ago
  I’ve recently switched most of my old gmail account to ICloud. Extremely easy to use with the iOS and Mac system. I’m (currently) ok with apple handling my email data, much more so than google. Have had no issues whatsoever.
Szero 8y ago
cock.li
arisAlexis 8y ago
protonmail works very well and is very secure
fencepost 8y ago
I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive. I wish I could bold this, but: For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized. Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering. It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that. GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.
kotrunga 8y ago
Use protonmail.com. They're the best, and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail.
- bjrnio 8y ago
  > and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail Can you elaborate?
  - kotrunga 8y ago
    tldr- they both seem to be very secure email providers, with some differences. To fully grasp differences, read the links referenced below. I've done some research, but not much. I should have researched more before speaking, so if I'm wrong, please let me know! I just want to have the most secure email. Anyway... here are a few things I've found. I'm no security engineer, so others may have more insight. First thing is the location of the datacenters. Protonmail's servers are apparently under 1000 meters of solid rock in a bunker, and they claim it could even survive a nuclear attack. (And, they aren't in the US) (https://protonmail.com/security-details https://protonmail.com/security-details) Even if that's there for marketing purposes, it's kind of cool. To compare, FastMail also has good security, but it's based in New Jersey, and I don't think it could survive a nuclear attack ':) (https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html) That stuff is important, but unless something crazy happens, I doubt there is going to be any serious physical attacks on the servers. But, you never know. ProtonMail is open source, and I know some of FastMail is too. Not sure if it all is or not. ProtonMail has end-to-end encryption, and while FastMail has encryption, it's not 100%, and on the above /security.html link, it seems employees have access to some data, and full encryption is still a work in progress. From the link: 'At this stage, some system log data (which could contain personal information) is temporarily stored on un-encrypted disks on individual servers, however we have an ongoing project to bring encryption to all system logging as well.' Probably the biggest thing is when a company is forced to hand over data. ProtonMail keeps a Transparency Report, so the world knows about everything dealing with this. (https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/ https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/) ProtonMail is under Swiss law, and FastMail is under AU law. They both claim to not answer to US claims, but FastMail does have servers in the US, so I'm not sure how that all works. Anyway, you can read more on their sites from the links provided. Hopefully some of this was helpful.
steaminghacker 8y ago
I run several mailservers but my main email addresses go to fastmail. the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works. I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal. FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers. my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes. So these are for side projects. not for real work. another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.
faissaloo 8y ago
You might want to take a look at cock.li, the guy who owns it is pretty dead set on keeping the feds away and is really hands off about what you use it for. I've been using it for my personal correspondence email for about a year now and it's been fine.
- lgregg 8y ago
  Those domain names are something else... Why do you trust him?
  - gexcolo 8y ago
    you shouldn't trust him, he gets google alerts and finds threads on hacker news and posts wacky comments like this one
    - lgregg 8y ago
      I see what you did there.
togusa2017 8y ago
I use protonmail. No complaints
hidden_sheepman 8y ago
Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but checkout Tutanota https://tutanota.com/ https://tutanota.com/ I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.
- randie63 8y ago
  +1 The new interface redesign is perfect and really snappy. The new mobile apps will be open source and for android also available on F-Droid app store https://mail.tutanota.com/ https://mail.tutanota.com/
penglish1 8y ago
Another happy fastmail.com customer here. I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise. There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year), even if the hardware itself were free, and you were not counting the cost of the internet service (eg: using your own home internet), and you were willing to accept that you might fail to update some things, sometimes, etc. If you value your time at all. Even at say, minimum wage. Not to mention the deliverability issues etc. If you just love doing it, then, by all means, do it. Just don't imagine it is somehow less than $50/yr, or comparable in quality. I do wish Fastmail had more competition, even if it cost a bit more, and (as the Fastmail folks here have said) the competition participated in open standards and contributed to open source. I think others are "in the works" particularly with (even more) security/privacy emphasis. But, IMHO, eg: protonmail does not currently directly compete. We'll see what pans out.
- taneq 8y ago
  > There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year) If you're talking about self-hosting at home, then probably true unless you're using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the server. You can get web hosting including email at your own domain for somewhere around $50/year, though. I think I'm paying $26/year for hosting and $13/year for domain registration (or thereabouts, it's a trivial amount anyway) which comes with as many email addresses as I want at the domain, 10GB storage, and some amount of web traffic (50GB/mo maybe?) that's never been an issue.
- nhumrich 8y ago
  > even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info It sure does: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/google-cloud-security-and-compliance-whitepaper.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo... Because there are no ads in the paid version, (and because they are dealing with hippa/soc2 etc.) They have no need to look at your data.
trisimix 8y ago
Obligatory check out protonmail
MaryTurner 8y ago
You can try servermx.com the give all the features commonly provided for an email account and also some extra ..you can try the service for free (30 days) no credit card required Mary
grizzles 8y ago
wildduck.email looks pretty good for a modern mail architecture w/ failover.
pavanear 8y ago
Fast mail is great services

greenyoda 8y ago

You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)

ssss11 8y ago
I second FastMail they’re fantastic
herhor 8y ago
Same here. Another one (which has a free tier) is mailfence.com, but I prefer fastmail's UI :-)
dewey 8y ago
Fastmail is great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that. Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.
- tmaly 8y ago
  Is there a wild card feature to capture any address on a domain? I currently have multiple email addresses for a single domain. If I moved the email to fastmail, would I have to pay for each individual email on that domain?
  - dewey 8y ago
    Yes there’s a catch all address too.
  - LaxisB 8y ago
    i set this up for my fastmail account a couple weeks ago. go to settings -> aliases and create an alias for * this also allows you to write from any email address in your domain (when composing, change the sender dropdown to your *-alias, and the 'from' line appears and is editable
vortico 8y ago
Seconded. This is the answer right here. I've been using it for my personal email for 3 years and company email for 1 year. Their support, web app UI, mobile app, data access policies, and prices are great.
Multicomp 8y ago
Fastmail is the best. I make great use of the subdomain mailbox aliasing feature (website)@(username).fastmail.com
- kungtotte 8y ago
  It's incredibly smooth and powerful to use that feature. Set up some folders and it will auto-sort things based on the e-mail address, including sub-folders (e.g <parent>.<subfolder>@<username>.fastmail.com). It will also fall back on placing e-mail in the <parent> folder if there is no <subfolder> present.
- WA 8y ago
  You can also do username+website@fastmail.com
  - cggarvey 8y ago
    I’ve run into sites that consider + invalid within an email address. It would also be easy for a site that wants to sell off user info to have a regex strip the +sitename from emails prior to selling the list.
    - repsilat 8y ago
      The worst I've dealt with is a site that allows + within an email address for signup but not unsubscribe. They've been hitting my spam folder for years now...
      - whatsstolat 8y ago
        Lucky you have the + to filter them out then.
      - mdaniel 8y ago
        Just in case you haven't tried it, I have found that about 80% of the time, they have some frontend JS regex that blocks the form, but using the wizardry of one's choosing, if you managed to get the email address posted to the endpoint, all is well.
eeutb 8y ago
Fastmail is too expensive. They have no competition. I wish someone would come around and disrupt those prices.
- MandieD 8y ago
  If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a lower price, someone would be doing it already. It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.
  - eeutb 8y ago
    I disagree. Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. It simply doesn't add up. The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      The price seems reasonable to me. Bear in mind that they are much smaller than any popular free email provider because they charge. Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS. However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts. Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.
    - nmjenkins 8y ago
      > Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/ https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap. On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres). If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.
some_account 8y ago
Fastmail is the best.
Semaphor 8y ago
Not that it's really needed, I've found out about fastmail on HN and it's regularly the most recommended email service here, but I've been a very happy customer for 5 years now. Support (the few times I needed it) was always quick and helpful.
chewz 8y ago
Another happy Fastmail user.. ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.
cschmidt 8y ago
I've used FastMail for years. You pay them money, so you are the customer, which is how it should be. Your data isn't being mined.
seanwilson 8y ago
Just curious, but what do you need support for?
- jazoom 8y ago
  I needed help with some slightly complex setting up of users and probably something else. Their support was good, as people here say.
66d8kk 8y ago
Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.
- moltar 8y ago
  You can use the plus system. foo+sitename@yourdomain.com
- smartt 8y ago
  If you only want to receive mail at aliases it's easy: just setup an email catch-all on your domain ;-) To send is another matter; and unfortunately, I haven't found a way to easily do this with fastmail.
  - nmjenkins 8y ago
    Just create a wildcard identity to match (*@yourdomain.com) – when you select this in compose, you will be able to edit the address.
- TarpitCarnivore 8y ago
  You can use a wildcard for this: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/alias-catchall.html I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    This is no good when you want to use the fastmail domain for the aliases. Ever since the twitter @N theft[1], I've learned to never use a custom domain email when signing up for anything. It just increases your attack surface. I prefer to leave it to fastmail to protect their own domain from hijacking. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picking-up-the-pieces-after-the-n-twitter-account-theft/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...
livingpunchbag 8y ago
OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure? A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Dreamhost's primary business isn't email. Fastmail's is.
EnderMB 8y ago
As a service, it's fantastic. The only issue I've had with Fastmail is if you ignore a new email notification on their Android app, you won't receive future email notifications. Not a huge problem, unless you're receiving time-sensitive emails.

1ba9115454 8y ago

Even if you secure your side of communications you're at the mercy of people who send and receive email to and from you. If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts. You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse. A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
I wish more people understood that.
avaika 8y ago
Well, the scenario where only part of information about you is available for a single provider is still much better, when it has all of it.
newscracker 8y ago
For me, it's all the commercial, financial and similarly sensitive emails that matter the most. Those companies are certainly not using a free Gmail account for the most part, and whatever paid service they use (GSuite or Outlook365 or other) wouldn't mine this information. With my use of a paid email service that has no ads and promises privacy, this part is handled. Personal emails from those who use Gmail would get mined and profiled, but that's a harder problem to solve. I do try to push people out of free email services and to paid ones that are cheaper and more suitable for privacy.

airbreather 8y ago

mail.com

Rjevski 8y ago
It's free and ad supported. There's no way they're better than Gmail.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  > "Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?" You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    My point was that it was ad supported and so had the exact same drawbacks as Gmail, but in addition being much less advanced.

zhte415 8y ago

For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com? You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app. I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.

uncle_d 8y ago
Seconded - I am also very happy with ProtonMail.
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
  Thirded, I too am quite happy enough with protonmail I decided to pay for their service.
  - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
    Fourthed. I can see me transitioning, so far so good.
    - scruple 8y ago
      Here, as well. Very happy with protonmail.
maxk42 8y ago
I've been using Protonmail for quite a while. It's excellent.
blablabla123 8y ago
Protonmail is great. It has all features necessary but at the same time it's not creepy at all - like Gmail is. Apart from that, in fact I have this long-term project to self-host all my stuff. So far I managed to do this only for my calendar (using Apple's CalDav server). E-Mail is my next goal but even if I have it running, I'll start transitioning slowly. After all I think it's not that much maintanance effort once it's setup as long as it's managed through Ansible or Docker.

mehrdadn 8y ago

Whatever email service provider you choose, make sure to still (a) keep backups of emails just in case (maybe sync an IMAP client periodically), and (b) use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.

isostatic 8y ago
> use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something. I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it. I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun) I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.

homero 8y ago

33mail

mada360 8y ago

You could try mail in a box - https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/. It's really quick and easy to set up and is generally secure, I couldn't imagine someone would target a single mail server over a massive host like gmail or hotmail. This website https://www.privacytools.io/ https://www.privacytools.io/ is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.

fredsted 8y ago

Virtualmin is a little old-school, and hosting-oriented, but you can easily set up a mail server with SPF, DKIM, SSL w/ LetsEncrypt, etc. out of the box. I've never had any problems in over 5 years with sending or receiving and I just turn on automatic updates for Debian. Only issue is if the IP you get from the hosting provider is blacklisted, so remember to check that before you start setting it up. I use DigitalOcean for hosting.

Rjevski 8y ago
Watch out for vulnerabilities though. I always recommend staying away from such "panels" like Plesk, cPanel, etc. Virtualmin is no exception.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  Our security history is pretty good, and we provide a wide variety of security features like 2FA, TLS with Let's Encrypt certificates, various password and login policy options, etc. I would argue that non-technical users are safer using Virtualmin (I can't speak to the security history or features of any other panels) than doing it themselves, because it's easy to make security mistakes when doing it yourself if you don't have a lot of time to research all the options. If someone can invest the time to learn how to manage all of their own services, and can invest the time to build out all of the security features included in a default Virtualmin installation, then absolutely removing the GUI is removing one vector of potential attack; you should always turn off services you don't need. But, based on history, I can say with reasonable confidence that Virtualmin is probably not going to be the way an attacker gets in (it's probably going to be weak passwords, old software, poorly designed custom web apps, etc.). Disclaimer: I work on Virtualmin.

th0br0 8y ago

How about https://kolabnow.com/ https://kolabnow.com/ ? You can also self-host Kolab.

carlos22 8y ago
Kolabnow is rather expensive and we had a lot of problems with it. The up-time was also very upsetting. Experience was 2 years ago. Self-hosting of Kolab is not very flexible and a lot of work. We use self-hosted SoGO now and are very happy.
canada_dry 8y ago
I recently joined Kolab to host mail and my calendar. Their customer service is so-so. They also have had some weird certificate issues that prevent my caldav from sync'ing properly - which is kinda inexcusable. The one thing I like about them is privacy. E.g. the employees don't have access to your mail. Period. Their policy requires them to have your specific approval to access your account/mail.

synchrone 8y ago

https://cloudron.io/ https://cloudron.io/ has a very decent email setup plus a lot of other apps all one-click installable. Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.

nebulon 8y ago
More information on how email works on Cloudron can be found at https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/ https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/

Rjevski 8y ago

Office 365? It's a paid product from the ground up so they're less likely to terminate your account, and they actually have support. > having phone apps reading all my email That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.

hux_ 8y ago

I just moved all my email accounts to China.

ganlub 8y ago
Is thay supposed to be better?
- Lunatic666 8y ago
  If you assume that every hoster is reading your mails, then moving them to China would give you the advantage, that your content and your meta data are not relevant to your new Chinese hoster, so ad targeting etc. would be gone, because you probably don't check Chinese sites frequently

laurent123456 8y ago

I use OVH https://www.ovh.com https://www.ovh.com for emails and domain (as well as VPS) and never had any problem with them. They have a built-in spam filter, which is pretty efficient.

milani 8y ago
I experienced having my account suspended all of a sudden with no notice; the problem livingpunchbag is trying to avoid.
- laurent123456 8y ago
  I've been with them for nearly 10 years for shared web hosting, domains, emails and VPS, and never had such problem. Customer support is not as good as it used to, but still ok. Did they say why your account was suspended?

majewsky 8y ago

I use the mailbox offering of Posteo (https://posteo.de https://posteo.de) and am very happy with it. They're a small business located in Germany that does not do any bullshit (no ads, no tracking, etc.), and ticks a lot of the checkboxes for ethical business (as much encryption as possible, careful examination of court orders instead of automated law enforcement access, exclusive usage of renewable energy, etc.). I usually go in via IMAP, but their webmail looks pretty okay as far as I remember. The basic offering is 1 € per month for a mailbox, a CalDAV calendar and a CardDAV addressbook; but I think you can sign up for a free trial if you just want to have a look. (Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)

dimitar 8y ago
They look great! However I don't seem to find an option to use a custom domain.
- nachtigall 8y ago
  +1 for Posteo, but they do not offer custom domains. See 3rd question at https://posteo.de/en/site/faq https://posteo.de/en/site/faq If you want this, then I'd check out https://mailbox.org https://mailbox.org See https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individual-domains/ https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individua...
akudha 8y ago
Just one Euro per month per inbox? That is awesome, I wonder what their margin is
- majewsky 8y ago
  According to their own accounts, they have not taken any venture capital or loans. And they say they're donating to NGOs on a regular basis. I could also imagine that users' deposits are invested. (They use a pre-paid model, and e.g. I always send 25 or 50 euros at a time when recharging my Posteo account. An average of maybe 5 euros times 50,000 users is a quarter million in free cash.) Source: https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability

hknd 8y ago

low-maintenance email will not work. You get what you pay for, it will always either be high-maintenance, or you'll have to pay for the service. Unfortunately, fighting spam and keeping stuff up-to-date is not as easy as it should be.

maltalex 8y ago

Self-hosting is tricky to get right and the cost of getting something wrong is high. One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)

pmlnr 8y ago
It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you. [^1]: https://www.iredmail.org/ https://www.iredmail.org/ [^2]: https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/
- marticode 8y ago
  ...and then you need to deal with all the blacklists. I once tried hosting an email server and found out at least one major American ISP was blacklisting everything from Digital Ocean. And when that happens, good luck reaching someone to get out of their list.
- maltalex 8y ago
  > It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward. Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security, high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups, spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things. Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots... None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started, but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally managed service.

timwis 8y ago

I left Gmail once, but what brought me back was its separation of "primary", "promotions", "forums", and "updates". I don't know how I'd get through my emails without that. Has anyone seen another service that does something like that?

spondyl 8y ago

I can recommend the folks over at Migadu (https://migadu.com https://migadu.com) which is a small Swiss email host. Their support is very responsive and I never had any issues while there. I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it. Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done. Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.

ganlub 8y ago
Migadu works great most of the time, but it takes forever to get a reply from their support.
newscracker 8y ago
Anecdotal: whenever I contacted Migadu (as a potential customer), it didn't seem like they were reading the messages sent to them at all. Looks like they're either heavily understaffed or their technology isn't that great. I personally wouldn't recommend it.

carlhjerpe 8y ago

If you're OK with Putin reading your mail instead of Google if say Yandex is a great alternative!

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bambamboom 8y ago
The boogeyman dnc used to hide their mistreatment of Sanders and the resulting loss.
segmondy 8y ago
Yup, I use gmail but I also use Yandex with my own domain. Google is the greater evil if I had to pick between them, Russia & China. Any data I give to Google is more likely to be used against me in the USA than the other 2.

wastedhours 8y ago

I use https://zoho.eu https://zoho.eu - decent apps, reasonable tools, similar configuration to GApps. Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and fairness perspective.

amelius 8y ago

Whatever service you try, make sure that you literally own your email address (i.e. domain name), so you can always walk away without problems.

Jaruzel 8y ago

I find the worst part of running a private mail system is the spam. It morphs so often that you are always fighting a running battle just to keep it under control. Achieving a zero-spam target is almost impossible. The larger players (gmail/Office365) only manage to do it because they are handling millions of messages a day and have thousands of honeypot addresses just for spam catching. As a small player there's no way you can compete with that. My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be. I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me. If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.

dmm 8y ago
I've run my own email for years and I don't have a serious spam problem despite posting my email everywhere. I get maybe 1-2 spam messages a week. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist.
hoechst 8y ago
I have not tried it yet myself, but heard good things about Proxmox Mail Gateway: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway
sliken 8y ago
Use one of the DNS based blacklists (amavis, mailfilter and other similar tools are supported on most linux platforms) and add greylisting. Sure if you want to go the extra mile you can train the filters, generally I find it not worthwhile.

bcrack 8y ago

After spending a few years in a similar situation, and not wanting to maintain my own server, I settled with using runbox.com. It's an economical and privacy-oriented, mail provider which allows (necessary for my needs) using your own domain. They have very quick and excellent support (the few times that I needed it) and also offer a CalDAV/CardDav service. Their web interface is lacking (I believe it is about to be updated) but this is an non-issue for me science I use mutt. I'm not aware of a mobile app (I personally use and suggest the excellent K-9 mail OSS app).

ar-jan 8y ago
+1 for Runbox. I do wish they had better filtering options.

Major_Grooves 8y ago

I've recently been having this problem with Gmail: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/gmail/-isLElPcsOo/ym26YaEEAgAJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm... where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

I have only positive things to say about tutanota: https://tutanota.com/ https://tutanota.com/

happyvalley 8y ago

Happy user at mailbox.org They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even send them money by post for complete anonymity. Edit: You can use a custom domain

craftyguy 8y ago
I like their inbox encryption feature, all inbound mail is automatically encrypted with your gpg key. This means that mails downloaded to clients must be decrypted with your gpg key, and it's impossible to read mails in your inbox with their webmail thing. This means that if your device is stolen, your emails (their contents) are still encrypted.
matogato 8y ago
Another happy user at mailbox.org here! Mail (with optional custom domain), calendar, address book, storage and XMPP for 1€/month.

laamalif 8y ago

for security paranoid minds: protonmail.com

dod9er 8y ago

Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them. I was just going to start with https://mailcow.email/ https://mailcow.email/ on a cheap vps. But thanks to this thread I will also be evaluating migadu, seems a nice fit with even less hassle for me.

bjrnio 8y ago
Check out github.com/hardware/mailserver, just finished setting it up for myself and feels great.

mrmondo 8y ago

Very happy Fastmail user here, it's great (and fast!) to use, I've _never_ noticed any outages, calendar always just works, search is excellent, it's device and OS agnostic and the organisation makes massive contributions to open source and mail related communities.

messutied 8y ago

No one using iCloud email? I’m giving it a try atm, I think if you’re in the apple ecosystem it can be a good choice, anybody else experimented with it?

wtd 8y ago
iCloud (or its prior iterations) has had some bad press over the years ago about undisclosed filtering of inbound and outbound email and since then I haven’t considered them for email: Outbound: https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filtering-your-outgoing-mobileme-email-exclusive/ https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filt... Inbound: https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filtering-makes-icloud-an-unreliable-option.html https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filter...
gzu 8y ago
I’ve recently switched most of my old gmail account to ICloud. Extremely easy to use with the iOS and Mac system. I’m (currently) ok with apple handling my email data, much more so than google. Have had no issues whatsoever.

Szero 8y ago

cock.li

arisAlexis 8y ago

protonmail works very well and is very secure

fencepost 8y ago

I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive. I wish I could bold this, but: For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized. Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering. It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that. GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.

kotrunga 8y ago

Use protonmail.com. They're the best, and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail.

bjrnio 8y ago
> and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail Can you elaborate?
- kotrunga 8y ago
  tldr- they both seem to be very secure email providers, with some differences. To fully grasp differences, read the links referenced below. I've done some research, but not much. I should have researched more before speaking, so if I'm wrong, please let me know! I just want to have the most secure email. Anyway... here are a few things I've found. I'm no security engineer, so others may have more insight. First thing is the location of the datacenters. Protonmail's servers are apparently under 1000 meters of solid rock in a bunker, and they claim it could even survive a nuclear attack. (And, they aren't in the US) (https://protonmail.com/security-details https://protonmail.com/security-details) Even if that's there for marketing purposes, it's kind of cool. To compare, FastMail also has good security, but it's based in New Jersey, and I don't think it could survive a nuclear attack ':) (https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html) That stuff is important, but unless something crazy happens, I doubt there is going to be any serious physical attacks on the servers. But, you never know. ProtonMail is open source, and I know some of FastMail is too. Not sure if it all is or not. ProtonMail has end-to-end encryption, and while FastMail has encryption, it's not 100%, and on the above /security.html link, it seems employees have access to some data, and full encryption is still a work in progress. From the link: 'At this stage, some system log data (which could contain personal information) is temporarily stored on un-encrypted disks on individual servers, however we have an ongoing project to bring encryption to all system logging as well.' Probably the biggest thing is when a company is forced to hand over data. ProtonMail keeps a Transparency Report, so the world knows about everything dealing with this. (https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/ https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/) ProtonMail is under Swiss law, and FastMail is under AU law. They both claim to not answer to US claims, but FastMail does have servers in the US, so I'm not sure how that all works. Anyway, you can read more on their sites from the links provided. Hopefully some of this was helpful.

steaminghacker 8y ago

I run several mailservers but my main email addresses go to fastmail. the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works. I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal. FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers. my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes. So these are for side projects. not for real work. another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.

faissaloo 8y ago

You might want to take a look at cock.li, the guy who owns it is pretty dead set on keeping the feds away and is really hands off about what you use it for. I've been using it for my personal correspondence email for about a year now and it's been fine.

lgregg 8y ago
Those domain names are something else... Why do you trust him?
- gexcolo 8y ago
  you shouldn't trust him, he gets google alerts and finds threads on hacker news and posts wacky comments like this one
  - lgregg 8y ago
    I see what you did there.

togusa2017 8y ago

I use protonmail. No complaints

hidden_sheepman 8y ago

Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but checkout Tutanota https://tutanota.com/ https://tutanota.com/ I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.

randie63 8y ago
+1 The new interface redesign is perfect and really snappy. The new mobile apps will be open source and for android also available on F-Droid app store https://mail.tutanota.com/ https://mail.tutanota.com/

penglish1 8y ago

Another happy fastmail.com customer here. I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise. There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year), even if the hardware itself were free, and you were not counting the cost of the internet service (eg: using your own home internet), and you were willing to accept that you might fail to update some things, sometimes, etc. If you value your time at all. Even at say, minimum wage. Not to mention the deliverability issues etc. If you just love doing it, then, by all means, do it. Just don't imagine it is somehow less than $50/yr, or comparable in quality. I do wish Fastmail had more competition, even if it cost a bit more, and (as the Fastmail folks here have said) the competition participated in open standards and contributed to open source. I think others are "in the works" particularly with (even more) security/privacy emphasis. But, IMHO, eg: protonmail does not currently directly compete. We'll see what pans out.

taneq 8y ago
> There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year) If you're talking about self-hosting at home, then probably true unless you're using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the server. You can get web hosting including email at your own domain for somewhere around $50/year, though. I think I'm paying $26/year for hosting and $13/year for domain registration (or thereabouts, it's a trivial amount anyway) which comes with as many email addresses as I want at the domain, 10GB storage, and some amount of web traffic (50GB/mo maybe?) that's never been an issue.
nhumrich 8y ago
> even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info It sure does: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/google-cloud-security-and-compliance-whitepaper.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo... Because there are no ads in the paid version, (and because they are dealing with hippa/soc2 etc.) They have no need to look at your data.

trisimix 8y ago

Obligatory check out protonmail

MaryTurner 8y ago

You can try servermx.com the give all the features commonly provided for an email account and also some extra ..you can try the service for free (30 days) no credit card required Mary

grizzles 8y ago

wildduck.email looks pretty good for a modern mail architecture w/ failover.

pavanear 8y ago

Fast mail is great services