15 ms·

Moving Away from Gmail

349 points by rolisz 7y ago

javagram 7y ago
It seems like G Suite meets all the requirements listed on the blog post, but is not discussed. G Suite or Office 365 also work well as personal email providers - they fulfill all the requirements mentioned such as a custom domain, text search, and IMAP access.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The author talks about the risks of single point of failure being Google/a Google account, and their lengthy and regularly amended Terms of Service. This would arguably be true of Office 365 as well.
  - qwertox 7y ago
    Keep in mind that in G-Suite you can also enable email routing which will enable you to create full backups of emails https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en > These options include rejecting, quarantining, or delivering email with modifications. For example, you can route mail to Gmail and an external server or set policies that vary by organizational unit. That way Gmail becomes a single point of failure like any other service; you will only lose the mail which didn't arrive during the outage, which will then usually be resent at a later time. But you wouldn't care that much if they lock you out, since you then can change the MX records to point to the external server.
- rolisz 7y ago
  GSuite has some quirks when it comes to personal usages. For example, you can't use it for Family Groups, which allows me to share a YouTube Premium account with my wife.
  - jvolkman 7y ago
    Pretty sure a PurelyMail account will also not work for these things.
    - ValentineC 7y ago
      I think a Google Account linked to a non-GSuite account might work for Family Groups.
    - rolisz 7y ago
      Sure, but I will keep my GMail account - for YouTube Premium. But at least if it gets banned for whatever reason, I lose only my Youtube history and nothing more.
- beagle3 7y ago
  G-Suite charges by mailbox address. It is possible to have a catchall, but when you send other emails from it you sometimes get the dreaded "on behalf of ..." tag.
- crispinb 7y ago
  G suite is pretty expensive for email, presumably because you can only buy it bundled up with all the other stuff.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Indeed, it does. Until suddenly it doesn't. The posted article explains with examples how it happens to some people.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone. But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be. EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.
- rolisz 7y ago
  The bus factor of PurelyMail is a valid concern and I hope it will be solved in the future.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  Also if cost is a concern for Fastmail, there's Mailbox.org which is a very reliable alternative.
  - mindracer 7y ago
    Been a customer theirs for 3 years not and they’ve been excellent
  - rv-de 7y ago
    They don't provide a practically working implementation of MFA. More like a cargo cult version of it.
- hinkley 7y ago
  And yet we tell each other that if you run a small business it's important to remember you can fire a customer.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    I think it's very important for customers to be able to trust the business though. This means the business relationship should have clearly defined terms and both parties should be expected to follow them. Unfortunately, the trend is for services to have take it or leave it terms and to essentially be written to hold them blameless while letting them do whatever they want. A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.
rakoo 7y ago
Unaffiliated, I found migadu (https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need. As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it should be a financial distinction.
- jacobroyquebec 7y ago
  I second this, i've been using it for a few years and it's very easy to setup. Reliable and cheap.
- fermienrico 7y ago
  I've tried Migadu and I much prefer FastMail: https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com They have full DNS capabilities and very nice UI (minimal JS, loads super fast).
  - adtac 7y ago
    While I'm happy with fastmail, they aren't minimal JS by any means. The website is snappy though.
- ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
  > Copyright © 2016 AdVite GmbH This sounds like an advertising company. A person's inbox is the holy grail of info about them. I don't think I want to use this company for my email. Change my mind?
  - gpanders 7y ago
    The company is based in Switzerland and is French speaking. Any chance "AdVite" means something different in French? Apart from that, their website states pretty clearly their privacy policy [1] and other terms [2]. It doesn't look like there is anything shady going on here. I don't personally use Migadu but I've had it bookmarked as the "service I would probably use if/when the day comes". [1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html [2]: https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html
kh_hk 7y ago
The only thing that makes sense is getting your own domain first. There after you can look into email providers, but to avoid lock in, first you need your own address, owned by you. Only by then, you can rent the email service into it if you want, or run your own.
- yokto 7y ago
  Then again, that's potentially an additional attack surface that you need to be mindful of: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...
akssri 7y ago
Gandi may also be an option here - a domain registered with them comes with two free mailboxes, each with a few GBs of space and calendar support. (Yes, yes, this is the same company that lost the data on their cloud servers.)
- gpanders 7y ago
  Gandi is what I use as well and have for years. I follow all these new up-and-coming email services, but I've never had a reason to switch.
- KitDuncan 7y ago
  mhm, are they good? I have my domains there, but never considered using them for my emails. are catchall emails possible?
- robjan 7y ago
  They are missing 2FA which is a deal-breaker for many
  - benhurmarcel 7y ago
    And they don't support DKIM. That's my main complaint with them so far.
- newcrobuzon 7y ago
  I have been using it for few years now and so far have been reasonably happy. Works fine with Thunderbird, on my phone however i have recently noticed a substantial delay in getting new emails, sometimes even more than couple of hours...
- ptman 7y ago
  I think they eventually restored that data.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dehrmann 7y ago
> it's a single point of failure If Google blocked your Recaptchas, deleted your Gmail account, and disabled you Android phone...wow.
- downerending 7y ago
  I've lost one of my (two) Gmail accounts. Attempting to get it back was an existential exercise in looking into the maw of nothingness. Kind of like that thing from The Fifth Element or something. Even know a ranking insider, but... nothing. Relying on any company for more than one divisible service in 2020 is insane. Use Google for search? Don't use them for anything else. There are lots of little guys out there doing great stuff. Put a few bucks in their direction. Shutouts are fascist.
wheresvic3 7y ago
This post came at a very opportune time as I was having some issues recently with my email provider and was looking for alternatives. I own my main email address but I do have a few other domains which I would like to have mailboxes for. Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains! Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email is not backed up anywhere :)
vinni2 7y ago
I switched to posteo in 2015 and never looked back! https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en
- chappi42 7y ago
  They don't support custom domains (https://posteo.de/en/site/faq https://posteo.de/en/site/faq).
  - vinni2 7y ago
    I never claimed that they support custom domain. Thanks for the down vote.
osamagirl69 7y ago
Purely mail does look like a very attractive mail host, filling an interesting niche between the SMTP sever you get from your ISP (or someone like zoneout from zoneedit, which is $1/month for up to 50 outgoing email per day) and a full on webmail like fastmail. Honestly for me the $50/year to fastmail to worry about worrying about my mail is worth it, and their webmail/mobile clients are great if that is your thing. Really the main thing here is to move your mail over to a custom domain, and these guys really make that a lot cheaper. $15/year for the domain and another $10/year for mail is absolutely worth it to remove your mail provider as a single point of failure in your email. PS - if you are looking for a good android mail client, I have had good luck with K-9. It takes a bit of getting used to when migrating over from the built in android mail, but if you stick with it and figure out how to configure it correctly it works great. The main configuration changes I had to make were putting a shortcut for 'move to archive' and getting android configured to let it run in the background so notifications work correctly.
- battery_cowboy 7y ago
  I love fastmail, I use them for my email and my DNS servers, it's so easy. I understand some people want to run their own email, but ever since you have to set up SPF records and all kinds of other shit, and you still rush Gmail black holing your emails, I'd rather pay 50 bucks a year.
simonjgreen 7y ago
It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.
- lallysingh 7y ago
  Static IPs aren't getting easier to acquire.
  - mihaifm 7y ago
    You only need a public IP, not necessarily static. My ISP offers public IPs via pppoe and dynamic DNS. I was able to install my mail server with docker-mailserver [1] without much effort. There are some quirks, but it's worth trying out. [1]: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
- fuzzy2 7y ago
  Running a (1) mail server is not enough. You need fault tolerance. And then of course spam filtering, DKIM and whatnot, maybe a nice web interface, ... Running an SMTP server is easy. The rest? Not so much. Rolling your own is great. However, it's not for most people and requires constant monitoring and maintenance.
  - ozim 7y ago
    For personal mail? I don't need fault tolerance if it is going to be down for 10 hours I don't care. If I run it I am going to fix it anyway and retry registration process for whatever I needed mail. Spam filtering use 10minute mail or something for crap that you don't care. Give your mail address to people and companies you actually want to deal with. Better just keep some spam box on free provider where you sign up for crap. I don't care about web interface I have multiple boxes anyway so I have to use client app where I can see all stuff at once. (why people think you can have only ONE "THE ONE" mail address for everything?) DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two. Mostly what people do is that they receive stuff (registration mails for crap). That said, if you send out bulk mail like in 1k a day you really need DKIM, SPF, DMARC and stuff. If you run company email server it might be better to do it with email provider or get marketing to send mass mails with mailchimp or sendgrid. When you want to run mail server for friends and family you are just being silly and if there will be 10 hours downtime you would not care about... Guess what your brother in law wanted to sign up for free month april on por..ekhm...pluralsight and he is going to be mad at you (and you should not tell that to your sister).
Daegalus 7y ago
This is some good info, I personally still use GMail and used to use GSuite. Migrating from GSuite -> Gmail was a nightmare in of itself, but I found a service that helped me keep my custom domain emails and no longer feel like a second class citizen. So even if someday Google decides to kill my Account, I can just reroute my domain to a new service with not issue. The service I used is ImprovMX. YOu just setup your DNS records, and they handle your domain emails. Any number of aliases and redirects you need. Their free tier is very generous with 10 domains, and I think 15-20 aliases per domain. Super easy to get my family on there for our family domain and my other custom domains. I then made a new standard gmail account, migrated everything I could, repurchased apps, and then just forwarded my email to the gmail account after detaching it from GSuite. It was fairly painless on this front. You can do email alias sending of emails with any provider, but ImprovMX has SMTP services now that get rid of that pesky "on behalf of" label of your emails. It is part of their Pro feature set, but that's just $9 a month for a ton of features and peace of mind. Full DKIM support and the such. You can even setup a custom domain as a login email for your GMail and most other services, so you can login with it just like you would with GSuite. Now I know this is a post about moving away from Google, but this could be a stepping stone, because once you do all this. If i decided I want to use Fastmail, PurelyMail, Outlook, Yahoo, or whatever the hell else I want. I can just change the target email in ImprovMX and it goes to the right place. The rest is all just import/export from gmail. You can just GYOB to make detailed Maildir format backups of Gmail, and either restore them into another gmail account, or find a way to import them into your new service using similar tools. Or just keep a local backup, use NotMuch or a NotMuch UI like Neit Viel to search/lookup your old emails, and start fresh in your new place. One little gotchya if you do this. Gmail saw the initial set of ImprovMX emails as spam or fraud for a few emails as they would come from 1 email, but had ImprovMX redirect info. SO be sure to double check spam folders for a a few days for miscategorized emails. Once the spam blocker learns ImprovMX is ok, it will start working as normal. (Thought I think ImprovMX improved something on their end as I have even seen this particular thing happen in a while.
- crispinb 7y ago
  GYOB?
meagher 7y ago
The sad thing like others have mentioned is that most people don’t own their own email address. Their address is tied to the client. Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off for ToS violations. I wrote about it more here https://meagher.co/own-your-email/ https://meagher.co/own-your-email/
- svnpenn 7y ago
  You ditched Gmail for... Gsuite. Is this a joke?
  - meagher 7y ago
    The post is about “owning” your email address so you can move, not moving to a new provider.
    - delsarto 7y ago
      As the recent changes to .org show, though, after a while the domain owns you rather than the other way around! I am trying to move away from gsuite. The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). Using the account directly sucks, you have constant switching and gsuite accounts can't do things like family sharing. Forwarding services, even implementing srs still can't rewrite dkim, so you get weird reply to addresses than again often trigger things ending up in spam. I think the best solution while keeping everything together in the Google ecosystem (drive, docs, calendar, etc.) is probably an external provider you do pop from to your standard Google account, then offlineimap style backup Gmail somewhere else. Then you still have arbitrary delays in fetching! Basically, everything is terrible.
      - ValentineC 7y ago
        > The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). If you're on paid G Suite, you can tweak the Default routing setting [1] in Google Admin to forward all emails to a different domain. I believe this bypasses Gmail's spam filter (Google might reject some mail during SMTP — I've never had a problem with mail delivery to Google though, unlike to Hotmail). [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en
wwweston 7y ago
Anyone know of a good alternative for Google Voice? This is the stickiest service for me; there are lots of email options but it doesn't seem there's many services that offer a phone alias with call forwarding and a full web interface for not only voicemail but texting. Rolling my own through Twilio or something seems like an option but then I'm back to paying per text message or other event (I don't mind paying for a good service along these lines, but I'm reluctant to get into a metered situation).
- sam 7y ago
  Check out OpenPhone.
- profsnuggles 7y ago
  The closest I've found is https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ I'm waiting for voip.ms to enable mms support then I'll probably roll something with asterisk. Although I saw https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms the other day.
  - ossguy 7y ago
    Yeah, JMP supports picture messaging and short codes, so works for most SMS-based 2FA. Group texting support will be completed in the next month or two, which would give JMP feature-parity with Google Voice. And you can run your own instance if you don't trust the one at https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/
- deanmoriarty 7y ago
  I would love to have a trustworthy alternative to using GV for all my SMS 2FA needs. I switched to custom domain email a while ago, but definitely feel I am still way too exposed to Google in that area.
- johntash 7y ago
  Rolling my own through Twilio is something I've been considering as well, so I'd also be interested if anyone knows of a good alternative.
hysan 7y ago
One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years, but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that many websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it problematic if you have a decades worth of accounts tied to gmail.
- beart 7y ago
  I just kept my Gmail account but receive virtually zero email on it.
- thanksforfish 7y ago
  This is also true for sites that use Google accounts for OAuth. Your account has a one to one mapping to your Google account. You can keep the old address and auto-forward emails from the old to the new. I think that's the best you can manage.
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  I just progressively went through all my accounts in my password manager, and changed the email. I used my Gmail account to register to everything for more than a decade, but since I also kept a complete list of all my accounts, it wasn't an issue to change it one by one. I still have my Gmail account, it just sits empty (in case). There's no need to delete it.
vzaliva 7y ago
email is such a critical part of my digital life that is stability and convenience are the critical factors which can overweight some shortcomings in features and UI. So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are: 1. Stability. Google as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller companies? 2. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed very professionally. I am pretty comfortable with my email data being safe with them. 3. Security. My guess is that the Google security team has more people than the whole development team of Purelymail or even Fastmail. They know how to resist attacks from state actors, massive DDOS, etc. 4. Spam filters. Having 1 billion active users Gmail has a unique ability to detect spam. Smaller providers, no matter how good are their antispam algorithms are, just do not have access to such amount of data. That said, I share some of your concerns about Gmail and thinking about moving to ProtonMail.
- nullc 7y ago
  Considering the importance of email that you mention: What is your plan if google suddenly bans your account? Google might not go anywhere but your access to it might. And when their automation directs them to ban an account, there is essentially no recourse-- they won't even respond to you.
  - vzaliva 7y ago
    any provider can ban your account. my recourse is to switch my domain. I do not use @gmail.com address - I use my own domain with google mail.
    - remram 7y ago
      I considered doing that, but decided against it because domain names are rented and not permanently yours. If I ever stop paying, make a mistake, or pass away, anyone can grab it and password-recover their way in all my accounts... I'm not sure if it's a good trade-off...
      - ValentineC 7y ago
thanksforfish 7y ago
> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds). Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.
- Evan_Hellmuth 7y ago
  "The once a month I load it" they don't care about you, you're not the typical paying enterprise use case.
- thekyle 7y ago
  I imagine the logic is that people usually keep Gmail open in a tab which might be reloaded once per day. So people aren't likely to switch email providers because of 20 seconds a day. That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.
  - remus 7y ago
    This seems quite a common complaint, but gmail has always been pretty snappy for me. I wonder what causes the variability?
  - kenhwang 7y ago
    My Gmail tab that I leave pinned regularly loses connection and stops updating. It seems more and more these days Google things just break when you don't use Chrome. Using Gmail with Firefox hasn't felt fast in a long while.
FpUser 7y ago
I was never "in". Had my email for ages. I do not trust Google and the likes to handle my email
tobysemmel 7y ago
> Privacy stuff is not a part of my requirements. Can you send me a zip file containing all of your emails then? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Funny how even people who claim they don’t care about privacy actually really value privacy.
- 1f60c 7y ago
  I read this as "I don't care if my emails get mined to show me ads", not "I'll send out copies of all my email to random HN users".
  - tobysemmel 7y ago
    I can mine it for ads if he wants
trengrj 7y ago
I'm really looking forward to what DHH can do with https://hey.com/ https://hey.com/. My aim with an email provider is that I trust it. A non-bootstrapped company with a founder outspoken against privacy issues seems a good place to try.
- dguo 7y ago
  I'm planning on migrating from Gmail to Fastmail, but I'm holding off until Hey launches to see what it offers.
- ekovarski 7y ago
  Hey sounds promising but out of the gate it sounds like it will be missing a lot of features I need, eg no migration path, you start with a clean slate web based only, no imap access (not sure of smtp) no custom domains on day 1 Maybe this will change as they delayed the launch due to covid-19 but right now it's something I, and I assume many others, will watch from afar as its missing crucial elements.
foobarbecue 7y ago
I've been using MailInaBox on a Droplet for a decade or so now and it's been great.
soufron 7y ago
This really seems like a bad solution to me. Any domain name provider will allow you to create personalized mail addresses for a total cost of around 10$/y. Then -> imap -> Thunderbird. And you're set for life with a nearly unlimited set of features. It's easy to backup. It can sync between different computers and mobile phones. I don't get why he would chose something else.
- abdabab 7y ago
  Does that setup allow you to check mails from multiple computers and phones?
  - KitDuncan 7y ago
    Of course. You can setup your IMAP mailbox on any device. You can even use your Gmail or Apple Mail Apps to set it up on your phone.
  - soufron 7y ago
    Perfectly.
Razengan 7y ago
I've been using iCloud email for more than a decade, no problems, and much better privacy. It allows 3 aliases per account (that you can replace) without exposing your primary address unlike Google's primary+alias suffix, so you can have up to 4 addresses per account. I also don't think they require you to give them your phone number.
sneak 7y ago
Keeping years and years of old emails on the server is a bad idea whilst subjected to the third party doctrine, which holds that the government snoops can access your emails without a warrant due to the fact that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are storing your emails on a hosted server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act How often do you need the mails from years ago? Archive them to a local mailbox and include it in your normal backups.
- rovr138 7y ago
  Sure, but backups would still be an issue and there's also a copy on the sender outbox or recipient's inbox.
jbullock35 7y ago
From the article: "One thing that I miss is the fact that in GMail folders are actually labels and you can have multiple labels for an email." Which competing services (apart from Outlook) offer Gmail-like labeling for individual messages?
megido 7y ago
Pure mail, but registration is such a nightmare
nicoburns 7y ago
> Another reason because of which I'm leaving GMail is because it's kinda slow. A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop (good specs, wired Internet connection). Loading a folder with 184 emails takes 2.5 seconds. I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.
- joering2 7y ago
  It actually is. It has some tweaks done so that no matter what device you on it still runs most functionality.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    That's absolutely standard for a webapp though (and really old devices are only supported through the "Basic HTML" view). There's no reason why wide device support should cause it to be slow.
- ValentineC 7y ago
  I miss the old, snappy interface, and held out for the longest time until they forced G Suite users to move over some time in 2019.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  yeah you just reminded me that gmail is the new old hotmail seduction makes everyone do its best, over time you rot time for a new challenger ?
- floo 7y ago
  For me gmail loads and becomes interactive in under 2 seconds on an empty cache. I did not expect it to be that slow for other people. That said I do practice inbox zero, so it might just be spending time on loading a lot of mail?
  - remus 7y ago
blntechie 7y ago
Atlassianis launching an email service(Hey) later this year and I have kind of pinned my hopes on it to replace gmail.
- williw 7y ago
  Isn't Hey.com a Basecamp product?
  - 1f60c 7y ago
    It is.
  - blntechie 7y ago
    Sorry about that. I have no idea how I mixed up that so bad as I follow DHH regularly for his tweets and all. Facepalm.
mattkevan 7y ago
Been using Soverin after switching from Gmail a few years ago - really happy with the service. Only €40/year for 25gb storage. www.soverin.net
twodayslate 7y ago
Is there any mail client that has priority inbox like support? That's one reason I still use gmail/g-suite
TrueDuality 7y ago
I've been considering doing a similar thing but I'm in a different situation with Gmail. I hopped on to their business domains when they were initially released (and free) and I'm still grandfathered into their free plan. I use the account as my primary Google account which includes purchased Android apps, and I make pretty heavy use of that Google Drive with several external organizations. I'd like to move just my email away to my own hosting, but I'm worried Google might do something sneaky when they realize my MX domains no longer point at them. I haven't herd of anyone attempting to migrate just their email from a Google on a custom domain while trying to maintain the rest of their account and that fear is the only thing keeping me on Google.
- judge2020 7y ago
  In my experience (G Suite Basic) it doesn't do any MX record checks, I still have a domain "active" that had its MX records removed (expired domain) almost 2 years ago.
  - TrueDuality 7y ago
    Niiiccceee. That does make me a bit more confident about it.
    - sdan 7y ago
      You can actually get a google account with any email (hosted on your own platform, etc.)
- heywire 7y ago
  I made this same move a couple years ago and still have no problem logging into my account.
- parkersweb 7y ago
  I’m in the same boat - set up the free service with my own domain for the family a long time ago. Quite frankly I’d love to ditch it entirely because Google frequently makes crazy stuff inaccessible as a result - I can’t use Android screen time limits for the kids, I can’t sign up for Google music family plan. Problem is - I have loads of purchases on the accounts and there’s no way at all to convert them to standard Google accounts and no way at all to transfer the purchases. It’s maddening...
masnick 7y ago
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail back in 2013 [1] and haven't looked back. Fastmail has continued to make significant improvements, while keeping the interface lean and functional. It seems to me like $3/month is worth it for a service as critical as email. [1]: https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944
- jw14 7y ago
  I agree $3/month is reasonable for email, but since the encryption backdoor laws passed in Australia in Dec 2018, I've been avoiding Australian software.
  - thekyle 7y ago
    Would the Australian encryption laws impact Fastmail that much? AFAIK their emails were never encrypted at rest to begin with so someone with a warrant could always have gotten in.
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      The question is why you would ever expose your data to the control of lawmakers who make such laws if you're not Australian.
  - masnick 7y ago
    You should take a look at https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/ https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/. They say it doesn’t affect their customers.
    - contravariant 7y ago
      While that's true it's also because they don't use E2E. Which I guess makes any discussion about encryption backdoors rather pointless.
wycy 7y ago
Question for people who have emails at their own domain: what do you pick as your email address? Do you typically use first@firstlast.com? firstlast@firstlast.com? first@last.com? me@firstlast.com? Do you typically use multiple accounts?
- Terretta 7y ago
  Use a time machine and get first@last.com
  - trevyn 7y ago
    If you're time machining, firstinitial@first.com is the way to go!
- heywire 7y ago
  first@firstlast.com for me. Happy FastMail user too.
- codethief 7y ago
  It took me a while to figure this out but I've now settled with the following: - mail@firstlast.tld for personal emails directed at me only and written by a human being, i.e. emails that warrant my personal response - <SomeServiceIsignedUpfor>@firstlast.tld for automated emails from services like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HN, …. These are usually computer-generated emails that don't warrant a response, so they are merely notifications. The neat thing about this approach is that: a) the list of email aliases contains all the services I've signed up for, ever b) I can easily stop a service from sending me emails by simply deleting the alias. In particular, if an email address leaks to spammers, I simply delete it. c) I can distinguish between personal and non-personal email and can prioritize accordingly. I look at my personal emails more often than at my non-personal ones.
  - knr2345 7y ago
    Do you have a method for quickly creating new aliases on the fly? My setup is nearly the same. I use two domains such as firstlast.tld and genericwords.tld. Genericwords.tld has umbrella aliases for social, apps, subscriptions, orders, etc. I have rules setup up per umbrella alias to delete after 30 days, or always mark as read, or never mark as read. I originally had service/site specific aliases in mind for easy deletion, but for my setup this creates a layer of friction that makes it quite cumbersome. I considered umbrella+servicename aliases but those are not always guaranteed to be accepted.
longtermd 7y ago
I moved to SuperHuman (SH) quite a while ago and really love it!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
marban 7y ago
Has anyone opted for Yahoo Business Mail recently? Pricing looks very competitive; Just not sure how great their spam filter is compared to Google.
mzzter 7y ago
I’ve had a great experience with Purelymail, though I haven’t figured out how to complete the DKIM and DMARC setup. When I was evaluating options for hosting an email address from my own domain, two things sold me on Purelymail: - special characters allowed in the name, like "~" - the pay-as-you-go pricing
- crispinb 7y ago
  I set up a account and was considering it for an intended email consolidation. But Roundcube is hopeless - keyboard shortcuts are a 'planned' feature. That makes Roundcube a pre-alpha product in my view.
lma22 7y ago
I've been considering moving to Outlook. Can anyone share their take on Outlook?
steelframe 7y ago
I used to run my own mail server, and that very nearly cost me a career-changing job at Microsoft. My reply to a hiring manager for a team I really wanted to work on went into Microsoft's bit bucket because (I'm guessing) their spam detectors didn't like my own domain and my own instance of Exim sending out my emails. When a recruiter (thankfully) followed up and scheduled me for on-site interviews, that manager mentioned that he never got a reply when he emailed me. That was the point where I realized that email had gone the way of fiefdoms, and if I wanted really important emails to make it through, I'd need to choose which castle I wanted to handle my email.
- tzs 7y ago
  Wait...your mail was a reply to a mail they sent to you, and it went to the bit bucket? Their spam handling is not sophisticated enough to special case replies to mails that they have sent?
  - travbrack 7y ago
    Do other spam filters actually check every incoming email against a database of outgoing emails?
    - lisper 7y ago
      Mine does. And I wrote it myself.
      - eru 7y ago
        You could use a Bloom filter to save on memory. And perhaps empty it once a year, if necessary. (Ie so that replies to emails older than a year don't rank better than random emails.)
        lisper 7y ago
        I just throw all the subject lines into a database. The data volume is not even remotely close to the limits of a modern DB.
crispinb 7y ago
Can anyone recommend tools for removing email duplicates? I have a mess of archived email from different sources I intend one day to consolidate onto a decent IMAP provider. Over the years I've done all kinds of forwarding from one account to another, been in & out of gmail,etc. It's a bit of a mess, and consolidation would result in me using much more storage than I need because of dupes. A trustworthy deduping tool (whether operating via IMAP, or on local maildirs) would be useful. I've seen a couple around when I've searched in the past, but would like a recommendation from experience before running something over some gigs of archived mail.
- virgoerns 7y ago
  I use mutt for that which modifies local maildir so it's super fast. Commands are: "D~=$". Then it's just a matter of syncing local changes back e.g. with mbsync.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    Thanks. I suppose I should take another look at mutt. When I have in the past it's seemed a bit overwhelming with features & config. Does that command remove dupes in a single folder or a hierarchy?
    - virgoerns 7y ago
      It works in a single folder only. It's actually a set of the following commands: - D tells mutt to delete messages by pattern - ~= is pattern which selects all the dupes in current folder - $ finalizes the command I think this [1] is where I learned about it and there's also a handy folder hook for mutt which automatically removes duplicates when you open the folder. [1]: http://promberger.info/linux/2008/03/31/mutt-delete-duplicate-e-mail-messages/ http://promberger.info/linux/2008/03/31/mutt-delete-duplicat...
      - crispinb 7y ago
        Thanks. Could prove useful.
timwis 7y ago
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a year ago and I really miss how Gmail filtered things into primary/social/updates/forums. I feel overwhelmed with a single inbox, and can’t possibly keep up with my own custom filters. The result is I’m likely to miss something important. Does anyone have a solution for this?
- rolisz 7y ago
  Try to use aliases. Give out news@domain.com when signing up for a newspaper, gaming@domain.com for gaming accounts and so on. In this way, a simple filter for incoming address will cover a lot of different email senders.
- distances 7y ago
  Do you feel like you're getting something out of all those email updates? My solution was to simply cut down the amount of incoming mail. Nowadays I receive about three emails a day, with some days of zero emails in between. Feels like a good number to me personally.
emilburzo 7y ago
> Technically, I could use GMail with my own domain, but only by signing up for a business GSuite account. Actually it is possible to use your own domain with even a regular Gmail account (although not straight-forward), and it works well -- I know because that's how I have set it up. Requirements: own domain with MX records pointing to your server(s) running SMTP software Receiving: SMTP server forwards to gmail account, SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) takes care so SPF doesn't fail, DKIM just works. Sending: you configure Gmail to use your SMTP server for sending. Gmail side: add email alias and verify it, the "reply" function is even smart enough to use the correct alias depending on the "TO" Besides the bonus of "owning" your email while still using the goodies of Gmail, having "catch-all", being able to easily migrate if shit hits the fan, there were also some other things I didn't realize until doing this: You can save a local copy of the emails on your server (nice extra backup). You have access to email logs, if you are worried about reliability you can just check it on-the-fly, you don't have to wait for the "email delivery failed" notification.
- PhilippGille 7y ago
  Wow I didn't know that! Do you know if there are more detailed tutorials for this?
  - emilburzo 7y ago
    I guess it depends on how detailed you want it, but maybe Google's own help page already helps? https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370
- rolisz 7y ago
  Wow, that's quite interesting!
aorth 7y ago
> Ability to use multiple aliases. I want to have site_name@rolisz.ro, besides the main address I will give out, but still have everything come in to my main inbox. It's not an alias, but you can effectively get this for free with any mail provider by using a plus sign (+). For a really extreme (and awesome) example, see: http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email_addresses_with_a_are_valid.html http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email... He suggests using emails like: aorth+news.ycombinator.com+2020-04-12@example.com. The benefits are that you get a lightweight alias that you can filter on, but you also get a canary that tells you which site sold your email address when you start getting spam to it! :)
- PudgePacket 7y ago
  I've seen sites reject for having the plus and strip it on submit when I tried this :/ so not a perfect solution
- inapis 7y ago
  Sites have started being smart about it. I also now know of services which won’t allow you to create an account if the string contains the service name in it.
thdrdt 7y ago
Some weeks ago I decided to be brave and build my own mail server. With a great tutorial [1] I was able to do this in a few hours and learned a ton about email along the way. Because today it is possible to setup a lot of features via DNS I got no problems with email being marked as spam. But I can understand this is not for everyone. Personally I got some problems with DNS misconfigurations and file access rights at first but got it working perfectly after a day or two. [1] https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/ https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/
DeathArrow 7y ago
I, too, want to switch from using Google services. I find it hard. I have hundreds of website accounts, all registered through Gmail. I don't even know all the websites I have accounts on. Switching all to use another mail address, would be at least very tedious and would take a very long time. Also I have many contacts mailing me on my Gmail address. Making all those people use another address would be hard. I can redirect Gmail probably, but that would mean still using Gmail. Also, using Google's services is very convenient. And the only other provider which the same level of integration and which has e-mail, online docs, calendar, storage is Microsoft. And you have to pay if you want to use docs. Maybe I'll use different providers for different services, but I 'll lose the integration. And Google tries to make your life harder if you are not using Chrome and you are not logged in into Google account. You' ll see lots of recaptchas triggered if you use Firefox or Edge and you'll get the bot treatment if you try to access next pages in Google search.
- DavideNL 7y ago
  > Also I have many contacts mailing me on my Gmail address. Making all those people use another address would be hard. What i did is, i automatically forwarded all incoming Gmail emails to my new new@domain.com address. Then when someone sends me an e-mail to my old Gmail account, i simply reply to it from my new new@domain.com. That way contacts will gradually/eventually update me in their contact lists... it worked really well. > I have hundreds of website accounts, all registered through Gmail. I don't even know all the websites I have accounts on. It doesn't matter, just keep using them and register all new accounts with your new e-mail address. You can slowly update your email address in old accounts over time, Gmail will stay accessible anyway.
prescojan 7y ago
I'm using fastmail for few months. Only when I switched I understood that leaving google product is not that scary
vrutberg 7y ago
I have been on a similar journey to distance myself from Google and my Google account for a little more than a year now. It's taken longer than I thought to get to where I am now, and now I'm skeptical that I'll ever be completely Google free. My steps so far have been: 1. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail. 2. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my new FastMail powered email address. 3. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I would need it 4. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone 5. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone A few tips I can share: * If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services. * You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address. The things that I've found hardest to migrate are: * iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID. * GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake. * YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube?
iliaznk 7y ago
I'd recommend at least getting your own email domain so you are still able to use Gmail's interface, but could easily switch to something else if necessary. That's what I did with Pobox – reliable and affordable solution for that (and even more).
paulcarroty 7y ago
Use riseup.net last 5 years, great services(), but heavily relies from donations.
wildduck 7y ago
If you know nodejs pretty well, try https://wildduck.email https://wildduck.email Unaffiliated BTW. Just find that their storage saves space compare to Maildir and pretty scalable compare postfix. It also allows unicode email addresses.
hanche 7y ago
I'm a happy user of runbox myself. I learned about it here on HN, in fact. Good security and privacy, reasonably priced, and a quite good webmail client (I think – I haven't used it extensively). Of course, it helps that they're based in Norway, where I live.
rootsudo 7y ago
Moving away from Gmail isn't that hard. It's on my list forever, but an Subscription to O365 and an IMAP migration is both great because: A: You're paying Microsoft for a service, and that has many more features than gMail. B: I believe Microsoft is more transparent than Google. C: You remove the identity (IAM) part of Google from your Email and separate yourself from Google's Ecosystem. D: Finally doing an IMAP migration gives you an independent copy of all your email to date. You can also download all your data from Google too, through some obscure settings page. Having your own domain. Enable SPF. Enable DMARC/DKIM if you dare. Enable hard failure on SPF. All that you need. Running your own server is HARD there are projects that make it easier like mailinabox, but it is HARD and annoying work. If you ever want to see how annoying it can be, load up shodan.io and just look up postfix CVE + postfix version numbers. Granted O365/Exchange is it's own thing and can become a headache, but there is tons of support available and it's meant to be portable and easy to move away from. gMail is Google. Google is designed to trap you in forever. :(
- SahAssar 7y ago
  > You can also download all your data from Google too, through some obscure settings page. If anyone is looking for how to do this: google.com/takeout Also IMAPsync works well for migrating email into another provider.
marie37 7y ago
I moved away from gmail, as I started my own business, the webshop https://kaninbutikken.dk https://kaninbutikken.dk , to my own mail. So now I both have a personal mail and a business email. However, I have some issues with the fact that many of my mails from my new emails end in the spam filter. I cannot figure out what I can do to make sure that my future mails doesn't end in the spam filter. I didn't have this problem, when I used my gmail. Do any of you guys have the same issues?
- rootsudo 7y ago
  It's most likely not setting up your SPF record. Most email servers reject email that do not contain an SPF DNS record. Then there's also general reputation, and blocking non US TLD's. It depends, you really need to have the other party check their email server logs or do a mail trace to find out WHY but then comes the chicken and egg - how can you contact someone via email if their server is automatically purging your communications.

349 points by rolisz 7y ago

It seems like G Suite meets all the requirements listed on the blog post, but is not discussed. G Suite or Office 365 also work well as personal email providers - they fulfill all the requirements mentioned such as a custom domain, text search, and IMAP access.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The author talks about the risks of single point of failure being Google/a Google account, and their lengthy and regularly amended Terms of Service. This would arguably be true of Office 365 as well.
- qwertox 7y ago
  Keep in mind that in G-Suite you can also enable email routing which will enable you to create full backups of emails https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/6297084?hl=en > These options include rejecting, quarantining, or delivering email with modifications. For example, you can route mail to Gmail and an external server or set policies that vary by organizational unit. That way Gmail becomes a single point of failure like any other service; you will only lose the mail which didn't arrive during the outage, which will then usually be resent at a later time. But you wouldn't care that much if they lock you out, since you then can change the MX records to point to the external server.
rolisz 7y ago
GSuite has some quirks when it comes to personal usages. For example, you can't use it for Family Groups, which allows me to share a YouTube Premium account with my wife.
- jvolkman 7y ago
  Pretty sure a PurelyMail account will also not work for these things.
  - ValentineC 7y ago
    I think a Google Account linked to a non-GSuite account might work for Family Groups.
  - rolisz 7y ago
    Sure, but I will keep my GMail account - for YouTube Premium. But at least if it gets banned for whatever reason, I lose only my Youtube history and nothing more.
beagle3 7y ago
G-Suite charges by mailbox address. It is possible to have a catchall, but when you send other emails from it you sometimes get the dreaded "on behalf of ..." tag.
crispinb 7y ago
G suite is pretty expensive for email, presumably because you can only buy it bundled up with all the other stuff.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Indeed, it does. Until suddenly it doesn't. The posted article explains with examples how it happens to some people.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

I am very surprised a "one man show" was the author's final choice here: What if the one man gets hit by a bus? FastMail is probably worth the increased cost to avoid that concern alone. But in general, I am excited to see anyone moving to their own email domain, decentralized is how email was always supposed to be. EDIT: A huge terms issue with PurelyMail is "The Company may, at its sole discretion, terminate service without cause or notice." FastMail can terminate for violations of the terms or non-payment, PurelyMail could terminate you because Scott just doesn't like you anymore.

rolisz 7y ago
The bus factor of PurelyMail is a valid concern and I hope it will be solved in the future.
benhurmarcel 7y ago
Also if cost is a concern for Fastmail, there's Mailbox.org which is a very reliable alternative.
- mindracer 7y ago
  Been a customer theirs for 3 years not and they’ve been excellent
- rv-de 7y ago
  They don't provide a practically working implementation of MFA. More like a cargo cult version of it.
hinkley 7y ago
And yet we tell each other that if you run a small business it's important to remember you can fire a customer.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  I think it's very important for customers to be able to trust the business though. This means the business relationship should have clearly defined terms and both parties should be expected to follow them. Unfortunately, the trend is for services to have take it or leave it terms and to essentially be written to hold them blameless while letting them do whatever they want. A legally sound strategy, but not one that embodies trust. And I'd argue being able to trust your email provider is very important.

rakoo 7y ago

Unaffiliated, I found migadu (https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html https://www.migadu.com/en/index.html) to be extremely easy to set up and having a nice ui to work with. Gives you only the basics but that's all you need. As they say, storage space is not an issue in the 21st century, so the only differentiator between plans is the only thing that matters: the number of outgoing emails. You can have as many domains, as many aliases and as many addresses as you want, that's not a technical problem so there's no reason it should be a financial distinction.

jacobroyquebec 7y ago
I second this, i've been using it for a few years and it's very easy to setup. Reliable and cheap.
fermienrico 7y ago
I've tried Migadu and I much prefer FastMail: https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com They have full DNS capabilities and very nice UI (minimal JS, loads super fast).
- adtac 7y ago
  While I'm happy with fastmail, they aren't minimal JS by any means. The website is snappy though.
ThePowerOfFuet 7y ago
> Copyright © 2016 AdVite GmbH This sounds like an advertising company. A person's inbox is the holy grail of info about them. I don't think I want to use this company for my email. Change my mind?
- gpanders 7y ago
  The company is based in Switzerland and is French speaking. Any chance "AdVite" means something different in French? Apart from that, their website states pretty clearly their privacy policy [1] and other terms [2]. It doesn't look like there is anything shady going on here. I don't personally use Migadu but I've had it bookmarked as the "service I would probably use if/when the day comes". [1]: https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html https://www.migadu.com/en/privacy.html [2]: https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html https://www.migadu.com/en/terms.html

kh_hk 7y ago

The only thing that makes sense is getting your own domain first. There after you can look into email providers, but to avoid lock in, first you need your own address, owned by you. Only by then, you can rent the email service into it if you want, or run your own.

yokto 7y ago
Then again, that's potentially an additional attack surface that you need to be mindful of: https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-...

akssri 7y ago

Gandi may also be an option here - a domain registered with them comes with two free mailboxes, each with a few GBs of space and calendar support. (Yes, yes, this is the same company that lost the data on their cloud servers.)

gpanders 7y ago
Gandi is what I use as well and have for years. I follow all these new up-and-coming email services, but I've never had a reason to switch.
KitDuncan 7y ago
mhm, are they good? I have my domains there, but never considered using them for my emails. are catchall emails possible?
robjan 7y ago
They are missing 2FA which is a deal-breaker for many
- benhurmarcel 7y ago
  And they don't support DKIM. That's my main complaint with them so far.
newcrobuzon 7y ago
I have been using it for few years now and so far have been reasonably happy. Works fine with Thunderbird, on my phone however i have recently noticed a substantial delay in getting new emails, sometimes even more than couple of hours...
ptman 7y ago
I think they eventually restored that data.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dehrmann 7y ago

> it's a single point of failure If Google blocked your Recaptchas, deleted your Gmail account, and disabled you Android phone...wow.

downerending 7y ago
I've lost one of my (two) Gmail accounts. Attempting to get it back was an existential exercise in looking into the maw of nothingness. Kind of like that thing from The Fifth Element or something. Even know a ranking insider, but... nothing. Relying on any company for more than one divisible service in 2020 is insane. Use Google for search? Don't use them for anything else. There are lots of little guys out there doing great stuff. Put a few bucks in their direction. Shutouts are fascist.

wheresvic3 7y ago

This post came at a very opportune time as I was having some issues recently with my email provider and was looking for alternatives. I own my main email address but I do have a few other domains which I would like to have mailboxes for. Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains! Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email is not backed up anywhere :)

vinni2 7y ago

I switched to posteo in 2015 and never looked back! https://posteo.de/en https://posteo.de/en

chappi42 7y ago
They don't support custom domains (https://posteo.de/en/site/faq https://posteo.de/en/site/faq).
- vinni2 7y ago
  I never claimed that they support custom domain. Thanks for the down vote.

osamagirl69 7y ago

Purely mail does look like a very attractive mail host, filling an interesting niche between the SMTP sever you get from your ISP (or someone like zoneout from zoneedit, which is $1/month for up to 50 outgoing email per day) and a full on webmail like fastmail. Honestly for me the $50/year to fastmail to worry about worrying about my mail is worth it, and their webmail/mobile clients are great if that is your thing. Really the main thing here is to move your mail over to a custom domain, and these guys really make that a lot cheaper. $15/year for the domain and another $10/year for mail is absolutely worth it to remove your mail provider as a single point of failure in your email. PS - if you are looking for a good android mail client, I have had good luck with K-9. It takes a bit of getting used to when migrating over from the built in android mail, but if you stick with it and figure out how to configure it correctly it works great. The main configuration changes I had to make were putting a shortcut for 'move to archive' and getting android configured to let it run in the background so notifications work correctly.

battery_cowboy 7y ago
I love fastmail, I use them for my email and my DNS servers, it's so easy. I understand some people want to run their own email, but ever since you have to set up SPF records and all kinds of other shit, and you still rush Gmail black holing your emails, I'd rather pay 50 bucks a year.

simonjgreen 7y ago

It really saddens me when I see topics like this and just doing it yourself doesn't come up as an option. Running a mail server is not difficult, and I firmly believe that deliverability is quite solvable. This was basic sysadmin 101 about a decade ago, one skill of many that's getting lost in the S/I/PaaS ecosystem.

lallysingh 7y ago
Static IPs aren't getting easier to acquire.
- mihaifm 7y ago
  You only need a public IP, not necessarily static. My ISP offers public IPs via pppoe and dynamic DNS. I was able to install my mail server with docker-mailserver [1] without much effort. There are some quirks, but it's worth trying out. [1]: https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver
fuzzy2 7y ago
Running a (1) mail server is not enough. You need fault tolerance. And then of course spam filtering, DKIM and whatnot, maybe a nice web interface, ... Running an SMTP server is easy. The rest? Not so much. Rolling your own is great. However, it's not for most people and requires constant monitoring and maintenance.
- ozim 7y ago
  For personal mail? I don't need fault tolerance if it is going to be down for 10 hours I don't care. If I run it I am going to fix it anyway and retry registration process for whatever I needed mail. Spam filtering use 10minute mail or something for crap that you don't care. Give your mail address to people and companies you actually want to deal with. Better just keep some spam box on free provider where you sign up for crap. I don't care about web interface I have multiple boxes anyway so I have to use client app where I can see all stuff at once. (why people think you can have only ONE "THE ONE" mail address for everything?) DKIM and stuff does not matter if you send ONE EMAIL A MONTH or two. Mostly what people do is that they receive stuff (registration mails for crap). That said, if you send out bulk mail like in 1k a day you really need DKIM, SPF, DMARC and stuff. If you run company email server it might be better to do it with email provider or get marketing to send mass mails with mailchimp or sendgrid. When you want to run mail server for friends and family you are just being silly and if there will be 10 hours downtime you would not care about... Guess what your brother in law wanted to sign up for free month april on por..ekhm...pluralsight and he is going to be mad at you (and you should not tell that to your sister).

Daegalus 7y ago

This is some good info, I personally still use GMail and used to use GSuite. Migrating from GSuite -> Gmail was a nightmare in of itself, but I found a service that helped me keep my custom domain emails and no longer feel like a second class citizen. So even if someday Google decides to kill my Account, I can just reroute my domain to a new service with not issue. The service I used is ImprovMX. YOu just setup your DNS records, and they handle your domain emails. Any number of aliases and redirects you need. Their free tier is very generous with 10 domains, and I think 15-20 aliases per domain. Super easy to get my family on there for our family domain and my other custom domains. I then made a new standard gmail account, migrated everything I could, repurchased apps, and then just forwarded my email to the gmail account after detaching it from GSuite. It was fairly painless on this front. You can do email alias sending of emails with any provider, but ImprovMX has SMTP services now that get rid of that pesky "on behalf of" label of your emails. It is part of their Pro feature set, but that's just $9 a month for a ton of features and peace of mind. Full DKIM support and the such. You can even setup a custom domain as a login email for your GMail and most other services, so you can login with it just like you would with GSuite. Now I know this is a post about moving away from Google, but this could be a stepping stone, because once you do all this. If i decided I want to use Fastmail, PurelyMail, Outlook, Yahoo, or whatever the hell else I want. I can just change the target email in ImprovMX and it goes to the right place. The rest is all just import/export from gmail. You can just GYOB to make detailed Maildir format backups of Gmail, and either restore them into another gmail account, or find a way to import them into your new service using similar tools. Or just keep a local backup, use NotMuch or a NotMuch UI like Neit Viel to search/lookup your old emails, and start fresh in your new place. One little gotchya if you do this. Gmail saw the initial set of ImprovMX emails as spam or fraud for a few emails as they would come from 1 email, but had ImprovMX redirect info. SO be sure to double check spam folders for a a few days for miscategorized emails. Once the spam blocker learns ImprovMX is ok, it will start working as normal. (Thought I think ImprovMX improved something on their end as I have even seen this particular thing happen in a while.

crispinb 7y ago
GYOB?

meagher 7y ago

The sad thing like others have mentioned is that most people don’t own their own email address. Their address is tied to the client. Controlling the address is key to switching services and not being shut off for ToS violations. I wrote about it more here https://meagher.co/own-your-email/ https://meagher.co/own-your-email/

svnpenn 7y ago
You ditched Gmail for... Gsuite. Is this a joke?
- meagher 7y ago
  The post is about “owning” your email address so you can move, not moving to a new provider.
  - delsarto 7y ago
    As the recent changes to .org show, though, after a while the domain owns you rather than the other way around! I am trying to move away from gsuite. The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). Using the account directly sucks, you have constant switching and gsuite accounts can't do things like family sharing. Forwarding services, even implementing srs still can't rewrite dkim, so you get weird reply to addresses than again often trigger things ending up in spam. I think the best solution while keeping everything together in the Google ecosystem (drive, docs, calendar, etc.) is probably an external provider you do pop from to your standard Google account, then offlineimap style backup Gmail somewhere else. Then you still have arbitrary delays in fetching! Basically, everything is terrible.
    - ValentineC 7y ago
      > The thing with forwarding from there is that it goes through spam there first, meaning you really have to check it (my accountant screwed up their spf records recently, leading to a lot of confusion). If you're on paid G Suite, you can tweak the Default routing setting [1] in Google Admin to forward all emails to a different domain. I believe this bypasses Gmail's spam filter (Google might reject some mail during SMTP — I've never had a problem with mail delivery to Google though, unlike to Hotmail). [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/2368153?hl=en

wwweston 7y ago

Anyone know of a good alternative for Google Voice? This is the stickiest service for me; there are lots of email options but it doesn't seem there's many services that offer a phone alias with call forwarding and a full web interface for not only voicemail but texting. Rolling my own through Twilio or something seems like an option but then I'm back to paying per text message or other event (I don't mind paying for a good service along these lines, but I'm reluctant to get into a metered situation).

sam 7y ago
Check out OpenPhone.
profsnuggles 7y ago
The closest I've found is https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/ I'm waiting for voip.ms to enable mms support then I'll probably roll something with asterisk. Although I saw https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms https://github.com/zoenb/mx-puppet-voipms the other day.
- ossguy 7y ago
  Yeah, JMP supports picture messaging and short codes, so works for most SMS-based 2FA. Group texting support will be completed in the next month or two, which would give JMP feature-parity with Google Voice. And you can run your own instance if you don't trust the one at https://jmp.chat/ https://jmp.chat/
deanmoriarty 7y ago
I would love to have a trustworthy alternative to using GV for all my SMS 2FA needs. I switched to custom domain email a while ago, but definitely feel I am still way too exposed to Google in that area.
johntash 7y ago
Rolling my own through Twilio is something I've been considering as well, so I'd also be interested if anyone knows of a good alternative.

hysan 7y ago

One problem that I wish all of these “Move Away from Gmail” articles would address is how to update all of the websites you’ve already created accounts on to your new email address. I’ve had my own email address for several years, but I still keep the old gmail one around because I’ve found that many websites do not allow you to change your email address. This makes it problematic if you have a decades worth of accounts tied to gmail.

beart 7y ago
I just kept my Gmail account but receive virtually zero email on it.
thanksforfish 7y ago
This is also true for sites that use Google accounts for OAuth. Your account has a one to one mapping to your Google account. You can keep the old address and auto-forward emails from the old to the new. I think that's the best you can manage.
benhurmarcel 7y ago
I just progressively went through all my accounts in my password manager, and changed the email. I used my Gmail account to register to everything for more than a decade, but since I also kept a complete list of all my accounts, it wasn't an issue to change it one by one. I still have my Gmail account, it just sits empty (in case). There's no need to delete it.

vzaliva 7y ago

email is such a critical part of my digital life that is stability and convenience are the critical factors which can overweight some shortcomings in features and UI. So the additional arguments for staying with Gmail are: 1. Stability. Google as a company is not going anywhere. Can you say the same about smaller companies? 2. Backend infrastructure. Google has some serious backend managed very professionally. I am pretty comfortable with my email data being safe with them. 3. Security. My guess is that the Google security team has more people than the whole development team of Purelymail or even Fastmail. They know how to resist attacks from state actors, massive DDOS, etc. 4. Spam filters. Having 1 billion active users Gmail has a unique ability to detect spam. Smaller providers, no matter how good are their antispam algorithms are, just do not have access to such amount of data. That said, I share some of your concerns about Gmail and thinking about moving to ProtonMail.

nullc 7y ago
Considering the importance of email that you mention: What is your plan if google suddenly bans your account? Google might not go anywhere but your access to it might. And when their automation directs them to ban an account, there is essentially no recourse-- they won't even respond to you.
- vzaliva 7y ago
  any provider can ban your account. my recourse is to switch my domain. I do not use @gmail.com address - I use my own domain with google mail.
  - remram 7y ago
    I considered doing that, but decided against it because domain names are rented and not permanently yours. If I ever stop paying, make a mistake, or pass away, anyone can grab it and password-recover their way in all my accounts... I'm not sure if it's a good trade-off...
    - ValentineC 7y ago

thanksforfish 7y ago

> A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop Looking at the typical Amazon concern that "longer load times cost millions in sales" that you hear, it's crazy to think that gmail doesn't measure the uncached load time (or they do and are happy with 20 seconds). Anecdata: I mostly use my phone for email, so most of the time I load the gmail web interface the cache is cold and it takes this long. It bothers me the one a month I load it.

Evan_Hellmuth 7y ago
"The once a month I load it" they don't care about you, you're not the typical paying enterprise use case.
thekyle 7y ago
I imagine the logic is that people usually keep Gmail open in a tab which might be reloaded once per day. So people aren't likely to switch email providers because of 20 seconds a day. That said, I've found Gmail to be pretty sluggish even after loading, so I use it via email clients with my other accounts.
- remus 7y ago
  This seems quite a common complaint, but gmail has always been pretty snappy for me. I wonder what causes the variability?
- kenhwang 7y ago
  My Gmail tab that I leave pinned regularly loses connection and stops updating. It seems more and more these days Google things just break when you don't use Chrome. Using Gmail with Firefox hasn't felt fast in a long while.

FpUser 7y ago

I was never "in". Had my email for ages. I do not trust Google and the likes to handle my email

tobysemmel 7y ago

> Privacy stuff is not a part of my requirements. Can you send me a zip file containing all of your emails then? Oh, you don’t want to do that? Funny how even people who claim they don’t care about privacy actually really value privacy.

1f60c 7y ago
I read this as "I don't care if my emails get mined to show me ads", not "I'll send out copies of all my email to random HN users".
- tobysemmel 7y ago
  I can mine it for ads if he wants

trengrj 7y ago

I'm really looking forward to what DHH can do with https://hey.com/ https://hey.com/. My aim with an email provider is that I trust it. A non-bootstrapped company with a founder outspoken against privacy issues seems a good place to try.

dguo 7y ago
I'm planning on migrating from Gmail to Fastmail, but I'm holding off until Hey launches to see what it offers.
ekovarski 7y ago
Hey sounds promising but out of the gate it sounds like it will be missing a lot of features I need, eg no migration path, you start with a clean slate web based only, no imap access (not sure of smtp) no custom domains on day 1 Maybe this will change as they delayed the launch due to covid-19 but right now it's something I, and I assume many others, will watch from afar as its missing crucial elements.

foobarbecue 7y ago

I've been using MailInaBox on a Droplet for a decade or so now and it's been great.

soufron 7y ago

This really seems like a bad solution to me. Any domain name provider will allow you to create personalized mail addresses for a total cost of around 10$/y. Then -> imap -> Thunderbird. And you're set for life with a nearly unlimited set of features. It's easy to backup. It can sync between different computers and mobile phones. I don't get why he would chose something else.

abdabab 7y ago
Does that setup allow you to check mails from multiple computers and phones?
- KitDuncan 7y ago
  Of course. You can setup your IMAP mailbox on any device. You can even use your Gmail or Apple Mail Apps to set it up on your phone.
- soufron 7y ago
  Perfectly.

Razengan 7y ago

I've been using iCloud email for more than a decade, no problems, and much better privacy. It allows 3 aliases per account (that you can replace) without exposing your primary address unlike Google's primary+alias suffix, so you can have up to 4 addresses per account. I also don't think they require you to give them your phone number.

sneak 7y ago

Keeping years and years of old emails on the server is a bad idea whilst subjected to the third party doctrine, which holds that the government snoops can access your emails without a warrant due to the fact that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are storing your emails on a hosted server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act How often do you need the mails from years ago? Archive them to a local mailbox and include it in your normal backups.

rovr138 7y ago
Sure, but backups would still be an issue and there's also a copy on the sender outbox or recipient's inbox.

jbullock35 7y ago

From the article: "One thing that I miss is the fact that in GMail folders are actually labels and you can have multiple labels for an email." Which competing services (apart from Outlook) offer Gmail-like labeling for individual messages?

megido 7y ago

Pure mail, but registration is such a nightmare

nicoburns 7y ago

> Another reason because of which I'm leaving GMail is because it's kinda slow. A full load with an empty cache takes about 20 seconds on my desktop (good specs, wired Internet connection). Loading a folder with 184 emails takes 2.5 seconds. I don't understand how Gmail managed to get to this point. One of the original selling points of Gmail was the snappy interface. And it's regressed massively. And it's not like the interface is complicated.

joering2 7y ago
It actually is. It has some tweaks done so that no matter what device you on it still runs most functionality.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  That's absolutely standard for a webapp though (and really old devices are only supported through the "Basic HTML" view). There's no reason why wide device support should cause it to be slow.
ValentineC 7y ago
I miss the old, snappy interface, and held out for the longest time until they forced G Suite users to move over some time in 2019.
agumonkey 7y ago
yeah you just reminded me that gmail is the new old hotmail seduction makes everyone do its best, over time you rot time for a new challenger ?
floo 7y ago
For me gmail loads and becomes interactive in under 2 seconds on an empty cache. I did not expect it to be that slow for other people. That said I do practice inbox zero, so it might just be spending time on loading a lot of mail?
- remus 7y ago

blntechie 7y ago

Atlassianis launching an email service(Hey) later this year and I have kind of pinned my hopes on it to replace gmail.

williw 7y ago
Isn't Hey.com a Basecamp product?
- 1f60c 7y ago
  It is.
- blntechie 7y ago
  Sorry about that. I have no idea how I mixed up that so bad as I follow DHH regularly for his tweets and all. Facepalm.

mattkevan 7y ago

Been using Soverin after switching from Gmail a few years ago - really happy with the service. Only €40/year for 25gb storage. www.soverin.net

twodayslate 7y ago

Is there any mail client that has priority inbox like support? That's one reason I still use gmail/g-suite

TrueDuality 7y ago

I've been considering doing a similar thing but I'm in a different situation with Gmail. I hopped on to their business domains when they were initially released (and free) and I'm still grandfathered into their free plan. I use the account as my primary Google account which includes purchased Android apps, and I make pretty heavy use of that Google Drive with several external organizations. I'd like to move just my email away to my own hosting, but I'm worried Google might do something sneaky when they realize my MX domains no longer point at them. I haven't herd of anyone attempting to migrate just their email from a Google on a custom domain while trying to maintain the rest of their account and that fear is the only thing keeping me on Google.

judge2020 7y ago
In my experience (G Suite Basic) it doesn't do any MX record checks, I still have a domain "active" that had its MX records removed (expired domain) almost 2 years ago.
- TrueDuality 7y ago
  Niiiccceee. That does make me a bit more confident about it.
  - sdan 7y ago
    You can actually get a google account with any email (hosted on your own platform, etc.)
heywire 7y ago
I made this same move a couple years ago and still have no problem logging into my account.
parkersweb 7y ago
I’m in the same boat - set up the free service with my own domain for the family a long time ago. Quite frankly I’d love to ditch it entirely because Google frequently makes crazy stuff inaccessible as a result - I can’t use Android screen time limits for the kids, I can’t sign up for Google music family plan. Problem is - I have loads of purchases on the accounts and there’s no way at all to convert them to standard Google accounts and no way at all to transfer the purchases. It’s maddening...

masnick 7y ago

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail back in 2013 [1] and haven't looked back. Fastmail has continued to make significant improvements, while keeping the interface lean and functional. It seems to me like $3/month is worth it for a service as critical as email. [1]: https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944

jw14 7y ago
I agree $3/month is reasonable for email, but since the encryption backdoor laws passed in Australia in Dec 2018, I've been avoiding Australian software.
- thekyle 7y ago
  Would the Australian encryption laws impact Fastmail that much? AFAIK their emails were never encrypted at rest to begin with so someone with a warrant could always have gotten in.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    The question is why you would ever expose your data to the control of lawmakers who make such laws if you're not Australian.
- masnick 7y ago
  You should take a look at https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/ https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/. They say it doesn’t affect their customers.
  - contravariant 7y ago
    While that's true it's also because they don't use E2E. Which I guess makes any discussion about encryption backdoors rather pointless.

wycy 7y ago

Question for people who have emails at their own domain: what do you pick as your email address? Do you typically use first@firstlast.com? firstlast@firstlast.com? first@last.com? me@firstlast.com? Do you typically use multiple accounts?

Terretta 7y ago
Use a time machine and get first@last.com
- trevyn 7y ago
  If you're time machining, firstinitial@first.com is the way to go!
heywire 7y ago
first@firstlast.com for me. Happy FastMail user too.
codethief 7y ago
It took me a while to figure this out but I've now settled with the following: - mail@firstlast.tld for personal emails directed at me only and written by a human being, i.e. emails that warrant my personal response - <SomeServiceIsignedUpfor>@firstlast.tld for automated emails from services like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HN, …. These are usually computer-generated emails that don't warrant a response, so they are merely notifications. The neat thing about this approach is that: a) the list of email aliases contains all the services I've signed up for, ever b) I can easily stop a service from sending me emails by simply deleting the alias. In particular, if an email address leaks to spammers, I simply delete it. c) I can distinguish between personal and non-personal email and can prioritize accordingly. I look at my personal emails more often than at my non-personal ones.
- knr2345 7y ago
  Do you have a method for quickly creating new aliases on the fly? My setup is nearly the same. I use two domains such as firstlast.tld and genericwords.tld. Genericwords.tld has umbrella aliases for social, apps, subscriptions, orders, etc. I have rules setup up per umbrella alias to delete after 30 days, or always mark as read, or never mark as read. I originally had service/site specific aliases in mind for easy deletion, but for my setup this creates a layer of friction that makes it quite cumbersome. I considered umbrella+servicename aliases but those are not always guaranteed to be accepted.

longtermd 7y ago

I moved to SuperHuman (SH) quite a while ago and really love it!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

marban 7y ago

Has anyone opted for Yahoo Business Mail recently? Pricing looks very competitive; Just not sure how great their spam filter is compared to Google.

mzzter 7y ago

I’ve had a great experience with Purelymail, though I haven’t figured out how to complete the DKIM and DMARC setup. When I was evaluating options for hosting an email address from my own domain, two things sold me on Purelymail: - special characters allowed in the name, like "~" - the pay-as-you-go pricing

crispinb 7y ago
I set up a account and was considering it for an intended email consolidation. But Roundcube is hopeless - keyboard shortcuts are a 'planned' feature. That makes Roundcube a pre-alpha product in my view.

lma22 7y ago

I've been considering moving to Outlook. Can anyone share their take on Outlook?

steelframe 7y ago

I used to run my own mail server, and that very nearly cost me a career-changing job at Microsoft. My reply to a hiring manager for a team I really wanted to work on went into Microsoft's bit bucket because (I'm guessing) their spam detectors didn't like my own domain and my own instance of Exim sending out my emails. When a recruiter (thankfully) followed up and scheduled me for on-site interviews, that manager mentioned that he never got a reply when he emailed me. That was the point where I realized that email had gone the way of fiefdoms, and if I wanted really important emails to make it through, I'd need to choose which castle I wanted to handle my email.

tzs 7y ago
Wait...your mail was a reply to a mail they sent to you, and it went to the bit bucket? Their spam handling is not sophisticated enough to special case replies to mails that they have sent?
- travbrack 7y ago
  Do other spam filters actually check every incoming email against a database of outgoing emails?
  - lisper 7y ago
    Mine does. And I wrote it myself.
    - eru 7y ago
      You could use a Bloom filter to save on memory. And perhaps empty it once a year, if necessary. (Ie so that replies to emails older than a year don't rank better than random emails.)
      - lisper 7y ago
        I just throw all the subject lines into a database. The data volume is not even remotely close to the limits of a modern DB.

crispinb 7y ago

Can anyone recommend tools for removing email duplicates? I have a mess of archived email from different sources I intend one day to consolidate onto a decent IMAP provider. Over the years I've done all kinds of forwarding from one account to another, been in & out of gmail,etc. It's a bit of a mess, and consolidation would result in me using much more storage than I need because of dupes. A trustworthy deduping tool (whether operating via IMAP, or on local maildirs) would be useful. I've seen a couple around when I've searched in the past, but would like a recommendation from experience before running something over some gigs of archived mail.

virgoerns 7y ago
I use mutt for that which modifies local maildir so it's super fast. Commands are: "D~=$". Then it's just a matter of syncing local changes back e.g. with mbsync.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Thanks. I suppose I should take another look at mutt. When I have in the past it's seemed a bit overwhelming with features & config. Does that command remove dupes in a single folder or a hierarchy?
  - virgoerns 7y ago
    It works in a single folder only. It's actually a set of the following commands: - D tells mutt to delete messages by pattern - ~= is pattern which selects all the dupes in current folder - $ finalizes the command I think this [1] is where I learned about it and there's also a handy folder hook for mutt which automatically removes duplicates when you open the folder. [1]: http://promberger.info/linux/2008/03/31/mutt-delete-duplicate-e-mail-messages/ http://promberger.info/linux/2008/03/31/mutt-delete-duplicat...
    - crispinb 7y ago
      Thanks. Could prove useful.

timwis 7y ago

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a year ago and I really miss how Gmail filtered things into primary/social/updates/forums. I feel overwhelmed with a single inbox, and can’t possibly keep up with my own custom filters. The result is I’m likely to miss something important. Does anyone have a solution for this?

rolisz 7y ago
Try to use aliases. Give out news@domain.com when signing up for a newspaper, gaming@domain.com for gaming accounts and so on. In this way, a simple filter for incoming address will cover a lot of different email senders.
distances 7y ago
Do you feel like you're getting something out of all those email updates? My solution was to simply cut down the amount of incoming mail. Nowadays I receive about three emails a day, with some days of zero emails in between. Feels like a good number to me personally.

emilburzo 7y ago

> Technically, I could use GMail with my own domain, but only by signing up for a business GSuite account. Actually it is possible to use your own domain with even a regular Gmail account (although not straight-forward), and it works well -- I know because that's how I have set it up. Requirements: own domain with MX records pointing to your server(s) running SMTP software Receiving: SMTP server forwards to gmail account, SRS (Sender Rewriting Scheme) takes care so SPF doesn't fail, DKIM just works. Sending: you configure Gmail to use your SMTP server for sending. Gmail side: add email alias and verify it, the "reply" function is even smart enough to use the correct alias depending on the "TO" Besides the bonus of "owning" your email while still using the goodies of Gmail, having "catch-all", being able to easily migrate if shit hits the fan, there were also some other things I didn't realize until doing this: You can save a local copy of the emails on your server (nice extra backup). You have access to email logs, if you are worried about reliability you can just check it on-the-fly, you don't have to wait for the "email delivery failed" notification.

PhilippGille 7y ago
Wow I didn't know that! Do you know if there are more detailed tutorials for this?
- emilburzo 7y ago
  I guess it depends on how detailed you want it, but maybe Google's own help page already helps? https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370
rolisz 7y ago
Wow, that's quite interesting!

aorth 7y ago

> Ability to use multiple aliases. I want to have site_name@rolisz.ro, besides the main address I will give out, but still have everything come in to my main inbox. It's not an alias, but you can effectively get this for free with any mail provider by using a plus sign (+). For a really extreme (and awesome) example, see: http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email_addresses_with_a_are_valid.html http://www.jacobsen.no/anders/blog/archives/2002/08/24/email... He suggests using emails like: aorth+news.ycombinator.com+2020-04-12@example.com. The benefits are that you get a lightweight alias that you can filter on, but you also get a canary that tells you which site sold your email address when you start getting spam to it! :)

PudgePacket 7y ago
I've seen sites reject for having the plus and strip it on submit when I tried this :/ so not a perfect solution
inapis 7y ago
Sites have started being smart about it. I also now know of services which won’t allow you to create an account if the string contains the service name in it.

thdrdt 7y ago

Some weeks ago I decided to be brave and build my own mail server. With a great tutorial [1] I was able to do this in a few hours and learned a ton about email along the way. Because today it is possible to setup a lot of features via DNS I got no problems with email being marked as spam. But I can understand this is not for everyone. Personally I got some problems with DNS misconfigurations and file access rights at first but got it working perfectly after a day or two. [1] https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/ https://workaround.org/ispmail/buster/

DeathArrow 7y ago

I, too, want to switch from using Google services. I find it hard. I have hundreds of website accounts, all registered through Gmail. I don't even know all the websites I have accounts on. Switching all to use another mail address, would be at least very tedious and would take a very long time. Also I have many contacts mailing me on my Gmail address. Making all those people use another address would be hard. I can redirect Gmail probably, but that would mean still using Gmail. Also, using Google's services is very convenient. And the only other provider which the same level of integration and which has e-mail, online docs, calendar, storage is Microsoft. And you have to pay if you want to use docs. Maybe I'll use different providers for different services, but I 'll lose the integration. And Google tries to make your life harder if you are not using Chrome and you are not logged in into Google account. You' ll see lots of recaptchas triggered if you use Firefox or Edge and you'll get the bot treatment if you try to access next pages in Google search.

DavideNL 7y ago
> Also I have many contacts mailing me on my Gmail address. Making all those people use another address would be hard. What i did is, i automatically forwarded all incoming Gmail emails to my new new@domain.com address. Then when someone sends me an e-mail to my old Gmail account, i simply reply to it from my new new@domain.com. That way contacts will gradually/eventually update me in their contact lists... it worked really well. > I have hundreds of website accounts, all registered through Gmail. I don't even know all the websites I have accounts on. It doesn't matter, just keep using them and register all new accounts with your new e-mail address. You can slowly update your email address in old accounts over time, Gmail will stay accessible anyway.

prescojan 7y ago

I'm using fastmail for few months. Only when I switched I understood that leaving google product is not that scary

vrutberg 7y ago

I have been on a similar journey to distance myself from Google and my Google account for a little more than a year now. It's taken longer than I thought to get to where I am now, and now I'm skeptical that I'll ever be completely Google free. My steps so far have been: 1. January 2019: Bought a domain name and registered for FastMail. 2. Progressively over the following months: Every time I got an email sent to my Gmail address, I'd either unregister for that service or change it to my new FastMail powered email address. 3. Early summer 2019: Logged out from my Google Account in Firefox, and created a Firefox Container where I am logged into my Google account in case I would need it 4. Deleted Google Maps app from my phone 5. Logged out from my Google account on the Gmail app on my phone A few tips I can share: * If you have this email address registered at FastMail: foo@bar.com, emails sent to x@foo.bar.com (where x can be anything) will be forwarded do foo@bar.com. I found this very useful when using it to sign up for various services. * You can register as many aliases as you want in FastMail. For example I have my personal email address be firstname@domain.com. I also have inbox@domain.com registered as an alias, so if I sign up for some online service I can use service@inbox.domain.com as my email address. The things that I've found hardest to migrate are: * iMessage. I've used my Gmail address as the primary iMessage handle, so that's what people have been sending messages to. Not sure what'll happen if I remove it from my Apple ID. * GitHub. I've used my Gmail address as my email address in Git for years. Removing the Gmail address from my profile in GitHub removes the connection between those commits and my profile. For now I have it as a secondary email address (or whatever it's called on GitHub) for this sake. * YouTube. I want my viewing history, channel subscriptions, etc. Maybe I should create a new Google Account just for YouTube?

iliaznk 7y ago

I'd recommend at least getting your own email domain so you are still able to use Gmail's interface, but could easily switch to something else if necessary. That's what I did with Pobox – reliable and affordable solution for that (and even more).

paulcarroty 7y ago

Use riseup.net last 5 years, great services(), but heavily relies from donations.

wildduck 7y ago

If you know nodejs pretty well, try https://wildduck.email https://wildduck.email Unaffiliated BTW. Just find that their storage saves space compare to Maildir and pretty scalable compare postfix. It also allows unicode email addresses.

hanche 7y ago

I'm a happy user of runbox myself. I learned about it here on HN, in fact. Good security and privacy, reasonably priced, and a quite good webmail client (I think – I haven't used it extensively). Of course, it helps that they're based in Norway, where I live.

rootsudo 7y ago

Moving away from Gmail isn't that hard. It's on my list forever, but an Subscription to O365 and an IMAP migration is both great because: A: You're paying Microsoft for a service, and that has many more features than gMail. B: I believe Microsoft is more transparent than Google. C: You remove the identity (IAM) part of Google from your Email and separate yourself from Google's Ecosystem. D: Finally doing an IMAP migration gives you an independent copy of all your email to date. You can also download all your data from Google too, through some obscure settings page. Having your own domain. Enable SPF. Enable DMARC/DKIM if you dare. Enable hard failure on SPF. All that you need. Running your own server is HARD there are projects that make it easier like mailinabox, but it is HARD and annoying work. If you ever want to see how annoying it can be, load up shodan.io and just look up postfix CVE + postfix version numbers. Granted O365/Exchange is it's own thing and can become a headache, but there is tons of support available and it's meant to be portable and easy to move away from. gMail is Google. Google is designed to trap you in forever. :(

SahAssar 7y ago
> You can also download all your data from Google too, through some obscure settings page. If anyone is looking for how to do this: google.com/takeout Also IMAPsync works well for migrating email into another provider.

marie37 7y ago

I moved away from gmail, as I started my own business, the webshop https://kaninbutikken.dk https://kaninbutikken.dk , to my own mail. So now I both have a personal mail and a business email. However, I have some issues with the fact that many of my mails from my new emails end in the spam filter. I cannot figure out what I can do to make sure that my future mails doesn't end in the spam filter. I didn't have this problem, when I used my gmail. Do any of you guys have the same issues?

rootsudo 7y ago
It's most likely not setting up your SPF record. Most email servers reject email that do not contain an SPF DNS record. Then there's also general reputation, and blocking non US TLD's. It depends, you really need to have the other party check their email server logs or do a mail trace to find out WHY but then comes the chicken and egg - how can you contact someone via email if their server is automatically purging your communications.