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ProtonMail has come a long way as a replacement for Gmail as well. Suuuper happy with them, they're really responsive to feature requests and support inquiries.

• bcrosby95 6y ago
  Switching email isn't nearly as friction-free as switching your browser. Not only do you have to change your email in every service you've registered for, you also need to convince your friends and other contacts to use the new email.
  • theshrike79 6y ago
    It's a year-long project in the minimum: 1: Start up new email (for me it was Fastmail) and preferably get your own domain 2: Forward all mail from gmail to your new account 3: Create a rule that flags messages that are still delivered to gmail, go through them at your leisure and swap to the new address
    • kadoban 6y ago
      I'd stress the "get your own domain" part. This is a _requirement_, or you're going to be going through the same pain again in a few years. Also, make sure you take backups of your old emails every once in a while. Google Checkout should be able to provide those.
      • colejohnson66 6y ago
        What’s the risk of losing your domain from a forgotten renewal?
        • imhoguy 6y ago
          There is always a risk of loosing an asset, that includes hijacking. However to reduce forgeting of renewal there is the recipe I have once read here on HN: Renew your doman for 10 years now, and then every next year do 1 year renewal. If you forget it then you still have 9 years of buffer.
        • _-david-_ 6y ago
          I would assume most domain registrars send you reminder emails as your expiration gets closer.
        • mrighele 6y ago
          Some registrars let you enable automatic renewal, so in that case the only risk is to keep paying for a domain that you forgot of.
          • trav4225 6y ago
            How is credit card expiration handled? Or do you suggest another payment method?
            • mrighele 6y ago
              I think they sent me a notification about the expiring card once. Another alternative is using one that accept recurring payments through PayPal; that way you would have to handle card expiration only with Paypal.
        • ashtonkem 6y ago
          If a domain is important to you, you should have it set to autorenew.
        • rietta 6y ago
          I have all my domains on autorenew, probably many I should have let lapse now, and some of which I have regretted letting go of.
      • thayne 6y ago
        getting your own domain might be fine for tech-savvy people, but for the general population it isn't really an option.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    The most important change you can make for your email is to own your own domain. Once you own your own domain, changing providers is much easier since it is transparent to the people that email you. Even if you decide to keep Gmail, you should switch your email to your own domain.
    • cpascal 6y ago
      One worry about tying your identity to your own domain, is the security of your identity (aka your domain) hinges on the security of your registrar. If a bad actor can socially engineer their way into controlling your domain, your entire identity is compromised. Here's a blog post about this nightmare happening to someone: 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-...
      • ashtonkem 6y ago
        I agree that that would be catastrophic, but I’m not convinced that using custom DNS changes my risk factor. If someone took over <my name>@gmail.com, they could do as much damage as they could by taking over <my name>@<my domain>.
        • Roujo 6y ago
          Yes, but there's still an increase in the attack surface - it's a lot harder to convince a registrar to turn over gmail.com than <my domain>, for most values of <my domain>. It's not a deal breaker, of course, but it's something to consider when looking at the risk factor.
        • cpascal 6y ago
          If you use an email provider to host your domain's email (e.g. Fastmail, GSuite, etc.), I believe you're actually increasing your risk factor. The security of your identity will depend on your registrar, your DNS provider, and your email provider.
      • toohotatopic 6y ago
  • dsanduleac 6y ago
    I recall seeing this recently on another HN post, where they had set up a blanket forwarding rule from their Gmail to another email account. Their Gmail later got dinged but the forwarding rule continued to work.
    • pletnes 6y ago
      I did that years ago. The only downside is that every 2-3 years some email gets stuck in gmail’s spam folder.
  • DavideNL 6y ago
    You don't have to switch overnight, i simply forwarded all my incoming Gmail e-mails to my new account, and then reply to all my Friends (etc.) from my NEW e-mail address. That way they will all, eventually, automagically update me in their address book. It worked very well :)
  • morrbo 6y ago
    Have to respectfully disagree here...we tried protonmail for ages and it wasn't good. Wet feature adding it sounds like you got lucky but we ask for several features over the course of a year - ranging from simple things such as HTML signatures (that they fully support, they just hide the button on their editor) to more enterprisey user management 2fa enforcement style features and it just didn't hold up in the slightest. No features got added and we ended up going back to o365..for a personal email it's ok though but I wouldn't tout them as responsive to feature requests as this wasn't our experience at all. We were a sma the on their visionary package if that makes a difference.
  • ori_b 6y ago
    You can set up forwarding rules and switch gradually. It's pretty much painless.
• ZacharyPitts 6y ago
  I have happily paid for ProtonMail for the past couple of years. I moved all my important email (i.e. anything involving money) off of gmail.
  • cdurth 6y ago
    I as well. Gmail is now my spam account. Very happy with ProtonMail.
  • abnercoimbre 6y ago
    ProtonMail user for years too. And non-tech people who get my e-mail immediately like (and ask about) the protonmail.com domain, which opens up an avenue to discuss privacy and the upside of non-Google products.
• Klonoar 6y ago
  I really wish they'd merge this, or implement it themselves (I wrote it, full disclaimer): https://github.com/ProtonMail/ios-mail/pull/16 https://github.com/ProtonMail/ios-mail/pull/16 As I understand it (and don't quote me on it) they're in the middle of a refactor, so I guess I get it.
• mtnGoat 6y ago
  I used protonmail for a week, but i got tired of waiting hours and days for some emails to arrive. some we so late the verification links were no longer active. ugh, if only proton mail was up to par with Gmail.
  • vorpalhex 6y ago
    I had similar issues early on but have been happy with Protonmail for the last year or so.
• spockz 6y ago
  Is there a provider that lets you send emails from free format users on your domain? With catch all addresses the mail goes into my other@domain account. I use a different email address per site. Now with gmail if I want to reply with that account I first need to create it as an alias. If I want to reply from my phone it even needs to be a full account. Is there any way to fix this? Short of using mutt and write the from header myself?
  • pinkythepig 6y ago
    I can do this with fastmail, though fastmail is a subscription (like $5/month? IIRC, mine auto renews every 2 years so not sure). I have my primary email setup as <firstname>@<lastname>.org. If you set your dns records correctly with them, that allows you to use without any ahead of time setup <randomtag>@<firstname>.<lastname>.org. Setting a different tag where I have <firstname> is can be done too, but you need to set those up individually. replying to emails, I can change <randomtag> to whatever I want. They also offer random domains that you can setup burners under, though that does involve some ahead of time setup.
    • jsmith99 6y ago
      Fastmail lets you create wildcard identities like this so you can send from any username at any domain you have with them, but if you are sending from a third party app you usually still need to set up the sending identity in the app itself, which is annoying. The email programs I've tried haven't let me type arbitrary addresses into the 'from' line. Many programs won't even automatically reply from the same alias the message was received at.
• ravenstine 6y ago
  I think most people are never going to choose ProtonMail, but it can be good for people who like simplicity and consistency. I don't need a million bajillion options, "plugins" or "apps" for my web mail. Just show me my emails, let me load attachments, and I'm good. That's why I pay for ProtonMail instead of Gmail. Well, that and all the other reasons to distrust Google.
• winter_blue 6y ago
  I'm a paying customer (paid for 2 years upfront), and I only found out after paying that ProtonMail has an incredibly poor implementation of 2FA. All it supports is app-based authentication[1]. No support for U2F (FIDO) keys[2]. No support for sending SMS to phones. In comparison, my Google account is protected with: (a) three distinct U2F FIDO keys that are stored safely in different countries, (b) three separate phones for SMS authentication (my phone, dad's pone, mom's phone), (c) lastly there's the authenticator app which I rarely use. This is so much more versatile and reassuring that ProtonMail's extremely-mininal 2FA implementation. Also, ProtonMail has no excuse for not supporting SMS-based 2FA. They can send a SMS to your phone, when you setup a new account -- but for some reason can't do this for 2FA. Despite being a paid service, they trying to save on the SMS charges that SMS-based 2FA would incur? [1] https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/two-factor-authentication/ https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/two-factor-aut... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor
  • spydum 6y ago
    Not sure about the other stuff, but SMS 2FA is generally frowned upon for auth.. though obviously they've decided it's fine for the one time setup just as a verification on signup (not used as 2fa in that case, more like crude proof of identity). U2F has been a challenge for everyone from what I've seen.
• rattray 6y ago
  How does ProtonMail compare to FastMail these days? I see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18008062 from 2018 where the jury seemed to overall favor FastMail.