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What's another good email provider? I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's

What's another good email provider? I am starting to feel really nervous about storing my life in Google. It's not that I wouldn't pay for these things...it's just that I worry one day I'll lose access and fall into the pit of "trying to get Google to help a single human regain access" that sounds horrible.

izacus 6y ago
FastMail / ProtonMail are good. But even they won't just store your mail forever for free.
- jamesfe 6y ago
  I'd pay. But mostly, I'd pay to know the customer service would respond to me. Customer service at Google is like trying to cancel Verizon service - endless transfers.
  - owenmarshall 6y ago
    “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” :) FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level. They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
  - thekyle 6y ago
    If you pay for Google One they have live chat and email support. Usually I think they also have phone support but not currently due to COVID. https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png
- gravitas 6y ago
  I chose FastMail + domain (standard plan, one user) after spending way too long weighing all the provider options this year; so far it's been great for me (email only, files/data went elsewhere). The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02 Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  I had two grandfathered free Fastmail accounts. They got deleted for inactivity [1] when I was at a bad point in life. Never using Fastmail after that. :) [1] https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service-levels/ https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...
eu 6y ago
fastmail.com
DenverCode 6y ago
I recently switched to FastMail and couldn’t be happier.
cbsks 6y ago
I’ve been very happy at Fastmail for the past few years. Their customer support has been quick and very helpful for me. It’s paid so I know that I am a customer and not a product. When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!
- sedatk 6y ago
  FastMail is probably the best among the bunch but it's still worse than GMail: - There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact. - There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop. - Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it. - Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
  - eins1234 6y ago
    > There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact. Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy. Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization. Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
    - nmjenkins 6y ago
      Fastmail has also proxied all images since 2014: https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy-through-image-proxying/ https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy... You can configure images to load always, or just for contacts, or always manually.
ryandrake 6y ago
Backups and self-hosting! These threads keep coming up where [Cloud service] deletes someone's data, bans their account, or otherwise denies service suddenly, and someone always asks "What [other cloud service] should I utterly rely on?" Maybe the answer is to not rely on cloud services to store the only copy of something precious or important to you.
- machinelabo 6y ago
  Any specific packages you recommend for setting up email? I would think there is some docker container I can run in a VM and go about my business.
  - dantle 6y ago
    I've used this for about a year, and it has been stable. Hosted on my home computer. https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    I have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a low spec Linux machine. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid. No experience with containers or docker or any of that stuff, sorry.
0x53 6y ago
Like everyone else is saying: fastmail.com. If you pay for 3 years up front it is like $3 a month.
sergiotapia 6y ago
I wish I could find this company again I saw online. It was a family owned "google photos" that was pay for, specifically and only sold photo storage for securing your family pictures. Dammit! Someone help!
eins1234 6y ago
More important than the current email provider you happen to use is controlling your email _address_, and this means using a domain you control. It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect. If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me. As for the actual email provider, I'm currently using Microsoft's standalone Exchange Online plan, which costs $4 per month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa... No major complaints so far.
- visarga 6y ago
  Yes, you can get a domain, but it would depend on yet another email address, right? And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
  - owenmarshall 6y ago
    It is a best practice to separate your registrar email from a domain you have, yes. Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail. That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me. > And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it. I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back. Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)
  - sneak 6y ago
    I did a writeup recently on just this, and how to deal with it: https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/ https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/
angst_ridden 6y ago
LuxSci is pretty good. They're oriented towards HIPAA-compliant solutions, but they're fine for anyone who doesn't want Google rifling through all their emails (of course, if the other party uses Gmail, you're out of luck either way).
jjuhl 6y ago
"What's another good email provider?" - an alternative is to run your own mail server. I used to do that and the harddrive with all the mail (and a backup copy) is not going away because some company changes policy..
- visarga 6y ago
  No, it's going away because of bad sectors or Flash memory. Or you lose it, or accidentally format it. Or forget to backup. Keeping your data safe is a hard task.
abc-xyz 6y ago
ProtonMail is great - the company also seem like they’re trustworthy and worth supporting. I was particularly impressed by ‘Help us defend democracy and freedom in Hong Kong’(https://protonvpn.com/blog/hongkong/ https://protonvpn.com/blog/hongkong/), a political stance that most other companies were afraid to take.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Hey.com , protonmail, bith are great

izacus 6y ago

FastMail / ProtonMail are good. But even they won't just store your mail forever for free.

jamesfe 6y ago
I'd pay. But mostly, I'd pay to know the customer service would respond to me. Customer service at Google is like trying to cancel Verizon service - endless transfers.
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” :) FWIW I’ve contacted Fastmail’s support once and they were excellent: they helped through a funny DNS issue that was my own doing within an hour of contacting them, and didn’t bat an eye at the question. It was one of the few times I’ve contacted support and thought “this person knows what I’m trying to do, why I messed it up, and how to fix it” at a deep level. They’ve either made great runbooks or hire great people, but the result is the same.
- thekyle 6y ago
  If you pay for Google One they have live chat and email support. Usually I think they also have phone support but not currently due to COVID. https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png https://i.imgur.com/cXeu1HB.png
gravitas 6y ago
I chose FastMail + domain (standard plan, one user) after spending way too long weighing all the provider options this year; so far it's been great for me (email only, files/data went elsewhere). The hardest part is dealing with all the websites who (a) don't let you change your email, (b) require you to contact Support to change your email, or (c) break when you try to change your email. FastMail migrated everything (contacts too) from GMail with one click and set up an IMAP poller against it while you work on the long road to convert. $0.02 Edit: just to cover my bases, a 10-year registration of the domain was < $100 USD at Namesilo.
ValentineC 6y ago
I had two grandfathered free Fastmail accounts. They got deleted for inactivity [1] when I was at a bad point in life. Never using Fastmail after that. :) [1] https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service-levels/ https://fastmail.blog/2012/10/18/changes-to-fastmail-service...

eu 6y ago

fastmail.com

DenverCode 6y ago

I recently switched to FastMail and couldn’t be happier.

cbsks 6y ago

I’ve been very happy at Fastmail for the past few years. Their customer support has been quick and very helpful for me. It’s paid so I know that I am a customer and not a product. When I signed up I just forwarded my old gmail account to it. Now it sounds like I should finally update my email address for all the services still using it!

sedatk 6y ago
FastMail is probably the best among the bunch but it's still worse than GMail: - There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact. - There is no "open mailto: links on FastMail" option on desktop. - Spam filter is too aggressive. I've missed too many legit mails while trying it. - Contact list manager is too barebones. There isn't even a "find and merge duplicates" option.
- eins1234 6y ago
  > There is no "always display images from this contact" option if you don't want to load images automatically. You have to click on "show images" every time you read an emai, even from a trusted contact. Oh man, this is one feature that I've really missed from Gmail, which actually gives you the best of both worlds by proxying external images from their own servers so images can load automatically without compromising privacy. Can't blame a small-time email provider like Fastmail from not offering something like this given the resources it'd likely require, but I'm using Microsoft's "enterprise" solution (Exchange Online) and they really have no excuses other than poor prioritization. Anyone aware of other providers offering this feature?
  - nmjenkins 6y ago
    Fastmail has also proxied all images since 2014: https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy-through-image-proxying/ https://fastmail.blog/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy... You can configure images to load always, or just for contacts, or always manually.

ryandrake 6y ago

Backups and self-hosting! These threads keep coming up where [Cloud service] deletes someone's data, bans their account, or otherwise denies service suddenly, and someone always asks "What [other cloud service] should I utterly rely on?" Maybe the answer is to not rely on cloud services to store the only copy of something precious or important to you.

machinelabo 6y ago
Any specific packages you recommend for setting up email? I would think there is some docker container I can run in a VM and go about my business.
- dantle 6y ago
  I've used this for about a year, and it has been stable. Hosted on my home computer. https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver https://github.com/tomav/docker-mailserver My emails get rejected from @comcast.net but nobody else as far as I can tell. I haven't figured out a good way to debug the issue. As a result, I am not completely off of free Gmail. If you need your emails to be 100% received on the other end, I would recommend paying a hosting provider.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a low spec Linux machine. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid. No experience with containers or docker or any of that stuff, sorry.

0x53 6y ago

Like everyone else is saying: fastmail.com. If you pay for 3 years up front it is like $3 a month.

sergiotapia 6y ago

I wish I could find this company again I saw online. It was a family owned "google photos" that was pay for, specifically and only sold photo storage for securing your family pictures. Dammit! Someone help!

eins1234 6y ago

More important than the current email provider you happen to use is controlling your email _address_, and this means using a domain you control. It enables for a surprisingly pain-free email migration experience as I found out not too long ago, where all you have to do is point the DNS records to the new provider and do an IMAP import from your old email provider, and everything will just work as you'd expect. If I wasn't already sold on the power of federation, that would definitely have sold me. As for the actual email provider, I'm currently using Microsoft's standalone Exchange Online plan, which costs $4 per month: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/exchange/compa... No major complaints so far.

visarga 6y ago
Yes, you can get a domain, but it would depend on yet another email address, right? And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it.
- owenmarshall 6y ago
  It is a best practice to separate your registrar email from a domain you have, yes. Fastmail makes this easy for me: I have an @fastmail.fm email from them that I have only ever provided to my domain registrar and I’ve set my MUA to scream and shout loudly if it ever gets mail. That + using Fastmail for all my domains makes this seamless for me. > And if you ever forget to renew it, you will lose it. I’ve had one gmail account nuked by Our Benevolent Overlord’s AI for no rhyme or reason. At least it was unimportant, but it still happened - and I have zero recourse to get it back. Losing control of my domain or a paid email service? That’s entirely on me ;)
- sneak 6y ago
  I did a writeup recently on just this, and how to deal with it: https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/ https://sneak.berlin/20201029/stop-emailing-like-a-rube/

angst_ridden 6y ago

LuxSci is pretty good. They're oriented towards HIPAA-compliant solutions, but they're fine for anyone who doesn't want Google rifling through all their emails (of course, if the other party uses Gmail, you're out of luck either way).

jjuhl 6y ago

"What's another good email provider?" - an alternative is to run your own mail server. I used to do that and the harddrive with all the mail (and a backup copy) is not going away because some company changes policy..

visarga 6y ago
No, it's going away because of bad sectors or Flash memory. Or you lose it, or accidentally format it. Or forget to backup. Keeping your data safe is a hard task.

abc-xyz 6y ago

ProtonMail is great - the company also seem like they’re trustworthy and worth supporting. I was particularly impressed by ‘Help us defend democracy and freedom in Hong Kong’(https://protonvpn.com/blog/hongkong/ https://protonvpn.com/blog/hongkong/), a political stance that most other companies were afraid to take.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Hey.com , protonmail, bith are great