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coincidentally (but unrelated), what is this crowd's current mail hosting recommendation? it has consistently been fastmail in the past, and i have had a great
by 5- 5y ago
coincidentally (but unrelated), what is this crowd's current mail hosting recommendation?
it has consistently been fastmail in the past, and i have had a great time with them over the last three years, but it's always nice to know what else is out there.
for better or worse i've also come to use fastmail for dns management (tolerable) and even for http hosting (awful, but occasionally convenient).
- diebeforei485 5y agoI still recommend Fastmail if you're using it to replace your primary email. If you just need to receive and send occasional email at your domain however, iCloud+ may be sufficient and you may already be paying for it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- crocodiletears 5y agoFastmail's been great for me, I love it. Unless I can find a similar premium domestic (US) offering that's near feature parity, and not a trillion dollar megacorp, I couldn't imagine leaving them.
- Skunkleton 5y agoFastmail has been my choice for some time now.
- ryantgtg 5y agoMe too. I came from posteo. The fastmail app is pretty great. This is the first downtime I’ve noticed in the last four years.
- atonse 5y agoNowadays it feels like the kind of thing CloudFlare would launch as it’s right up their alley. And seems appropriate if FastMail is having DDoS issues.
- Thorentis 5y agoHistory really does repeat itself. It won't be long before Cloudflare provides email, a search engine, cloud hosting, DNS, etc. and before you know it, we have another Google! I would much prefer multiple smaller companies that do one thing well, than a monolith that, even assuming they did everything well, has complete control over our digital lives.
- loriverkutya 5y agoCloudflare is not an ad company, Google is.
- Shared404 5y agoI'm not a fan of Cloudflare increasing centralization, but I'd take a Google-sized Cloudflare and Cloudflare-sized Google over our curre t situation any day.
- tbyehl 5y agoCloudFlare is not an ad company, yet.
- donarb 5y agoCloudFlare doesn't need to be an ad company, they have plenty of paying customers.
- blitzar 5y agoWith great control of the internet comes great advertising revenue.
- true_religion 5y agoThey could just be an ISP. They can take money, provide services, and be regulated like a utility.
- intunderflow 5y agoI've been using https://purelymail.com/ https://purelymail.com/ for a few months now and found them to be excellent
- brewdad 5y agoAgreed. I switched the last time they were mentioned on here. I haven't had any issues and migrating was relatively painless. I still need a shared calendar solution that passes the wife test. For now, we've kept our family calendar on Gooole.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ekovarski 5y agoAny deliverability issues? Spoke to someone who switched and said that his sent emails were ending up in Spam initially for others - could even be related to other servers but that it eventually mitigated itself and he is quite happy with the service.
- portaltonowhere 5y agoAny concerns about it being, seemingly, a one-person show? See https://purelymail.com/about https://purelymail.com/about
- intunderflow 5y agoAs my mail client just downloads my email and I use my own domain, PurelyMail is strictly for delivering and receiving as well as having a nice webmail, for me the answers to this question they posted at https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus are sufficient to deal with my concern for now
- portaltonowhere 5y agoAh thanks. Missed that.
- throwawayboise 5y agoI'm thinking of trying to stand up my own server on my own domain and see if I can get a good deliverability established. It may not have better uptime than Fastmail or Gmail but it's also very unlikely to ever come under focused attack. There's a certain resiliency in having a lot of small entities doing the same thing, compared to a handful of gargantuan ones that can take down huge user populations in an instant.
- zrail 5y agoYou could also stand up a receiving server and then relay outbound through something like Postmark. Deliverability is the hardest part, it's worth it to farm it out.
- ekovarski 5y ago^^^ This 100%. It's relatively easy these days to run a mail server, inbound even has a level of resilience that serves most people. It's being delivered into the inbox that is an issue. You can eventually get there with a good IP and time but it's best to farm it out - plenty of services out there for it.
- chrisweekly 5y agoI think deliverability is going to be a bigger challenge than uptime; good luck!
- nobody9999 5y ago>I'm thinking of trying to stand up my own server on my own domain and see if I can get a good deliverability established. I've been doing that for decades. I had some deliverability issues back in the early aughts, but I haven't had issues for many years. Over the past decade or so, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and not running an open relay (not that I ever did that) has kept deliverability very good for me. That said, none of the IP addresses I've used are on consumer ISP ranges. That may have an impact too.
- terkel 5y agohttps://www.migadu.com https://www.migadu.com for sure. I tried both Protonmail and fastmail and Migadu is def the my favorite
- lrae 5y agoThe PRO/CON page [0] says they don't have 2FA yet, is that still true? And anything else you'd mention as a con? I'm trying to remember why I didn't put them on my short list, maybe it was the 2FA thing, but I think there was something else. 0: https://www.migadu.com/procon/ https://www.migadu.com/procon/
- worg 5y ago2FA works in migadu now (using TOTP) not affiliated in any way, just happy customer
- jdlshore 5y agoI’m very happy with FastMail, despite the recent problems.
- bingohbangoh 5y agoI will second this
- Fwirt 5y agoI've been using https://mailfence.com/ https://mailfence.com/ for a couple years, only one outage I can remember and the one time I had to contact support they resolved my issue very quickly.
- stilisstuk 5y agoMe too. This is my third year with them I think. I believe there has been three downs. The worst was for almost a day IIRC. I like mailfence for several reasons. Quick, at personal support is one important factor. However I do think it would suit any provider if they publicized an annotated downtown log, so that we didn't have to guess how often or why they had issues.
- rhblake 5y agoSwitched from Gmail to Fastmail in 2008. No regrets. Haven't considered anything else since (and didn't notice these recent problems I now read about). Email hosting is something I'd want to change very rarely. Track record counts for a lot; good-AND-profitable email hosting is tough, and I generally wouldn't trust any entity [in this space] that's been around for <5 years. Fastmail's been at it for 20+ years now, and I'm reasonably sure I don't have to worry about changing anything for at least another 5-10 years.
- astral303 5y agoYou really can’t beat Fastmail. No other provider comes close from when I researched a few years ago.
- mixedCase 5y agoYandex gives me storage, reliability, custom domains and government spying for free. How can Fastmail compete when it charges for the same things? They don't even have custom domains on their cheaper plan.
- nobody9999 5y ago>coincidentally (but unrelated), what is this crowd's current mail hosting recommendation? I had been using my ISP's email for imap connectivity from my home and phone. They are getting out of the business of supplying the circuit I have with them and am now moving away from that ISP. I chose to host my own email (I already owned my own domains and hosted my own MTA for those domains) on a local imap server. Heck, I even host my own authoritative DNS zones. While there are single point of failure modes with that, nothing I do with my personal domains would kill me if my (multiple) ISP links are down for a few days. Not the solution for everyone, but it works for me.
- throwaway81523 5y agoFastmail is on the expensive side by my standards, and has occasional service interruptions like this, but I'm basically happy with them and would go with them again. A much cheaper option is mxroute.com (watch for a black friday promo) but that is more DIY and is a smaller operation. In all cases, if you want a long term email address, use your own domain (doing that costs extra in Fastmail's case) rather than one belonging to the host. That lets you switch hosts if something makes you want to do that.
- astral303 5y agoFastmail is a bargain for me. I’d pay $40/mo for super high quality email.
- throwaway81523 5y agoIf you want to use your own domain it's $50. I'm disappointed that they stopped the $10/y plan, since I had a standing offer to give those away to friends and family in order to get them off of gmail/yahoo mail (I'd pay the first year and renewals would be up to the recipient). The current plans are a bit too expensive for that, and more than most non-cognoscenti would be willing to pay renewals for.
- Amfy 5y agoyeah it'd be nice if they offered cheaper plans (possibly with less features)
- throwaway81523 5y agoThey had that ($10/year, one address, fairly small storage limit) but they eliminated it a few years ago. That disappointed me.
- TheSmiddy 5y agoThe thing about most SaaS companies is a majority of your support calls come from your lowest tier customers. In a service like email where a huge number of problems are a mystery due to other mail servers possibly mishandling email Fastmail have probably added up the numbers and realised that dropping the cheapest plans results in significantly less support costs.
- folmar 5y agoHost your own or tutanota if else.
- usr1106 5y agomailbox.org left a good impression. Linux people who seem to know what they are doing. Hosted in Germany, you are not required to tell them any contact information (not sure how they could trace you via the payments). I have not really used them, although I have their cheapest account hanging around. Not able to make a recommendation, but maybe someone else can comment.
- CallMeMarc 5y agoBeen using them for nearly two years now. I’m on the 2,50€ plan, which I think is now legacy and was upped to 3€, because that’s the cheapest plan which supports own domains. They offer a bunch of extra stuff like cloud, video conferencing, calendar etc. but I’ve never touched it. In my opinion the interface is terrible and the settings are not so user friendly, in the settings menu is a kinda sub-settings menu which seems to be embedded from a subsystem…? But if you’ve got everything setup and provided you’re using your own email client, the service is top notch. Never had a problem, maintenance and stuff like this was always communicated clearly and early. They split the parent company behind mailbox.org into its own one and even this one was very nice communicated. I’d love to try providers like Purelymail because I think 30€ per year for my few mails is a bit overkill but the money is well spent on people knowing what they are doing and most important, the servers are all hosted in Germany. YMMV but I’m happy with them and would definitely recommend them!
- crossroadsguy 5y agoI wish they had an app or an app that would make catch-all feature more usable. Ability to reply from any random email I had used as long as it's on my domain. For basics they are fine. Their cheapest plan is not the old cheapest. They added some new plans and now on cheapest plan there's literally no support (not even email or ticket) and many features simply cut off - no personal domain either. IMHO one must not consider a paid email provider if it doesn't support custom domain, no matter how cheap that plan is. UX is pathetic and there's no sign of that being fixed.
- Amfy 5y agoMXRoute
- dangoor 5y agoI still quite like Fastmail. I'm also looking forward to getting the convenient new masked email addresses once 1Password 8 is stable (you can create them now in Fastmail's UI, but it'll be a lot easier with the browser extension)