14 ms·

Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

351 points by giuliomagnifico 1y ago

dustinfarris 1y ago
how is this different from using PGP with Gmail?
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  As far as I know, Gmail doesn’t allow saving PGP keys or using them to write new emails, whereas mailbox.org integrates the entire PGP service and to send an email, even from iOS where PGP apps are "ugly," you just need to do it from the web interface. Anyway I wrote the details in the post. Edit: I have to mention that I generated my PGP keys locally and then imported to Mailbox.Org
  - immibis 1y ago
    Note that when you let a provider do PGP for you, you're not safe from that provider. It's one of the big problems with PGP: you can have usability or security but not both.
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    Do gmail prevents you from using a regular MTA these days?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- buran77 1y ago
  You're doing it without Gmail.
pyed 1y ago
[dead]
roscas 1y ago
Congrats for the move. "Away from Gmail" is by itself a happy title. The report is also very good and that should be a service every other mail service could provide to people who want to move away from G'rab'mail. Another curiosity is that you use the same password I use for everything: xxx Simple to remember and nobody will ever figure that out! Wink! :)
stkai 1y ago
One thing I'd recommend is getting your own domain for email (looks like mailbox.org allows custom domains with some plans). You never know what will happen to your email provider in the future, so having the freedom to move your domain to a different provider is valuable.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  Yes, thanks. I already have my custom email domain, but this mailbox address is for everyday use, while I use my personal domain for private matters.
- AshLeece 1y ago
  This. This 100%. I hosted my own email for a good few years and decided to migrate it to icloud using the custom domain. A few mins of copying IMAP over and waiting for the DNS to propagate and it was like nothing happened!
- octo888 1y ago
  It comes with responsibility too. Renewing your domain, keeping your registrar account safe, keeping your DNS records safe etc Some people prefer a domain registrar that allows 10 year renewals so pick carefully as not all do
  - alchemist1e9 1y ago
    It does and I’ve been hoping to see more discussion around best registrars from a domain security perspective. I looked into CSC (cscglobal.com) since it’s what a lot of big companies use, but it’s crazy expensive ($5K+/yr). Even worse, their contract is wild: no guarantee of registration/renewal, all fees non-refundable, they can hike prices anytime, liability capped at $5K, DNS is “as-is” with only credits for outages, and they can unmask WHOIS privacy at will. Basically you pay enterprise prices while they disclaim almost all responsibility.
- benhurmarcel 1y ago
  I’ve been using myname.com for email for a long time, but to be honest sometimes I wish I hadn’t. It sounds weird and kinda braggy to give in person. Maybe I need to buy a domain that sounds like a generic email host.
mantra2 1y ago
I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google about 5 years ago, so I decided to take the leap to Fastmail and haven’t looked back. Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there. Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win privacy-wise. I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  This solves the "dependence on Gmail" problem (which is definitely a worthy problem to solve) but not the general "dependence on a particular mail provider" problem. The next step in this walk-down-the-risk-chain is self-hosting on a VPS, where you're now just dependent on your VPS provider, and the next step could be self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP. Happy trails!
  - mantra2 1y ago
    What bothered me about Gmail was that it was central to my life and if something were to happen and they locked my account they have zero support. With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.
    - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
      I'm on fastmail with an xyz.dev domain and keep a gmail for legacy purposes. Unfortunately some email validators will reject my short FM address.
      - qingcharles 1y ago
        Right. Everyone has to keep a Gmail address as backup because of all these edge cases. For one, some domains (like yours) are just rejected. I tried to register an account with a huge corporate SMTP provider recently but they've not updated their allowed gTLD in 10 years and their devs fought me for weeks telling me it was my domain that was wrong, not their system until they finally gave in. And secondly, many sites, like Reddit, use a Gmail address as some sort of signal of quality. You can avoid a lot of new account bans on Reddit simply by registering with a Gmail instead of your own domain.
dsissitka 1y ago
Something to be aware of if you're considering mailbox.org: https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-custom-domains-spf-dkim-dmarc#comment-1450 https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
- sandreas 1y ago
  Oh, thank you. I recently considered moving from posteo.de to mailbox.org, but I think I won't anymore regarding such an issue took so long to even be considered as a problem and as I understand is still not solved.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  Oh, thank you. I didn't know that. Anyway, I'm not using a custom domain on mailbox, I use my custom mail domain with another service.
  - spapas82 1y ago
    Unfortunately this is common in many smtp servers and is configuration dependent: After you authenticate as usera@example.com you can send emails as userb@example.com.
- matteocontrini 1y ago
  Another thing is that they appear to have some spam scanning on outbound emails and when they detect something suspicious they simply drop the email silently, and nobody will ever know about it.
  - sumuyuda 1y ago
    You can turn this off in the settings and the spam will go in a Junk folder. https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/customizing-your-mailbox-org-spam-filter-settings/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/customizing...
    - 1y ago
_mlbt 1y ago
I wish there was something like cell phone number porting for email addresses. I don’t know how it would work on the technical side or how you could secure something like that, but the idea of switching email providers is too daunting, so I stay with Gmail despite abandoning all my other Google accounts and services.
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  It exists: just port your domain name to a new registrar, and/or point your mx records to a new email provider. Phone number is just a user number. Email addresses are a user name at a server name. A little harder to do if you're looking for something as ubiquitous as phone number porting. The closest thing to a server name when it comes to phone numbers, would be the network it is on. For example, there is the public switched telephone network (PSTN), then there is the Defense Switched Network (DSN)
  - _mlbt 1y ago
    The problem is that I would still need to "port out" my email address manually to a new domain name. It's not an exaggeration to say that there are probably over a hundred places I would need to make that change.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      What's the problem? Do it during a slow day when you're bored. Doesn't take a lot of time or effort. Keep the old e-mail around for any strays that you forgot.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  You kinda get that with your own domain. I think that's the best you are going to get
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Isn't losing your domain a huge risk for any common user?
colesantiago 1y ago
How do I get my family to move off of Gmail? I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works. How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Maybe because when normal people hear you say "Google spies on you" they think you are a crank. Perhaps try to reduce it to a statement that conveys valid information.
- bsoles 1y ago
  I did it by moving to the Proton ecosystem: Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Pass, with the added bonus of Proton VPN. As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).
- selkin 1y ago
  If they don't care, why should you? They found a deal that seems to be ok for them. To get them to change providers, you need to suggest one that would be a better value, and to be honest, I don't think you can find one.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  If they don't care there is no problem for them to solve. Stop sending mail to them and bounce mails from gmail.
mbirth 1y ago
I left a week ago and went for disroot.org . But this is only my backup email address. My main is via my web hoster and a custom domain.
raffraffraff 1y ago
I moved myself and my wife's business away from Google, but that hasn't been without it's issues. Even though we're using a globally recognised mail provider and have DKIM, SPF etc all set up perfectly, we get bounced or delayed by certain mail admins. There are also occasional delays and issues. One thing I'll say about Gmail is that it's extremely reliable.
- RandomBacon 1y ago
  What provider? Running an online forum, I've encountered people using Atomic Mail, and that service has terrible reliability.
  - raffraffraff 1y ago
    Namecheap's "private email" service.
    - jesterson 1y ago
      that’s “globally recognised”? Run from them as fast as possible if you would any of your services to work
      - raffraffraff 1y ago
        Well obviously yes, namecheap have been around a very long time and after GoDaddy (the default in the early 2000s for most people) Namecheap became a kind of default. One would think that a company with an online presence going back over two decades, and one a relatively low number of domain registrars, is "globally recognised". Whether they're "good" or even "passable" is another matter entirely, but without switching away from Google to Namecheap for a few months, one wouldn't have much of an idea. And now I know. How many really decent email providers are there aside from Google? What's today's obvious choice? And will they last?
        jesterson 1y ago
indigodaddy 1y ago
Anyone considering a move should also look at NameCrane/CraneMail by the crew behind BuyVM. Solid service, incredibly reasonable prices, great community/discord. They are always looking to improve, extremely proactive and reactive to customer feedback and issues. No builtin PGP, but I believe that is out of their control as they use SmarterMail on the backend.
- AnonC 1y ago
  I hadn’t heard of this and looked for it. How is Cranemail so cheap? I’m really surprised but also concerned that one can get 100 GB of space with unlimited mailboxes and aliases (with just a sending limit) for $10 a year (which gets even cheaper when paying for multiple years or lifetime).
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Not sure, but you could ask @Francisco here [1]. He might respond. He’s been around a very long time— certainly not fly by night, as I can understand thinking that at the price value. [1] https://discord.gg/E8myb2AD https://discord.gg/E8myb2AD
- prmoustache 1y ago
  I would run away from any service that forces me to use discord fr support.
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Take it easy. It's not their official support channel. They have tickets like everyone else, with the added bonus that you can nudge them in their chat. You can take advantage of it or not, no forcing involved. The discord is more about community than a support channel. In fact they will usually ask you to open a ticket if you haven't already for direct support issues that don't look to be a general/shared issue.
    - monkeywork 1y ago
x0x0 1y ago
I'm going to plug fastmail. Rationale: (1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times. (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail; (3) They have continued actively developing their UI, with nice updates released perhaps in the last 6 weeks. (4) keyboard shortcuts that work (5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine. (6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.
- johnplatte 1y ago
  Came here to say this. I've been with Fastmail a similar length of time and it just keeps getting better.
- commandersaki 1y ago
  (1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times. Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap. (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day. (5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine. Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP. Here's my (7): Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.
- internet_points 1y ago
  > (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail; I'd say it's better (maybe gmail has features it doesn't, but fastmail does everything I need and loads much much faster than gmail)
NoboruWataya 1y ago
I have been using mailbox.org for a few years and no complaints. I don't think the web UI is amazing but I use it via Thunderbird so it doesn't affect me. If you use your own email client and your own domain name, you don't really need to worry about UI with email providers at all (as long as your provider supports those features). And your own domain name makes it easy to move around in future if you need to. I don't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.
- guerrilla 1y ago
  It doesn't sound like they do on-disk encryption like ProtonMail. Is that right?
  - giuliomagnifico 1y ago
    Mailbox doesn’t support it, but on mailbox you can use your IMAP app with Proton not. And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed. It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.
    - guerrilla 1y ago
      I use IMAP with Proton. Thunderbird is my main mail client. You just need to install the bridge.
      - giuliomagnifico 1y ago
        Yes but only if you install the bridge as I wrote in my blog post, and on iOS iPadOS? You can’t use Apple Mail app.
        1y ago
luizfelberti 1y ago
For those looking to break free and are considering self-hosting, I can strongly recommend Stalwart. I'm surprised how almost no one seems to have heard of it, but it's amazing (and supports JMAP!)
- dcreater 1y ago
  I've wanted to self host but I've heard that there's high probability of getting blocked/marked as spam?
  - adlpz 1y ago
    Anyone has tried self hosting the server but sending through a third party like Amazon SES?
selkin 1y ago
> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms. > So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail). Ok, so now you have two problems.
- partomniscient 1y ago
  But we haven't started using regular expressions yet...!? I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time. If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out. Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?) Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is). Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with. Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.
smarx007 1y ago
Gotta put in a plug for Migadu: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ Happy customer over a couple of years.
- packetlost 1y ago
  I've been using Migadu for a low-moderate throughput inbox (within their micro tier limits) in the US and the IMAP4 performance is kinda awful sometimes. I'm not sure why :(
- internetter 1y ago
  Ended up dropping migadu. Lots of things I liked like the configuration but it was fairly expensive for what you got. After 3 years of paying, I once went over my outbound quota and couldn't send email for the day.
- mbrndtgn 1y ago
  Migadu is fantastic if you can live with their daily limits.
- josephb 1y ago
  Tried them with a domain that gets a bunch of spam, unfortunately their filtering is not as good as others like Fastmail it seems.
samuell 1y ago
I thought protonmail was the go-to for de-googling.
ellisd 1y ago
Anyone using a half-Gmail / half-personal IMAP server to handle the reality that keeping 20+ years or email in Gmail will bump into the storage quota? I'm around 99.5% usage and just slowly deleting ancient emails with large attachments to make it another month. Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance headache? I've never operated it before and am curious.
- TranquilMarmot 1y ago
  I also ran into the Google storage quota after 20+ years of gmail + drive + photos. I ended up paying for Google One at $4/mo just to make it long enough to move all of data somewhere else.
- mbirth 1y ago
  I’ve got Dovecot running in a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi. Moved everything over using Thunderbird. If you use mbox format, once done, you can turn the files read-only and Dovecot will still work. And you can throw a Solr server into the mix to get fast mail searches.
AnonC 1y ago
> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption ProtonMail and Tutanota offer end-to-end encryption only when both the sender and recipient are using the same (i.e., ProtonMail->ProtonMail or Tutanota->Tutanota). If you’re emailing someone outside those or if you’re receiving emails from someone outside those, and you want encryption, you’d have to go to PGP (with its own complexities).
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  That's why I find their mandatory requirement of exposing their hosted emails only to their clients is such a bizarre take (if not pure bs). I mean for god's sake just let me use IMAP/POP3. You give me encryption at rest, safety and privacy in transit, and do not sell my data. You also offer to let me put up my GPG key on your admin portal so that I can easily read e2ee mails in your webmail. Thank you, all that is very nice. Now get out of my way and do not try/pretend to be Signal and email at the same time.
TranquilMarmot 1y ago
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus. I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether. For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas. For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage. Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years. My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship! YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.
- floren 1y ago
  I've taken steps to degoogle too, but like you I've rather stuck on Android because over the years I've ossified a set of tools I like (KeepassDX and Syncthing are really important, and Firefox on Android is actually damn good).
  - pluc 1y ago
    GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps
    - 1y ago
throwzasdf 1y ago
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mrbluecoat 1y ago
https://porkbun.com/products/email https://porkbun.com/products/email is similarly priced
maksimur 1y ago
How do you deal with emails bouncing or going to spam? I have been looking to move away from Gmail but last I read it was the only reliable option out there.
- floren 1y ago
  You should be fine on the big providers. There's a weird horseshoe situation where anti-Google doomposting looks a lot like pro-Google FUD that I think leads people to believe only Google and maybe Microsoft are capable of sending mail any more. Something like mailbox.org should be fine. Even a carefully-chosen VPS running your own email server should be fine (works for me, no delivery problems in ~2 years)
  - selkin 1y ago
    Tell me you haven't run a large email server without telling me. There's a reason even large corporates that can easily afford the resources to run email their email themselves decide against it. There are a handful of good providers, not just Google and Microsoft, but the two hyperscalers do have very good offerings, so of course they have a lot of the market.
    - floren 1y ago
      You're right, I run a small email server. I told you.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
GTP 1y ago
The problem with changing email provider due to privacy concerns, is that most of your emails will still end up inside Google's or Microsoft's servers. I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services. But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.
- selkin 1y ago
  Even when they don't, it doesn't matter. Email wasn't designed for privacy or security, and can't accommodate those. Lucky for us, we now have much better tools for those use cases, so we don't need to clumsily try and fail to ducktape those use cases to email.
- mcdonje 1y ago
  This kind of thinking helps to perpetuate the situation.
Telaneo 1y ago
I've been pretty happy with Mailbox.org. The web interface isn't great compared to Gmail, but I prefer Thunderbird anyway for normal usage. They used to have a weird 2FA setup, but they've since switched to the same kind everybody else use, thankfully. Microsoft's been a bit annoying, since some emails I've sent to @hotmail.com domains go to spam, but at least they do arrive and aren't just bounced, as I've heard from some horror stories. Sending to @gmail.com accounts seems to work perfectly though. I don't send a lot of outgoing mail from my personal account anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Some mails seem to take longer to arrive, but I had that problem on Gmail too, so I don't think there's anything actually wrong per se.
- cnkk 1y ago
  I’d say their new 2FA setup is still weird. Not properly documented, and enabling broke all my devices. ActiveSync for example is not working (even with app/device specific passwords)
mixedmath 1y ago
> This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free. > > The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. Interestingly, one of my biggest problems with Gmail is that they don't allow actual plaintext. I used to routinely collaborate with developers who were vision-impaired, and the official Gmail phone app wouldn't let me send them plaintext email. Instead, it was some sort of HTML thing. Unfortunately, we sometimes sent code snippets to each other over email, and though admittedly it looked more or less fine, Gmail changed the underlying representation enough that my collaborators' screen readers would mess up on the parsing. This led to me leaving Gmail on my phone, which led ultimately to me leaving Gmail entirely.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  I think you use the term "plain text" differently from the author of the post. I think they refer to the fact that there is no end to end encryption. Google has access to the clear text of all messages and can index/analyze them.
  - MobiusHorizons 1y ago
    The article does call out plain text email without formatting or attachments. Plain text typically refers to visual formatting, while clear text refers to lack of encryption.
- Sniffnoy 1y ago
  That sounds like a problem with the Gmail webmail client -- I don't think Gmail does that when used over IMAP with an external client?
  - arccy 1y ago
    the web client can send plain text, it's only the mobile client that doesn't have an option to do so
    - 1y ago
charles_f 1y ago
> To send encrypted emails, you just select “Use PGP encrypted” when composing a new message, after importing your private key, of course. I love the concept of PGP and how well it seems to be integrated. I also don't know a single person who uses it or a provider/software capable of decrypting it. I think that's the biggest issue with PGP. Short of asking someone directly, you don't know if they'd be able to receive a PGP encrypted email, so you wont send one.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  Yes it’s very easy to use on mailbox, well I use pgp encryption with some friend and on Kraken (the crypto exchange)
- spapas82 1y ago
  The whole point of PGP is to actually communicate (out of band) with the party you want to sent mail to and receive his public key. It's no big deal if you really need to send a private message.
- hellojesus 1y ago
  If you own your own domain as many are suggesting, it's super easy to share your key. Simply publish it and share the link in your email signature.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
I'd really like to just run my own Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin stack, but it seems totally discouraged these days just on the basis of email sender reputation.
- 9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
  It's not as bad as some make it out to be. Check out Stalwart, as it is much easier for a newcomer to mail hosting to manage.
  - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    Thanks! I'll check it out.
- immibis 1y ago
  Just do it. You're allowed to have more than one address. You can keep using Gmail for important things while you experiment with your own server.
  - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    Might as well, right?
litmus-pit-git 1y ago
And I will be leaving Mailbox.org for Runbox, or Purelymail, or Fastmail. I have a few more months' credit remaining on Mailbox, besides I am yet to try the trials. (This is for the author and anyone else) If you are looking for responsive (or even barely responsive) and responsible support responses whenever you need it, weigh your options very carefully about which mail host you want to move to. You might need it once or twice a year, but that might be crucial. Edit: And if you can help it, and have your own domain, never use a mail host's domain-based email address (no matter how catchy and short that is) because it will be a headache switching away from it if you want to change your host.
- palata 1y ago
  Have you considered Migadu? I don't have shares there, just a very happy customer :-).
  - litmus-pit-git 1y ago
    I did. Their 20 out/day (soft limit) had me concerned. While many weeks I might send less than 7 emails I still feel uncomfortable with those limits.
    - palata 1y ago
      As you said, those are soft limits, i.e. there is a human on the other side. If they feel like you use more than you should, they will talk to you instead of kicking you out.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  Fastmail's base plan is excessive for me (60GB of storage) and costs twice as much as Mailbox, plus it's not an EU service.
  - litmus-pit-git 1y ago
    It is for me as well. It's an obscene plan. They should have plans for us normal humans :) But having burnt my fingers couple of times I need to be with a provider who has some sort of "real" and responsive support (and accountable) and that costs money so there's that. For me EU is not a condition, neither is e2ee (as long as it's E at Rest), but I understand it might be for others. I hope mailbox is good for you and unless you need some support it will good. There were no outages or any general things breaking during my usage of many years. Good luck.
erikqu 1y ago
what about https://0.email https://0.email
- sunshinekitty 1y ago
  this is just a wrapper around gmail
rendleflag 1y ago
I’ve been a Fastmail user for years, having left Gmail. It works great and have nothing be but praise for them. I use my own domain with them so if I decide to leave it’s not an issue worrying about updating people with my new email.
- palata 1y ago
  I was really happy with Fastmail as well. Before that I used ProtonMail, which was annoying because it forced me to install their bridge and use their encryption stuff. After Fastmail I went to Migadu, and it's absolutely great. I have never seen support requests getting answers that quickly :-).
  - tamimio 1y ago
    I don’t see masked email feature in Migadu, is there one? Useful for burner services
    - kenmacd 1y ago
      I use identities for this: https://migadu.com/guides/identities/ https://migadu.com/guides/identities/ I can send as the address, and emails arrive in my normal mailbox. I also use them for giving self-hosted services their own address/password to email me.
      - litmus-pit-git 1y ago
        How's migadu's email ip reputation? Also do you have to create these identities in that admin panel to use or you can use it on the go like duck.com or Apple's hide my email?
        kenmacd 1y ago
        Not sure on the reputation, but I personally haven't had any issues emailing people using gmail or microsoft. They have a good DNS Diagnostics page that checks all your domains DKIM/SPF/DMARC settings. I've been using identities created in the admin panel, but they do have subdomain addresses where everything to *@user.domain goes to user@domain, and you can configure a 'Catchall' address (and of course 'plus addresses'). I haven't used either though.
palata 1y ago
> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption This is not quite right. The only offer e2ee if you send an email to someone on the same provider (e.g. ProtonMail to ProtonMail). If you write to someone using Gmail, it's not e2ee. IMHO this kind of e2ee is interesting for companies (because every employee is on the same provider, and it's better to have the internal communications on ProtonMail than shared with Google on Gmail), but for a personal email it doesn't matter so much. What's really important is to have a custom domain so that you are not stuck with one provider.
- cptskippy 1y ago
  Custom domains make it really simple to move around. I was able to move from Gmail to ProtonMail on a Sunday afternoon without anyone knowing that I'd made a change.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  That's correct, I meant that you have to always use their app, whether to use e2ee or not. There is no IMAP. Mailbox also offers e2ee via browser among the same mailbox users, but it also has IMAP and PGP.
cptskippy 1y ago
I moved my domain to ProtonMail at the start of the year and my only real challenge is shared calendars. Does anyone have a suggested solution that allows multiple people to share and manage a calendars that isn't Google Calendar or locked to a particular platform (Apple).
asteinbr 1y ago
I’m going back to Gmail from mailbox. The spam protection from mailbox is very poor. Been there since many years.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  But there are the filter lists! You can customize the spam filters. Anyway maybe I’ll find these issue in the future, for now it’s all fgood with spam (I don’t see any spam email)
TriangleEdge 1y ago
I use both mailbox and gmail. For people that are considering switching, some websites don't accept the mailbox domain, so be ready for that. Otherwise the service works great.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  I've never encountered this issue so far, and I've already changed my email on almost all commercial services. But thanks for reporting! I'll use Gmail with forwarding if I encounter this issue
- marc_abonce 1y ago
  In over 6 years of using Mailbox, I only remember one website that rejected the domain. It's a government website and they only started rejecting "invalid" (non-duopoly) domains sometime this year. I do occasionally get emails that take longer to arrive into my inbox (between 5 minutes up to 1 hour), but the emails always arrive eventually. Or maybe I haven't noticed... Do you remember which websites rejected your Mailbox address?
  - paulrudy 1y ago
    I've been on mailbox for 6 years and I think the only issue I've had with rejections has been the email confirmation from some Discourse-based forums. But after I contacted the hosts and was added manually, the forums' emails made it through with no issue
nelblu 1y ago
Another happy mailbox.org user here who dumped gmail since a little over 4 years now. I'd highly recommend them to anyone who prefers more control on the client app they can use to access emails, calendars etc. Their web interface may not be the best/fastest, but their video conferencing web app is really good. I rarely use their office suite, but good to know it exists.
prima-facie 1y ago
Zoho Mail is very good, priced well, and available in multiple zones- EU/US/etc.
- Hobadee 1y ago
  Came here to say this. I moved my family (and our family domain) into Zoho and love it. It also has better features than Google in many areas. (coughre-ordering filterscough)
- mxuribe 1y ago
  Same here! Quite low prices, has been stable, and i use my personal domain (for my family)...and can't complain.
- cyanghxst 1y ago
  Same here. I’m on Zoho’s Mail Lite plan with my own domain. 19 CAD/year for 10 GB and 30 aliases. Couldn’t be happier.
tgma 1y ago
I don't understand the logic. I mean if you hate Google, or you specifically want to avoid Google having your data sure, but whichever email provider you choose will have at some point access to your plaintext email and they may choose to store it. There's no such thing as real end-to-end encrypted email unless the sender actively does so or you run the server yourself (and be online to do the TLS handshake when someone connects to your domain's MX address). Another concern about anything social is that there are at least two sides in a conversation and whoever leaks the data to a third party will compromise privacy of all so it is really hard to prevent your email from getting to Gmail servers one way or another.
- arunc 1y ago
  Can't agree more! I've analyzed my urges to migrate in the past decade or so and I've ended up staying with GMail for exactly these reasons.
- blueredmodern 1y ago
  [dead]
- Vaslo 1y ago
  If my wife and I both use Proton, or I correspond with a bank or company that doesn’t use a Google product, how would that possibly get into Google’s hands? You way oversimplified the possibilities here.
  - tgma 1y ago
    Of course there has been also PGP since the dawn of time. They all fall under unless the sender actively does so that I explicitly mentioned. I can send you PGP encrypted email you could have used Gmail or Proton or whatever. It is about what the sender does not what service you choose. (If you and your wife are both using Proton, that probably does not have anything to do with SMTP; it would be like calling iMessage "SMS".)
gkmcd 1y ago
I did the same thing some years ago. I chose purelymail[0] as the MX for my personal domain and would recommend. The only issue is that it's so cheap, and my credit lasts so long, I forget that it is in fact a paid service and that I do actually need to make a payment from time to time... [0]https://purelymail.com/ https://purelymail.com/
- everybodyknows 1y ago
  How do you like the RoundCube webmail UI?
stevage 1y ago
> starting at €2.50/month (paid annually) > I had no issues with paying the equivalent of two coffees a month Where can you get coffee for €1.25?!
- arccy 1y ago
  Italy I think
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  In Italy =] the price is about 1.30 to 1.40€. And I’m in northern Italy, in the south you can find it for ~1€.
  - stevage 1y ago
    wow, amazing. I feel like it was a pretty similar price (.90?) when I visited in 2006.
123sereusername 1y ago
[dead]
the_arun 1y ago
If others can do, I wonder why can’t Google provide encryption at rest with keys managed by users? May be for small a fee?
- max_ 1y ago
  Large Corporations think very slow. Currently the are distracted by AI gimmicks.
eviks 1y ago
> Let me start by saying: I use email in a very basic way. I send and receive a lot of messages (at least 50 a day), but they’re plain text/html emails with no attachments or fancy features. Why not shift to properly encrypted chat apps without all that single permanent pgp key nonsense that doesn't fit on a page?
8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y ago
mailbox.org recycles @mailbox.org addresses after a period. 90 days for the cheapest Light plan [1]. After that, someone else can register your old address. If your subscription lapses, your email account is closed after 30 days, data is deleted after another 30 days [2]. [1]: https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/when-is-a-deleted-address-available-again/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/when-is-a-... [2]: https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/payment-article/what-happens-at-the-end-of-my-contract/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/payment-article/what-happe...
EbNar 1y ago
I went the hard mode and migrated all my personal emails (3 domains) to mxroute. Haven't been using Gmail since 2015ish.
HackerNewt-doms 1y ago
The mail service has several serious shortcomings: 1. Disposable addresses (with the prefix temp in the domain part of the email address) can be generated via the web interface. However, when I receive an email at such a disposable address and reply to it in the web interface, the From field does not show this disposable address used in the previous communication, but instead the standard email address of the mailbox account. This is extremely annoying, because this communication partner is only supposed to know the disposable address. 2. In addition to the limited number of disposable addresses provided by the mailbox service, it is also possible to generate countless email addresses in the form of +extensions to the standard local part of the email address itself. Here again, it is frustrating that these email+addresses cannot be selected as the sender in the mailbox web interface (in Thunderbird you can and in the iOS Mail app it only works after manually adding this extension email as an alias in the account settings of the iOS app). Moreover, Mailbox.org restricts the creation of email extensions exclusively to the plus sign: with alice@mailbox.org you can generate alice+test@mailbox.org, which inbound will automatically be sorted into the inbox folder alice (case sensitive). But Mailbox.org does not allow the creation of alice.test@mailbox.org, which would actually be accepted as a registration email address by significantly more online services, because many of them apply standard filter rules for valid email addresses that wrongly consider the plus sign invalid and therefore reject it.
arunc 1y ago
Curious to know which of the email providers offer bottom posting? Genuinely asking after using Gmail and enterprise Outlook for more than 2 decades.
- tomsmeding 1y ago
  This has nothing to do with the provider and everything with your client. They are only linked if you happen to use the web interface of your provider directly, but you don't have to.
lormayna 1y ago
I am self-hosting my email. It's a pain in the ass, but software like mox[1] help on keeping things easier. The most tedious part is to setup correctly SPF, DKIM and DMARC and ensure that your IP will be whitelisted. [1] https://www.xmox.nl/ https://www.xmox.nl/
- dijit 1y ago
  I was looking recently and it seems there is something new that appears extremely easy to use on the surface: stalwart[0]. Not an endorsement as I haven’t actually tried it myself. [0]: https://stalw.art/ https://stalw.art/
- criticalfault 1y ago
  How do you protect your server? Any guides there?
  - lormayna 1y ago
    I have a FW provided by my provider, but I am not enforcing it too much. For SSH access, I have fail2ban + access only via certificates. For the rest, I have disabled web access and APIs as I don't need them. I also keep an eye on logs, but there is not too much there, besides some bots scanning for open relays
xcircle 1y ago
I would like to host my photos in Immich as mentioned here in the thread. I currently have my photos in the Apple Cloud. Does anyone have any tips on how I can download the photos in original quality without a Mac?
- praseodym 1y ago
  Immich has an iPhone app that should be able to pull photos from your photo library (and thus iCloud Photos) and upload them to Immich, but it might take a while compared to uploading from a Mac.
nodesocket 1y ago
Can I add multiple domains and thus addresses (forwards) to a single Proton or Mailbox.org account? That’s a game changer as I’m paying the Google Workspace per fee per domain currently.
openmymind_net 1y ago
[dead]
koevet 1y ago
It’s funny, the very first thing you see when visiting mailbox.org is their heavy push of the "German quality" mantra, like it's 1999. After living seven years in Germany, I can confidently say that when it comes to anything digital, “quality” is the last word I would use. I certainly wouldn’t trust this company with my data.
- everybodyknows 1y ago
  They're counting on customers to have forgotten all about that little matter involving WireCard?
sMarsIntruder 1y ago
> but the catch is that to use their end-to-end encryption you’re forced to use their apps (or, on macOS, run a background “bridge”). > That’s a no go for me, because I love Apple’s Mail app on macOS and iOS, it just works perfectly for my needs, and I don’t want to give that up. Well, you can indeed use Apple Mail by running the Bridge. Not sure I understand the point here.
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  On macOS you have to add another service in background and i don’t like it, on iOS and iPadOS you have to use their app and I want to use Mail by Apple.
6c696e7578 1y ago
Moving your mailbox to something else doesn't stop gmail reading your mail every time you respond to someone who has their mail stored on Google. You'd have to ask for gmail's MX to be blocked perhaps. Sadly I don't see a way around it unless you use PGP and the secret key is kept client side.
dk030 1y ago
Don’t do it! We are just switching back from mailbox.org to Google. - OXdrive is terrible and does not retain file backups like Dropbox or Google Drive. Nearly lost a lot of files when a co-worker deleted his duplicate OXdrive folder. - NO 2-factor for the business tariff. Major red flag, especially for a company that claims privacy focus. - Very low functionality software suite. Etherpad - I cannot figure out a use case OX office suite: Every cloud alternative is so much better. Video conferencing: No single sign on across mailbox.org meaning you have to login again to setup a meeting. Email client still has only a Folder philosophy- tags would be so much better. All in all we had high spirits but were very disappointed by the pretty bad feature set. For private Email it might be fine. Still would never recommend it after 8 month of use.
QuiEgo 1y ago
I like the idea of moving away from the big companies, and the privacy it brings, but security is a huge show stopper for me. e.x. For self hosting photos, am I gonna do something dumb that exposes the NAS on my network? Immich is not encrypted at rest, so what if someone just breaks in and steals my NAS? I could try and set up whole disk encryption, but what if I’m an idiot and end up losing all my photos because I make a mistake? Philosophically I applaud articles like this, but I find iCloud with Advanced Data Protection to be way less scary than dealing with the weakest link: me (as a sys admin).
nbf_1995 1y ago
Something to note: Certain service providers (e.g. Twitch) will not allow you to sign up using an '@mailbox.org' email address. I do not know if this ban extends to custom domain addresses.
crystalseed 1y ago
I was with Mailbox.org and made a switch to Fastmail. Mailbox.org announced that they would have 2FA 2.0, but my account hasn't received the update yet. I contacted their support, and they said my account would receive it ASAP. It's been two months, and I still haven't received it.

dustinfarris 1y ago

how is this different from using PGP with Gmail?

giuliomagnifico 1y ago
As far as I know, Gmail doesn’t allow saving PGP keys or using them to write new emails, whereas mailbox.org integrates the entire PGP service and to send an email, even from iOS where PGP apps are "ugly," you just need to do it from the web interface. Anyway I wrote the details in the post. Edit: I have to mention that I generated my PGP keys locally and then imported to Mailbox.Org
- immibis 1y ago
  Note that when you let a provider do PGP for you, you're not safe from that provider. It's one of the big problems with PGP: you can have usability or security but not both.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Do gmail prevents you from using a regular MTA these days?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
buran77 1y ago
You're doing it without Gmail.

pyed 1y ago

[dead]

roscas 1y ago

Congrats for the move. "Away from Gmail" is by itself a happy title. The report is also very good and that should be a service every other mail service could provide to people who want to move away from G'rab'mail. Another curiosity is that you use the same password I use for everything: xxx Simple to remember and nobody will ever figure that out! Wink! :)

stkai 1y ago

One thing I'd recommend is getting your own domain for email (looks like mailbox.org allows custom domains with some plans). You never know what will happen to your email provider in the future, so having the freedom to move your domain to a different provider is valuable.

giuliomagnifico 1y ago
Yes, thanks. I already have my custom email domain, but this mailbox address is for everyday use, while I use my personal domain for private matters.
AshLeece 1y ago
This. This 100%. I hosted my own email for a good few years and decided to migrate it to icloud using the custom domain. A few mins of copying IMAP over and waiting for the DNS to propagate and it was like nothing happened!
octo888 1y ago
It comes with responsibility too. Renewing your domain, keeping your registrar account safe, keeping your DNS records safe etc Some people prefer a domain registrar that allows 10 year renewals so pick carefully as not all do
- alchemist1e9 1y ago
  It does and I’ve been hoping to see more discussion around best registrars from a domain security perspective. I looked into CSC (cscglobal.com) since it’s what a lot of big companies use, but it’s crazy expensive ($5K+/yr). Even worse, their contract is wild: no guarantee of registration/renewal, all fees non-refundable, they can hike prices anytime, liability capped at $5K, DNS is “as-is” with only credits for outages, and they can unmask WHOIS privacy at will. Basically you pay enterprise prices while they disclaim almost all responsibility.
benhurmarcel 1y ago
I’ve been using myname.com for email for a long time, but to be honest sometimes I wish I hadn’t. It sounds weird and kinda braggy to give in person. Maybe I need to buy a domain that sounds like a generic email host.

mantra2 1y ago

I started the get itchy about so much of my life sitting on Google about 5 years ago, so I decided to take the leap to Fastmail and haven’t looked back. Didn’t need to do anything special for the migration. The in house importer they offer pulled over 80GB in a day and I was set from there. Fastmail isn’t going to give you end to end encryption - but - I think just shedding a major Google service is a massive win privacy-wise. I remember briefly looking into Proton but the search was awful.

ryandrake 1y ago
This solves the "dependence on Gmail" problem (which is definitely a worthy problem to solve) but not the general "dependence on a particular mail provider" problem. The next step in this walk-down-the-risk-chain is self-hosting on a VPS, where you're now just dependent on your VPS provider, and the next step could be self-hosting on your own metal, where you're now just dependent on your ISP. Happy trails!
- mantra2 1y ago
  What bothered me about Gmail was that it was central to my life and if something were to happen and they locked my account they have zero support. With that out of the way I feel perfectly happy with FM — no need to go further down the paranoia hole.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    I'm on fastmail with an xyz.dev domain and keep a gmail for legacy purposes. Unfortunately some email validators will reject my short FM address.
    - qingcharles 1y ago
      Right. Everyone has to keep a Gmail address as backup because of all these edge cases. For one, some domains (like yours) are just rejected. I tried to register an account with a huge corporate SMTP provider recently but they've not updated their allowed gTLD in 10 years and their devs fought me for weeks telling me it was my domain that was wrong, not their system until they finally gave in. And secondly, many sites, like Reddit, use a Gmail address as some sort of signal of quality. You can avoid a lot of new account bans on Reddit simply by registering with a Gmail instead of your own domain.

dsissitka 1y ago

Something to be aware of if you're considering mailbox.org: https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-custom-domains-spf-dkim-dmarc#comment-1450 https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...

sandreas 1y ago
Oh, thank you. I recently considered moving from posteo.de to mailbox.org, but I think I won't anymore regarding such an issue took so long to even be considered as a problem and as I understand is still not solved.
giuliomagnifico 1y ago
Oh, thank you. I didn't know that. Anyway, I'm not using a custom domain on mailbox, I use my custom mail domain with another service.
- spapas82 1y ago
  Unfortunately this is common in many smtp servers and is configuration dependent: After you authenticate as usera@example.com you can send emails as userb@example.com.
matteocontrini 1y ago
Another thing is that they appear to have some spam scanning on outbound emails and when they detect something suspicious they simply drop the email silently, and nobody will ever know about it.
- sumuyuda 1y ago
  You can turn this off in the settings and the spam will go in a Junk folder. https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/customizing-your-mailbox-org-spam-filter-settings/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/customizing...
  - 1y ago

_mlbt 1y ago

I wish there was something like cell phone number porting for email addresses. I don’t know how it would work on the technical side or how you could secure something like that, but the idea of switching email providers is too daunting, so I stay with Gmail despite abandoning all my other Google accounts and services.

RandomBacon 1y ago
It exists: just port your domain name to a new registrar, and/or point your mx records to a new email provider. Phone number is just a user number. Email addresses are a user name at a server name. A little harder to do if you're looking for something as ubiquitous as phone number porting. The closest thing to a server name when it comes to phone numbers, would be the network it is on. For example, there is the public switched telephone network (PSTN), then there is the Defense Switched Network (DSN)
- _mlbt 1y ago
  The problem is that I would still need to "port out" my email address manually to a new domain name. It's not an exaggeration to say that there are probably over a hundred places I would need to make that change.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    What's the problem? Do it during a slow day when you're bored. Doesn't take a lot of time or effort. Keep the old e-mail around for any strays that you forgot.
Semaphor 1y ago
You kinda get that with your own domain. I think that's the best you are going to get
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Isn't losing your domain a huge risk for any common user?

colesantiago 1y ago

How do I get my family to move off of Gmail? I keep telling them that Google spies on you, but they don’t care because it is free and it works. How reliable are these providers and what are the chances these providers emails would bounce or go to spam when sending an email?

jeffbee 1y ago
Maybe because when normal people hear you say "Google spies on you" they think you are a crank. Perhaps try to reduce it to a statement that conveys valid information.
bsoles 1y ago
I did it by moving to the Proton ecosystem: Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Pass, with the added bonus of Proton VPN. As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).
selkin 1y ago
If they don't care, why should you? They found a deal that seems to be ok for them. To get them to change providers, you need to suggest one that would be a better value, and to be honest, I don't think you can find one.
prmoustache 1y ago
If they don't care there is no problem for them to solve. Stop sending mail to them and bounce mails from gmail.

mbirth 1y ago

I left a week ago and went for disroot.org . But this is only my backup email address. My main is via my web hoster and a custom domain.

raffraffraff 1y ago

I moved myself and my wife's business away from Google, but that hasn't been without it's issues. Even though we're using a globally recognised mail provider and have DKIM, SPF etc all set up perfectly, we get bounced or delayed by certain mail admins. There are also occasional delays and issues. One thing I'll say about Gmail is that it's extremely reliable.

RandomBacon 1y ago
What provider? Running an online forum, I've encountered people using Atomic Mail, and that service has terrible reliability.
- raffraffraff 1y ago
  Namecheap's "private email" service.
  - jesterson 1y ago
    that’s “globally recognised”? Run from them as fast as possible if you would any of your services to work
    - raffraffraff 1y ago
      Well obviously yes, namecheap have been around a very long time and after GoDaddy (the default in the early 2000s for most people) Namecheap became a kind of default. One would think that a company with an online presence going back over two decades, and one a relatively low number of domain registrars, is "globally recognised". Whether they're "good" or even "passable" is another matter entirely, but without switching away from Google to Namecheap for a few months, one wouldn't have much of an idea. And now I know. How many really decent email providers are there aside from Google? What's today's obvious choice? And will they last?
      - jesterson 1y ago

indigodaddy 1y ago

Anyone considering a move should also look at NameCrane/CraneMail by the crew behind BuyVM. Solid service, incredibly reasonable prices, great community/discord. They are always looking to improve, extremely proactive and reactive to customer feedback and issues. No builtin PGP, but I believe that is out of their control as they use SmarterMail on the backend.

AnonC 1y ago
I hadn’t heard of this and looked for it. How is Cranemail so cheap? I’m really surprised but also concerned that one can get 100 GB of space with unlimited mailboxes and aliases (with just a sending limit) for $10 a year (which gets even cheaper when paying for multiple years or lifetime).
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Not sure, but you could ask @Francisco here [1]. He might respond. He’s been around a very long time— certainly not fly by night, as I can understand thinking that at the price value. [1] https://discord.gg/E8myb2AD https://discord.gg/E8myb2AD
prmoustache 1y ago
I would run away from any service that forces me to use discord fr support.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Take it easy. It's not their official support channel. They have tickets like everyone else, with the added bonus that you can nudge them in their chat. You can take advantage of it or not, no forcing involved. The discord is more about community than a support channel. In fact they will usually ask you to open a ticket if you haven't already for direct support issues that don't look to be a general/shared issue.
  - monkeywork 1y ago

x0x0 1y ago

I'm going to plug fastmail. Rationale: (1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times. (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail; (3) They have continued actively developing their UI, with nice updates released perhaps in the last 6 weeks. (4) keyboard shortcuts that work (5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine. (6) I just had a decade-anniversary there and I've never regretted it.

johnplatte 1y ago
Came here to say this. I've been with Fastmail a similar length of time and it just keeps getting better.
commandersaki 1y ago
(1) tech support that actually reads your messages and replies with a solution demonstrating comprehension of the message that you wrote. Amazing. I've emailed them twice and gotten a great response both times. Tech support forwarded an inquiry I was asking about an IMAP command in my MUA which led to an actual engineer that said my MUA was using an outdated/deprecated part of the IMAP protocol and provided the RFC for the new way of doing things, which then lead to a patch in said MUA. Very few companies offer this calibre of support, the only other one I can think of is Tarsnap. (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail I think it's a much better UI overall than gmail; at least I found with gmail you had to manually paginate things, I can easily do a search in FM that might have 10000 emails over 20 years and I can usually jump to a specific month/year very quickly via scroll and then from there a specific day. (5) Instead of inbox 0, I practice inbox 50k and it handles it fine. Similar, 37k in my Inbox, nay issue. I have probably 200k overall across different folders. But I know I'm outsourcing a service, so I do full infrequent backups via IMAP. Here's my (7): Fastmail has the only web interface I've come across that handles (catch-all) aliases correctly and knows how to respond with the correct one every single time. Maybe roundcube/squirrelmail can do this, but roundcube/squirrelmail overall is not very good.
internet_points 1y ago
> (2) it is the best UI I've seen outside gmail; I'd say it's better (maybe gmail has features it doesn't, but fastmail does everything I need and loads much much faster than gmail)

NoboruWataya 1y ago

I have been using mailbox.org for a few years and no complaints. I don't think the web UI is amazing but I use it via Thunderbird so it doesn't affect me. If you use your own email client and your own domain name, you don't really need to worry about UI with email providers at all (as long as your provider supports those features). And your own domain name makes it easy to move around in future if you need to. I don't really have any plans to move away from mailbox.org, though I just saw the post about Thunderbird offering an email service in the future. That might actually prompt me to move as I'd like to support the makers of a FOSS email client I've been happily using for years.

guerrilla 1y ago
It doesn't sound like they do on-disk encryption like ProtonMail. Is that right?
- giuliomagnifico 1y ago
  Mailbox doesn’t support it, but on mailbox you can use your IMAP app with Proton not. And on mailbox you can easily send and receive PGP encrypted mail on mailbox.org. They provide a page for key import, allowing you to send encrypted emails like regular mail when needed. It’s your choice, if you always want to use proton mail app everywhere you can use proton.
  - guerrilla 1y ago
    I use IMAP with Proton. Thunderbird is my main mail client. You just need to install the bridge.
    - giuliomagnifico 1y ago
      Yes but only if you install the bridge as I wrote in my blog post, and on iOS iPadOS? You can’t use Apple Mail app.
      - 1y ago

luizfelberti 1y ago

For those looking to break free and are considering self-hosting, I can strongly recommend Stalwart. I'm surprised how almost no one seems to have heard of it, but it's amazing (and supports JMAP!)

dcreater 1y ago
I've wanted to self host but I've heard that there's high probability of getting blocked/marked as spam?
- adlpz 1y ago
  Anyone has tried self hosting the server but sending through a third party like Amazon SES?

selkin 1y ago

> The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. That's not a Gmail problem, and no reason to migrate. Some use cases just don't fit email, and for those, we have other, more fitting platforms. > So, I went with mailbox.org that still offers integrated PGP encryption, and if you want, you can always use external PGP too (which I was already doing with Gmail). Ok, so now you have two problems.

partomniscient 1y ago
But we haven't started using regular expressions yet...!? I was fortunate enough that my solution was to host my own mail server 20+ years ago and create a separate email address per relationship with a company, so I can tell the moment some 3rd party has been comprimised when I receive spam on a specific address. My personal spam has been minimal over time. If for example moc.elgoog@mydomain.com gets spam - I know they're compromised or have sold me out. Yes gmail has had something similar using the + character, but most people don't know about/make use of this and still abdicate spam filtering to things they don't understand like bayesian algorithms which suffer from false positives. (Have you checked your spam folder for our very important message...?) Email has never been secure and despite modern updates, I still don't consider it as such. Then again I don't have much to worry about, so I'm ambivalent most of the time. That said, special 'fuck you' shoutouts to Ticketek for being compromised and their general ineptitude and shitfuckery in so many ways... It took them 2 months to respond to an issue I raised with them only to ask whether it was still an issue... (yes, it still is). Unfortunately I don't know if you could easily manage to convince majority email providers you're legitimite with a new domain in this day and age - I suspect its now a major hurdle to overcome as I've read often enough of mail bouncing because "we've never heard of you until now, so we don't trust you" - which makes communicating with the majority of the world via email almost impossible to build up the trust level you're considered legitimite and that's despite all this extra DMARC, DKIM, and SPF and SSL/TLS supposed safeguards which have appeared over time and I've had to comply with. Security as an afterthought means its still probably never going to be secure. I've always considered email the equivalent of transmitting plaintext and have always treated it as such. This has led to some pretty difficult situations where I don't email important stuff to a 3rd party just because they expect it and everyone else does it.

smarx007 1y ago

Gotta put in a plug for Migadu: https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ https://www.migadu.com/pricing/ Happy customer over a couple of years.

packetlost 1y ago
I've been using Migadu for a low-moderate throughput inbox (within their micro tier limits) in the US and the IMAP4 performance is kinda awful sometimes. I'm not sure why :(
internetter 1y ago
Ended up dropping migadu. Lots of things I liked like the configuration but it was fairly expensive for what you got. After 3 years of paying, I once went over my outbound quota and couldn't send email for the day.
mbrndtgn 1y ago
Migadu is fantastic if you can live with their daily limits.
josephb 1y ago
Tried them with a domain that gets a bunch of spam, unfortunately their filtering is not as good as others like Fastmail it seems.

samuell 1y ago

I thought protonmail was the go-to for de-googling.

ellisd 1y ago

Anyone using a half-Gmail / half-personal IMAP server to handle the reality that keeping 20+ years or email in Gmail will bump into the storage quota? I'm around 99.5% usage and just slowly deleting ancient emails with large attachments to make it another month. Dovecot in my homelab seem doable to have an IMAP server to transfer the Gmail based emails to and maintain them indefinitely but would this be a maintenance headache? I've never operated it before and am curious.

TranquilMarmot 1y ago
I also ran into the Google storage quota after 20+ years of gmail + drive + photos. I ended up paying for Google One at $4/mo just to make it long enough to move all of data somewhere else.
mbirth 1y ago
I’ve got Dovecot running in a Docker container on my Raspberry Pi. Moved everything over using Thunderbird. If you use mbox format, once done, you can turn the files read-only and Dovecot will still work. And you can throw a Solr server into the mix to get fast mail searches.

AnonC 1y ago

> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption ProtonMail and Tutanota offer end-to-end encryption only when both the sender and recipient are using the same (i.e., ProtonMail->ProtonMail or Tutanota->Tutanota). If you’re emailing someone outside those or if you’re receiving emails from someone outside those, and you want encryption, you’d have to go to PGP (with its own complexities).

crossroadsguy 1y ago
That's why I find their mandatory requirement of exposing their hosted emails only to their clients is such a bizarre take (if not pure bs). I mean for god's sake just let me use IMAP/POP3. You give me encryption at rest, safety and privacy in transit, and do not sell my data. You also offer to let me put up my GPG key on your admin portal so that I can easily read e2ee mails in your webmail. Thank you, all that is very nice. Now get out of my way and do not try/pretend to be Signal and email at the same time.

TranquilMarmot 1y ago

I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus. I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether. For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas. For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage. Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years. My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship! YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

floren 1y ago
I've taken steps to degoogle too, but like you I've rather stuck on Android because over the years I've ossified a set of tools I like (KeepassDX and Syncthing are really important, and Firefox on Android is actually damn good).
- pluc 1y ago
  GrapheneOS lets you use Play Store apps
  - 1y ago

throwzasdf 1y ago

[dead]

mrbluecoat 1y ago

https://porkbun.com/products/email https://porkbun.com/products/email is similarly priced

maksimur 1y ago

How do you deal with emails bouncing or going to spam? I have been looking to move away from Gmail but last I read it was the only reliable option out there.

floren 1y ago
You should be fine on the big providers. There's a weird horseshoe situation where anti-Google doomposting looks a lot like pro-Google FUD that I think leads people to believe only Google and maybe Microsoft are capable of sending mail any more. Something like mailbox.org should be fine. Even a carefully-chosen VPS running your own email server should be fine (works for me, no delivery problems in ~2 years)
- selkin 1y ago
  Tell me you haven't run a large email server without telling me. There's a reason even large corporates that can easily afford the resources to run email their email themselves decide against it. There are a handful of good providers, not just Google and Microsoft, but the two hyperscalers do have very good offerings, so of course they have a lot of the market.
  - floren 1y ago
    You're right, I run a small email server. I told you.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

GTP 1y ago

The problem with changing email provider due to privacy concerns, is that most of your emails will still end up inside Google's or Microsoft's servers. I considered self-hosting my own email, as I already have a domain name. But this has always put me off. The reason I would still consider self-hosting is to have readily available email address for side projects, like if I want to receive email notifications from services. But for privacy, you unfortunately don't gain much, as most of the people/entities you're exchanging emails with are using Google or Microsoft emails.

selkin 1y ago
Even when they don't, it doesn't matter. Email wasn't designed for privacy or security, and can't accommodate those. Lucky for us, we now have much better tools for those use cases, so we don't need to clumsily try and fail to ducktape those use cases to email.
mcdonje 1y ago
This kind of thinking helps to perpetuate the situation.

Telaneo 1y ago

I've been pretty happy with Mailbox.org. The web interface isn't great compared to Gmail, but I prefer Thunderbird anyway for normal usage. They used to have a weird 2FA setup, but they've since switched to the same kind everybody else use, thankfully. Microsoft's been a bit annoying, since some emails I've sent to @hotmail.com domains go to spam, but at least they do arrive and aren't just bounced, as I've heard from some horror stories. Sending to @gmail.com accounts seems to work perfectly though. I don't send a lot of outgoing mail from my personal account anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end. Some mails seem to take longer to arrive, but I had that problem on Gmail too, so I don't think there's anything actually wrong per se.

cnkk 1y ago
I’d say their new 2FA setup is still weird. Not properly documented, and enabling broke all my devices. ActiveSync for example is not working (even with app/device specific passwords)

mixedmath 1y ago

> This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free. > > The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. Interestingly, one of my biggest problems with Gmail is that they don't allow actual plaintext. I used to routinely collaborate with developers who were vision-impaired, and the official Gmail phone app wouldn't let me send them plaintext email. Instead, it was some sort of HTML thing. Unfortunately, we sometimes sent code snippets to each other over email, and though admittedly it looked more or less fine, Gmail changed the underlying representation enough that my collaborators' screen readers would mess up on the parsing. This led to me leaving Gmail on my phone, which led ultimately to me leaving Gmail entirely.

johannes1234321 1y ago
I think you use the term "plain text" differently from the author of the post. I think they refer to the fact that there is no end to end encryption. Google has access to the clear text of all messages and can index/analyze them.
- MobiusHorizons 1y ago
  The article does call out plain text email without formatting or attachments. Plain text typically refers to visual formatting, while clear text refers to lack of encryption.
Sniffnoy 1y ago
That sounds like a problem with the Gmail webmail client -- I don't think Gmail does that when used over IMAP with an external client?
- arccy 1y ago
  the web client can send plain text, it's only the mobile client that doesn't have an option to do so
  - 1y ago

charles_f 1y ago

> To send encrypted emails, you just select “Use PGP encrypted” when composing a new message, after importing your private key, of course. I love the concept of PGP and how well it seems to be integrated. I also don't know a single person who uses it or a provider/software capable of decrypting it. I think that's the biggest issue with PGP. Short of asking someone directly, you don't know if they'd be able to receive a PGP encrypted email, so you wont send one.

giuliomagnifico 1y ago
Yes it’s very easy to use on mailbox, well I use pgp encryption with some friend and on Kraken (the crypto exchange)
spapas82 1y ago
The whole point of PGP is to actually communicate (out of band) with the party you want to sent mail to and receive his public key. It's no big deal if you really need to send a private message.
hellojesus 1y ago
If you own your own domain as many are suggesting, it's super easy to share your key. Simply publish it and share the link in your email signature.

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

I'd really like to just run my own Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin stack, but it seems totally discouraged these days just on the basis of email sender reputation.

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
It's not as bad as some make it out to be. Check out Stalwart, as it is much easier for a newcomer to mail hosting to manage.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  Thanks! I'll check it out.
immibis 1y ago
Just do it. You're allowed to have more than one address. You can keep using Gmail for important things while you experiment with your own server.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  Might as well, right?

litmus-pit-git 1y ago

And I will be leaving Mailbox.org for Runbox, or Purelymail, or Fastmail. I have a few more months' credit remaining on Mailbox, besides I am yet to try the trials. (This is for the author and anyone else) If you are looking for responsive (or even barely responsive) and responsible support responses whenever you need it, weigh your options very carefully about which mail host you want to move to. You might need it once or twice a year, but that might be crucial. Edit: And if you can help it, and have your own domain, never use a mail host's domain-based email address (no matter how catchy and short that is) because it will be a headache switching away from it if you want to change your host.

palata 1y ago
Have you considered Migadu? I don't have shares there, just a very happy customer :-).
- litmus-pit-git 1y ago
  I did. Their 20 out/day (soft limit) had me concerned. While many weeks I might send less than 7 emails I still feel uncomfortable with those limits.
  - palata 1y ago
    As you said, those are soft limits, i.e. there is a human on the other side. If they feel like you use more than you should, they will talk to you instead of kicking you out.
giuliomagnifico 1y ago
Fastmail's base plan is excessive for me (60GB of storage) and costs twice as much as Mailbox, plus it's not an EU service.
- litmus-pit-git 1y ago
  It is for me as well. It's an obscene plan. They should have plans for us normal humans :) But having burnt my fingers couple of times I need to be with a provider who has some sort of "real" and responsive support (and accountable) and that costs money so there's that. For me EU is not a condition, neither is e2ee (as long as it's E at Rest), but I understand it might be for others. I hope mailbox is good for you and unless you need some support it will good. There were no outages or any general things breaking during my usage of many years. Good luck.

erikqu 1y ago

what about https://0.email https://0.email

sunshinekitty 1y ago
this is just a wrapper around gmail

rendleflag 1y ago

I’ve been a Fastmail user for years, having left Gmail. It works great and have nothing be but praise for them. I use my own domain with them so if I decide to leave it’s not an issue worrying about updating people with my new email.

palata 1y ago
I was really happy with Fastmail as well. Before that I used ProtonMail, which was annoying because it forced me to install their bridge and use their encryption stuff. After Fastmail I went to Migadu, and it's absolutely great. I have never seen support requests getting answers that quickly :-).
- tamimio 1y ago
  I don’t see masked email feature in Migadu, is there one? Useful for burner services
  - kenmacd 1y ago
    I use identities for this: https://migadu.com/guides/identities/ https://migadu.com/guides/identities/ I can send as the address, and emails arrive in my normal mailbox. I also use them for giving self-hosted services their own address/password to email me.
    - litmus-pit-git 1y ago
      How's migadu's email ip reputation? Also do you have to create these identities in that admin panel to use or you can use it on the go like duck.com or Apple's hide my email?
      - kenmacd 1y ago
        Not sure on the reputation, but I personally haven't had any issues emailing people using gmail or microsoft. They have a good DNS Diagnostics page that checks all your domains DKIM/SPF/DMARC settings. I've been using identities created in the admin panel, but they do have subdomain addresses where everything to *@user.domain goes to user@domain, and you can configure a 'Catchall' address (and of course 'plus addresses'). I haven't used either though.

palata 1y ago

> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption This is not quite right. The only offer e2ee if you send an email to someone on the same provider (e.g. ProtonMail to ProtonMail). If you write to someone using Gmail, it's not e2ee. IMHO this kind of e2ee is interesting for companies (because every employee is on the same provider, and it's better to have the internal communications on ProtonMail than shared with Google on Gmail), but for a personal email it doesn't matter so much. What's really important is to have a custom domain so that you are not stuck with one provider.

cptskippy 1y ago
Custom domains make it really simple to move around. I was able to move from Gmail to ProtonMail on a Sunday afternoon without anyone knowing that I'd made a change.
giuliomagnifico 1y ago
That's correct, I meant that you have to always use their app, whether to use e2ee or not. There is no IMAP. Mailbox also offers e2ee via browser among the same mailbox users, but it also has IMAP and PGP.

cptskippy 1y ago

I moved my domain to ProtonMail at the start of the year and my only real challenge is shared calendars. Does anyone have a suggested solution that allows multiple people to share and manage a calendars that isn't Google Calendar or locked to a particular platform (Apple).

asteinbr 1y ago

I’m going back to Gmail from mailbox. The spam protection from mailbox is very poor. Been there since many years.

giuliomagnifico 1y ago
But there are the filter lists! You can customize the spam filters. Anyway maybe I’ll find these issue in the future, for now it’s all fgood with spam (I don’t see any spam email)

TriangleEdge 1y ago

I use both mailbox and gmail. For people that are considering switching, some websites don't accept the mailbox domain, so be ready for that. Otherwise the service works great.

giuliomagnifico 1y ago
I've never encountered this issue so far, and I've already changed my email on almost all commercial services. But thanks for reporting! I'll use Gmail with forwarding if I encounter this issue
marc_abonce 1y ago
In over 6 years of using Mailbox, I only remember one website that rejected the domain. It's a government website and they only started rejecting "invalid" (non-duopoly) domains sometime this year. I do occasionally get emails that take longer to arrive into my inbox (between 5 minutes up to 1 hour), but the emails always arrive eventually. Or maybe I haven't noticed... Do you remember which websites rejected your Mailbox address?
- paulrudy 1y ago
  I've been on mailbox for 6 years and I think the only issue I've had with rejections has been the email confirmation from some Discourse-based forums. But after I contacted the hosts and was added manually, the forums' emails made it through with no issue

nelblu 1y ago

Another happy mailbox.org user here who dumped gmail since a little over 4 years now. I'd highly recommend them to anyone who prefers more control on the client app they can use to access emails, calendars etc. Their web interface may not be the best/fastest, but their video conferencing web app is really good. I rarely use their office suite, but good to know it exists.

prima-facie 1y ago

Zoho Mail is very good, priced well, and available in multiple zones- EU/US/etc.

Hobadee 1y ago
Came here to say this. I moved my family (and our family domain) into Zoho and love it. It also has better features than Google in many areas. (coughre-ordering filterscough)
mxuribe 1y ago
Same here! Quite low prices, has been stable, and i use my personal domain (for my family)...and can't complain.
cyanghxst 1y ago
Same here. I’m on Zoho’s Mail Lite plan with my own domain. 19 CAD/year for 10 GB and 30 aliases. Couldn’t be happier.

tgma 1y ago

I don't understand the logic. I mean if you hate Google, or you specifically want to avoid Google having your data sure, but whichever email provider you choose will have at some point access to your plaintext email and they may choose to store it. There's no such thing as real end-to-end encrypted email unless the sender actively does so or you run the server yourself (and be online to do the TLS handshake when someone connects to your domain's MX address). Another concern about anything social is that there are at least two sides in a conversation and whoever leaks the data to a third party will compromise privacy of all so it is really hard to prevent your email from getting to Gmail servers one way or another.

arunc 1y ago
Can't agree more! I've analyzed my urges to migrate in the past decade or so and I've ended up staying with GMail for exactly these reasons.
blueredmodern 1y ago
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Vaslo 1y ago
If my wife and I both use Proton, or I correspond with a bank or company that doesn’t use a Google product, how would that possibly get into Google’s hands? You way oversimplified the possibilities here.
- tgma 1y ago
  Of course there has been also PGP since the dawn of time. They all fall under unless the sender actively does so that I explicitly mentioned. I can send you PGP encrypted email you could have used Gmail or Proton or whatever. It is about what the sender does not what service you choose. (If you and your wife are both using Proton, that probably does not have anything to do with SMTP; it would be like calling iMessage "SMS".)

gkmcd 1y ago

I did the same thing some years ago. I chose purelymail[0] as the MX for my personal domain and would recommend. The only issue is that it's so cheap, and my credit lasts so long, I forget that it is in fact a paid service and that I do actually need to make a payment from time to time... [0]https://purelymail.com/ https://purelymail.com/

everybodyknows 1y ago
How do you like the RoundCube webmail UI?

stevage 1y ago

> starting at €2.50/month (paid annually) > I had no issues with paying the equivalent of two coffees a month Where can you get coffee for €1.25?!

arccy 1y ago
Italy I think
giuliomagnifico 1y ago
In Italy =] the price is about 1.30 to 1.40€. And I’m in northern Italy, in the south you can find it for ~1€.
- stevage 1y ago
  wow, amazing. I feel like it was a pretty similar price (.90?) when I visited in 2006.

123sereusername 1y ago

[dead]

the_arun 1y ago

If others can do, I wonder why can’t Google provide encryption at rest with keys managed by users? May be for small a fee?

max_ 1y ago
Large Corporations think very slow. Currently the are distracted by AI gimmicks.

eviks 1y ago

> Let me start by saying: I use email in a very basic way. I send and receive a lot of messages (at least 50 a day), but they’re plain text/html emails with no attachments or fancy features. Why not shift to properly encrypted chat apps without all that single permanent pgp key nonsense that doesn't fit on a page?

8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y ago

mailbox.org recycles @mailbox.org addresses after a period. 90 days for the cheapest Light plan [1]. After that, someone else can register your old address. If your subscription lapses, your email account is closed after 30 days, data is deleted after another 30 days [2]. [1]: https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/when-is-a-deleted-address-available-again/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/when-is-a-... [2]: https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/payment-article/what-happens-at-the-end-of-my-contract/ https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/payment-article/what-happe...

EbNar 1y ago

I went the hard mode and migrated all my personal emails (3 domains) to mxroute. Haven't been using Gmail since 2015ish.

HackerNewt-doms 1y ago

The mail service has several serious shortcomings: 1. Disposable addresses (with the prefix temp in the domain part of the email address) can be generated via the web interface. However, when I receive an email at such a disposable address and reply to it in the web interface, the From field does not show this disposable address used in the previous communication, but instead the standard email address of the mailbox account. This is extremely annoying, because this communication partner is only supposed to know the disposable address. 2. In addition to the limited number of disposable addresses provided by the mailbox service, it is also possible to generate countless email addresses in the form of +extensions to the standard local part of the email address itself. Here again, it is frustrating that these email+addresses cannot be selected as the sender in the mailbox web interface (in Thunderbird you can and in the iOS Mail app it only works after manually adding this extension email as an alias in the account settings of the iOS app). Moreover, Mailbox.org restricts the creation of email extensions exclusively to the plus sign: with alice@mailbox.org you can generate alice+test@mailbox.org, which inbound will automatically be sorted into the inbox folder alice (case sensitive). But Mailbox.org does not allow the creation of alice.test@mailbox.org, which would actually be accepted as a registration email address by significantly more online services, because many of them apply standard filter rules for valid email addresses that wrongly consider the plus sign invalid and therefore reject it.

arunc 1y ago

Curious to know which of the email providers offer bottom posting? Genuinely asking after using Gmail and enterprise Outlook for more than 2 decades.

tomsmeding 1y ago
This has nothing to do with the provider and everything with your client. They are only linked if you happen to use the web interface of your provider directly, but you don't have to.

lormayna 1y ago

I am self-hosting my email. It's a pain in the ass, but software like mox[1] help on keeping things easier. The most tedious part is to setup correctly SPF, DKIM and DMARC and ensure that your IP will be whitelisted. [1] https://www.xmox.nl/ https://www.xmox.nl/

dijit 1y ago
I was looking recently and it seems there is something new that appears extremely easy to use on the surface: stalwart[0]. Not an endorsement as I haven’t actually tried it myself. [0]: https://stalw.art/ https://stalw.art/
criticalfault 1y ago
How do you protect your server? Any guides there?
- lormayna 1y ago
  I have a FW provided by my provider, but I am not enforcing it too much. For SSH access, I have fail2ban + access only via certificates. For the rest, I have disabled web access and APIs as I don't need them. I also keep an eye on logs, but there is not too much there, besides some bots scanning for open relays

xcircle 1y ago

I would like to host my photos in Immich as mentioned here in the thread. I currently have my photos in the Apple Cloud. Does anyone have any tips on how I can download the photos in original quality without a Mac?

praseodym 1y ago
Immich has an iPhone app that should be able to pull photos from your photo library (and thus iCloud Photos) and upload them to Immich, but it might take a while compared to uploading from a Mac.

nodesocket 1y ago

Can I add multiple domains and thus addresses (forwards) to a single Proton or Mailbox.org account? That’s a game changer as I’m paying the Google Workspace per fee per domain currently.

openmymind_net 1y ago

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koevet 1y ago

It’s funny, the very first thing you see when visiting mailbox.org is their heavy push of the "German quality" mantra, like it's 1999. After living seven years in Germany, I can confidently say that when it comes to anything digital, “quality” is the last word I would use. I certainly wouldn’t trust this company with my data.

everybodyknows 1y ago
They're counting on customers to have forgotten all about that little matter involving WireCard?

sMarsIntruder 1y ago

> but the catch is that to use their end-to-end encryption you’re forced to use their apps (or, on macOS, run a background “bridge”). > That’s a no go for me, because I love Apple’s Mail app on macOS and iOS, it just works perfectly for my needs, and I don’t want to give that up. Well, you can indeed use Apple Mail by running the Bridge. Not sure I understand the point here.

giuliomagnifico 1y ago
On macOS you have to add another service in background and i don’t like it, on iOS and iPadOS you have to use their app and I want to use Mail by Apple.

6c696e7578 1y ago

Moving your mailbox to something else doesn't stop gmail reading your mail every time you respond to someone who has their mail stored on Google. You'd have to ask for gmail's MX to be blocked perhaps. Sadly I don't see a way around it unless you use PGP and the secret key is kept client side.

dk030 1y ago

Don’t do it! We are just switching back from mailbox.org to Google. - OXdrive is terrible and does not retain file backups like Dropbox or Google Drive. Nearly lost a lot of files when a co-worker deleted his duplicate OXdrive folder. - NO 2-factor for the business tariff. Major red flag, especially for a company that claims privacy focus. - Very low functionality software suite. Etherpad - I cannot figure out a use case OX office suite: Every cloud alternative is so much better. Video conferencing: No single sign on across mailbox.org meaning you have to login again to setup a meeting. Email client still has only a Folder philosophy- tags would be so much better. All in all we had high spirits but were very disappointed by the pretty bad feature set. For private Email it might be fine. Still would never recommend it after 8 month of use.

QuiEgo 1y ago

I like the idea of moving away from the big companies, and the privacy it brings, but security is a huge show stopper for me. e.x. For self hosting photos, am I gonna do something dumb that exposes the NAS on my network? Immich is not encrypted at rest, so what if someone just breaks in and steals my NAS? I could try and set up whole disk encryption, but what if I’m an idiot and end up losing all my photos because I make a mistake? Philosophically I applaud articles like this, but I find iCloud with Advanced Data Protection to be way less scary than dealing with the weakest link: me (as a sys admin).

nbf_1995 1y ago

Something to note: Certain service providers (e.g. Twitch) will not allow you to sign up using an '@mailbox.org' email address. I do not know if this ban extends to custom domain addresses.

crystalseed 1y ago

I was with Mailbox.org and made a switch to Fastmail. Mailbox.org announced that they would have 2FA 2.0, but my account hasn't received the update yet. I contacted their support, and they said my account would receive it ASAP. It's been two months, and I still haven't received it.