I (and a lot of other people around here) are enthusiastic FastMail customers. Hit any of us up off-site if you are interested in a referral code (10% off). It costs money, but you get a really solid webmail experience with real human customer support. The CEO is active here on HN and posts pretty solid things like this: https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electroni...
I have a strong belief that FastMail's business model is aligned with my interests/values, and they're a strong open source community member with initiatives like JMAP.
I found the idea of mail as long-term memory (also, as file-system) alluring. I instantly started working on a "pay once" email system, reserved http://memoria.email and put up an early-acces address reservation system. Working on it as speaking.
One issue I have with FastMail is the reuse of email addresses. It is possible to "hack" accounts on websites which were registered to expired email addresses by simply registering that email address anew and doing a password reset. This is very common in the domain space, where email addresses are publicly listed.
Well, with custom domain email addresses this is always true regardless of service provider.
If you ever abandon the domain, someone else could come along and buy the domain and create the same email address. They could then receive any mail intended for that email address (e.g. password resets). This is why I consider any domains purchased for email purposes to be lifetime investments.
One is that you can send email as any other FastMail user, and it won't stop you. SPF passes and DKIM signatures signed (even for other customers' custom domains), totally impossible to tell the difference between a legitimate and spoofed message.
To be fair, DKIM is a borderline useless technology and doesn't really prove anything, but it still appears to be an intentional policy decision by FM to be "lax".
Interestingly enough they do track the real sender in mail headers (which I suspect enables them to mark their own official emails with "verified" badges), but it's a dynamic obfuscated value iirc so it's absolutely worthless for regular users.
It kind of makes my stomach churn when I consider that it's trivial for any other FastMail user to impersonate me, but OTOH, it's best not to be under the delusion that email is authenticated, so I'm staying with them.
Have very recently moved over to Fastmail from a hosted Exchange service (personal - own domains). Very pleased so far although my only issue was that I couldn't get SRV records to work properly on my domain (the DNS is at cloudflare, and I'm more than certain it was my own incompetence) which made setup on my iPhone a bit of a faff for calendar, contacts and mail compared to exchange.
The web-interface is excellent for mail and calendar - for work I have to change between browsers and OSs regularly and it's worked perfectly with all combinations I've come across so far.
Also very interested in the work they're going with JMAP as hobby projects of mine have led to me running my own mail servers and developing clients, and this new protocol looks very straightforward and lightweight.
I've tried a lot of mail services over the years and every time come back to gmail, well actually GSuite. Stuff I tried:
- Posteo.de: Great, but you can't use your own domain or groups, which was a dealbreaker.
- Fastmail: Nice enough, didn't really care for the web interface though.
- Postbox: Great, after the merger with fastmail got the fastmail webinterface :-)
- Microsoft hosted exchange: It was ok, S.O. wasn't a fan due to slow webinterface on a tablet. Spam filtering was a weak point.
- MXRoute: Nice service, good price/quality. In the end however I didn't liked that I couldn't control the spam filter (you have some config options but mostly it's global).
I'm only using it as a throwaway, but ProtonMail seems okay.
(Scraped quickly after posting here in a hiring thread, too: "Good day to you and your family. I apologize if the content here-under are contrary to your moral ethics but please treat with absolute secrecy and personal as that is my business proposal to you.")
I pay for an account on hcoop.net. This was back in 2001 or so and my personal domain is hosted there. Hcoop has email. I fetch it to my local drive and read it. This is my primary email.
I moved to Runbox a week ago and am happy (so far at least). Before I switched from Gmail I worked out what my requirements were and evaluated a few services, wrote up my findings at http://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/ . Fastmail is the obvious competitor, but I wanted a mail service that didn’t have servers in the US (Fastmail have US and Amsterdam, but replicate across then instead of letting one pick a region as far as I can see).
- Cheap: 1€/month for 2 GBs mailbox
- Basic functionalities such as Web interface, SMTP, POP3, CalDav, CardDav are all included.
- They seem to take privacy and security seriously, including email encryption, 2FA signin or recently Autocrypt[1]
- The warm fuzzy feeling of using 100% renewable energy for your email.
Cons:
- No custom domain
- Might have less features than other providers[2]
[1] I am not a security expert nor I have validated their claim
[2] I use notmuch with emacs for reading email, it works great and very fast so I don't really need any other features.
EDIT: I also run my own email server but the effort involved is just not worth it, IMO.
Office 365 Business Essentials. Costs money but get good support and 50GB mailbox. I actually only needed the Exchange Product, but for only a $1.50 a month more I get a whole bunch of things, like SharePoint to play with :)
Very happy Fastmail customer here. Find the web interface more responsive than gmail and the IMAP implementation seems to be play better with apple's mail clients.
The web interface is fantastic, to the point where I use my Fastmail account for most of my email because it's less of a pain in the ass to go through.
The mobile app is also fantastic, but I've had instances in the past where I've received no notifications if an unread email is left in my inbox. I'm the kind of person that won't check my email unless I get a notification, so there have been times when a week has passed, and I've gone to wonder why I'm so unpopular, only to find a hundred unread emails from people wondering where I am.
Adding that connecting everything to a custom domain was a breeze to setup. Also, once your spam filter has been trained, it's very effective (at least in my experience).
Funny story: I've had FastMail for over a year now and still haven't gotten enough spam to train my filter. But the nonpersonalized one has done a pretty good job so far anyhow.
FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc).
RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works.
Zoho Mail is also available free too and it's extremely generous for ad free hosting:
I'm also using Zoho, since it was the only provider I could find that let me use my own domain for free. It's been working great so far.
Up until fairly recently, I was using Pawnmail (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548307), but it became very unreliable. Half of my sent mail bounced, and then it just stopped working altogether.
I've been on the free Zoho plan with my own domain for years. There have been a few minor issues but in all I love them. Can definitely not complain about the price. The web interface is very capable and they seem to take security very seriously.
I've been trying out Protonmail which I'm happy with, but in practice I'm still using Gmail.
I'm reluctant to move away from my @gmail address, and inform all my contacts to use the new one. Besides that, I notice that orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain. I wish I could take my gmail address to another service.
> orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain
Sure, if you had the foresight to reserve your.name@gmail.com twelve years ago, but today you'll have to use your.name772@gmail.com. Chances are that you won't even get incredibly.obscure.name@gmail.com.
However, chances are better for your.name@fastmail.com, your.name@protonmail.com, etc.
That's indeed a good reason to pick another domain. I hope non-gmail domains will become more common because of that. It might lower the barrier to switch for many people.
I have run my own mailserver for not quite 20 years. My preferred mail client is mutt, but I use K9 on Android several times a day and I set up rainloop, a web mail client.
When people ask me for advice and they are not in a position to run their own mail server, I generally recommend Fastmail.
Gmail's labeling system is hard to beat. In particular, any given email can be in several "folders" (a.k.a. labels) at the same time.
All other services I have tried out so far do not replicate this approach so that an email can only be in one folder at a time. Of course, you can copy an email into several folders but then they are physically different emails on the mail server.
Despite this, I switched to the German provider www.mailbox.org as they do not index or process your emails in any other way. And in Germany, the authorities still have a hard time getting access behind the scenes.
Further, mailbox.org allows the creation of mail aliases and also temporary addresses.
The service is 3 € per month which is totally acceptable.
I see mailbox.org as a main competitor of Protonmail and Posteo.
EDIT: additionally, I am using my own domains that are redirected to my mailbox.org account.
75 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadI have a strong belief that FastMail's business model is aligned with my interests/values, and they're a strong open source community member with initiatives like JMAP.
If you ever abandon the domain, someone else could come along and buy the domain and create the same email address. They could then receive any mail intended for that email address (e.g. password resets). This is why I consider any domains purchased for email purposes to be lifetime investments.
One is that you can send email as any other FastMail user, and it won't stop you. SPF passes and DKIM signatures signed (even for other customers' custom domains), totally impossible to tell the difference between a legitimate and spoofed message.
To be fair, DKIM is a borderline useless technology and doesn't really prove anything, but it still appears to be an intentional policy decision by FM to be "lax".
Interestingly enough they do track the real sender in mail headers (which I suspect enables them to mark their own official emails with "verified" badges), but it's a dynamic obfuscated value iirc so it's absolutely worthless for regular users.
It kind of makes my stomach churn when I consider that it's trivial for any other FastMail user to impersonate me, but OTOH, it's best not to be under the delusion that email is authenticated, so I'm staying with them.
Great service, despite my comments.
(Scraped quickly after posting here in a hiring thread, too: "Good day to you and your family. I apologize if the content here-under are contrary to your moral ethics but please treat with absolute secrecy and personal as that is my business proposal to you.")
Pro :
* There is free limited version (500MB, 150 messages per day).
* Web and mobile app
* Security
Cons :
* By design, the mail search is currently limited (wip)
* Currently no integration with calendar or other usefull app
* Caldav/Carddav
* Optional at rest encryption using your PGP public key
* Microsoft Exchange API
* Pretty decent web mail interface
* For iOS/macOS: Configuration profiles that make it really easy to start configuring new devices
* Easy domain aliases
* Cheap and affordable (< 20 Euro per year)
[2] I use notmuch with emacs for reading email, it works great and very fast so I don't really need any other features.
EDIT: I also run my own email server but the effort involved is just not worth it, IMO.
EDIT2: Formatting
The mobile app is also fantastic, but I've had instances in the past where I've received no notifications if an unread email is left in my inbox. I'm the kind of person that won't check my email unless I get a notification, so there have been times when a week has passed, and I've gone to wonder why I'm so unpopular, only to find a hundred unread emails from people wondering where I am.
https://www.zoho.eu/ https://www.zoho.com/ https://runbox.com/
FastMail gets a lot of love here but I think Zoho has more to offer in the ecosystem if you are willing to pay. It's a pretty decent drop in functionality replacement for a lot of Google (docs etc).
RunBox is kind of simple and and old school but it's solid and works.
Zoho Mail is also available free too and it's extremely generous for ad free hosting:
https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html?src=zmail
Scroll down the page a bit under the paid for price listings and it's headed 'free plan'. Includes hosting your own domain too.
Up until fairly recently, I was using Pawnmail (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548307), but it became very unreliable. Half of my sent mail bounced, and then it just stopped working altogether.
I use Thunderbird as a client.
Without the free offering i probably wouldn't have ended up on a paid plan so I'm glad they do it!
Fastmail is a great service if you only use e-mail and you don't usually use Google Docs.
Simple, cheap, secure and reliable. Offers a superior alternative to the mainstream services. IMHO. ;)
I'm reluctant to move away from my @gmail address, and inform all my contacts to use the new one. Besides that, I notice that orally communicating [anything]@gmail.com is much easier than any other domain. I wish I could take my gmail address to another service.
Sure, if you had the foresight to reserve your.name@gmail.com twelve years ago, but today you'll have to use your.name772@gmail.com. Chances are that you won't even get incredibly.obscure.name@gmail.com.
However, chances are better for your.name@fastmail.com, your.name@protonmail.com, etc.
When people ask me for advice and they are not in a position to run their own mail server, I generally recommend Fastmail.
All other services I have tried out so far do not replicate this approach so that an email can only be in one folder at a time. Of course, you can copy an email into several folders but then they are physically different emails on the mail server.
Despite this, I switched to the German provider www.mailbox.org as they do not index or process your emails in any other way. And in Germany, the authorities still have a hard time getting access behind the scenes. Further, mailbox.org allows the creation of mail aliases and also temporary addresses. The service is 3 € per month which is totally acceptable.
I see mailbox.org as a main competitor of Protonmail and Posteo.
EDIT: additionally, I am using my own domains that are redirected to my mailbox.org account.
I am using dreamhost mail with a bunch of domains and a few addresses for these domains that I regularly check.