Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?
I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.
I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.
I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.
What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?
Thanks a lot.
152 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadAlso I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.
this also allows you to write from any email address in your domain (when composing, change the sender dropdown to your *-alias, and the 'from' line appears and is editable
It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.
The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their email inside their premises.
Of the $50, my guess is that $15-20 covers the costs of hosting and support. That's a margin of 70% – could even be closer to 85% which wouldn't be uncommon for SaaS.
However, there are large fixed costs: an office, a development team, etc. Taking these into account, and the fact that Fastmail is a small business - they are never going to have the hyper growth of an ad-supported free model – I'd say this is a profitable, healthy business, charging reasonable amounts.
Could someone do hosted email for $40 for the same thing? Almost certainly. Could they charge $10 for something far less good (reliable, feature complete, less space, worse support, etc) yes – this is what hosting providers like GoDaddy do. Could someone do $10 for the same featureset, profitably? Almost certainly not.
FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of Cyrus (https://cyrusimap.org/) the open source mail server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't cheap.
On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary machines and data centres).
If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.
Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing workflows for me.
Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label and received in 2018. Same with mails relating to scouting. Without labels I can only save it in one folder, and searches are not guaranteed to catch everything unless I constantly make sure a search captures the mail every time I would set a label on it.
And I'll second the "it had better bloody be done this year!" - I'm keen to use it myself.
An example of how GTD is possible through tags and labels: http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-t...
While their offerings differ in the details, by and large they offer the same thigns as fastmail.
ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.
foo+sitename@yourdomain.com
I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/picki...
A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...
If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts.
You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse.
A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.
You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.
You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app.
I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.
Apart from that, in fact I have this long-term project to self-host all my stuff. So far I managed to do this only for my calendar (using Apple's CalDav server). E-Mail is my next goal but even if I have it running, I'll start transitioning slowly. After all I think it's not that much maintanance effort once it's setup as long as it's managed through Ansible or Docker.
Google mail is more feature-rich of course.
I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it.
I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun)
I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.
This website https://www.privacytools.io/ is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.
I would argue that non-technical users are safer using Virtualmin (I can't speak to the security history or features of any other panels) than doing it themselves, because it's easy to make security mistakes when doing it yourself if you don't have a lot of time to research all the options. If someone can invest the time to learn how to manage all of their own services, and can invest the time to build out all of the security features included in a default Virtualmin installation, then absolutely removing the GUI is removing one vector of potential attack; you should always turn off services you don't need. But, based on history, I can say with reasonable confidence that Virtualmin is probably not going to be the way an attacker gets in (it's probably going to be weak passwords, old software, poorly designed custom web apps, etc.).
Disclaimer: I work on Virtualmin.
Self-hosting of Kolab is not very flexible and a lot of work. We use self-hosted SoGO now and are very happy.
The one thing I like about them is privacy.
E.g. the employees don't have access to your mail. Period. Their policy requires them to have your specific approval to access your account/mail.
Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.
> having phone apps reading all my email
That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.
(Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)
If you want this, then I'd check out https://mailbox.org
See https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individua...
Source: https://posteo.de/en/site/sustainability
One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu
They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)
On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you.
[^1]: https://www.iredmail.org/
[^2]: https://mailinabox.email/
Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security, high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups, spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things. Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots...
None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started, but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally managed service.
Depends what kind of security, availability is a part of it. When you forget your password (or it gets hacked and someone changes it), you can just re-deploy the whole thing. On Gmail you might be screwed. On self-deploy backups seem mandatory, which mail user backs up his or her E-Mails?
As far as I have heard, if SPF, DKIM etc etc is properly configured, blocking won't happen. I don't have this running yet but this is my next project. Probably I'll go with postfix, there are bizillion plugins for exactly these things and the configuration will be automated with Ansible. So once it's up and running, I expect this to be pretty much care-free.
I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it.
Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done.
Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.
Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and fairness perspective.
My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be.
I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me.
If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.
I do wish they had better filtering options.
where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?