HN Explorer

Best paid email hosting service in 2019?

29 points by miles ↗ HN
Is there a paid email hosting service along the lines of easyDNS for domains or Tarsnap for backups? Something clean and geek-friendly with excellent spam filtering and reliable delivery?

Looking for an alternative to Rackspace (due to poor spam filtering of late as well as the general change in direction[0]), FastMail (due to TAAB[1]), and G Suite (which I already use for another domain).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19288905

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654434

40 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 99.0 ms ] thread
O365
Office365/exchange online
tmaly
At my day job we recently switched to Outlook Office 365. The app for my phone works fantastic. Also the web interface is amazing. We were previously doing our own, but squirrel mail or horde were just too painful
usr1106
At a previous job we used o365 calendar. It was extremely confusing. A company with 90% of experienced software developers/geeks/hackers could not use it. (Yeah, the choice had been made by marketing/HR)
tmaly
I remember using Calendar as an intern at Intel in the 90s. What I liked was the ability to schedule conference rooms with it.

I find it very intuitive to use.

What part did you find most confusing?

chrismeller
Every company I've worked for since somewhere around 2015 has used Office 365 (though one or two did self-host their own Exchange). I also recently got fed up with Gmail for a couple of reasons and moved all my personal things over to Microsoft's Hosted Exchange (O365 minus the O, basically).

While there are certainly some things I don't like about the UI, the migration tool never worked for me, and it feels like everything in the admin needs some good QA for error handling things appropriately, from the client side it's by no means sexy or exciting it... just works. I've decided that email is one of those utility type things that I don't want to be sexy or exciting, I just want it to work reliably and not have to think about it. Ever.

Given that all I really use it for is my own email and personal calendar the $4/user/month price is a tad steep, but with the handful of accounts I need I'm fine spending the price of a couple of cups of coffee for the simplicity. I can also mix and match just email vs. full Office 365 licenses, so that's nice.

prashnts
I’v been happily using Migadu.com for a couple years now. Few spams do make it, but it’s affordable and very generous with their plans.
miles
Thanks so much - this looks like just the sort of service I was looking for.

While digging around for more user experiences, I stumbled onto this similar question from 8 months back (867 points and 576 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574&p=2

Sorry to have missed it before posting.

jazoom
How is their deliverability? They had trouble with that back when I first checked them out.
captn3m0
Much better now. Haven’t had any complaints in the last year.
prashnts
I don’t send many emails, but/so it’s never been an issue for me — I don’t really know how they compare with others.
jazoom
It wasn't about sending many emails. Many of the few test emails I sent ended up in spam. They were struggling with the issues of being a new email provider.
unstatusthequo
ProtonMail
jammygit
ProtonMail doesn’t support email export, or at least didn’t a few years ago when I switched to fastmail
lighthazard
ProtonMail's spam filtering is subpar to most of the other suggestions here. The UX isn't that great and the apps are crap. Good/reliable email service though.
LeoPanthera
No support for IMAP or SMTP is a dealbreaker for me.
reyuzenfold
They have a bridge application you can run on you computer to use with local mail clients. I understand the reasoning for not having it normally, but it is rather annoying.
burgerzzz
Fastmail has been working swimmingly for me over the last several years.
wrycoder
Fastmail web interface easily beats the native Apple email apps for features. Search is very fast, and it’s easy to isolate chains out of a 15 year deep pile.
fred_is_fred
How does Fastmail do with spam filtering?
lighthazard
Not as good as Google's :(.
nathan-io
Google's spam filtering can be a bit too good.
shstalwart
Going on two years with fastmail, I get zero spam. I'd say its good enough.
jboles
I’ve had a paid subscription to Fastmail for 10+ years. After thinking that email was not worth paying for. It’s that good.
jszymborski
Enjoying mailbox.org's feature set :)

Webmail UI is just OK, but that's a non-issue if you use Thunderbird/Outlook/etc...

burlesona
Has anyone here used Helm? (https://thehelm.com/)

I love the concept of having my own little email box and their VPN system seems to handle most of the ISP issues with this approach, but I’ve been reluctant to test it out given the upfront cost.

Curious is anyone here has experience with it... care to share?

jammygit
Doesn’t seem to ship outside the USA
NotSammyHagar
I have one. I should post a longer review at some point. It works great for email, sending/ receiving. As they tell you, external sites treat your email as spam at first because it's coming from a new domain, you have to mark you email as not spam.

I wish it had a web page like interface like gmail. I suspect they didn't do that for security. Also I'd like more support for basically hosting domains on it - I have multiple domains and get email and that all works reliably. I'd like to have an easy way to setup other web page references on the domains and host simple pages I setup. You can get them to configure your dns to add more sites but I haven't bothered. I'd like an easy to use setup. The big negative is they will host your name servers for your domain, not you.

You have to use the app on your cell phone to administer it. A web interface would be much easier to work with.

Android and ios phones have built in apps, uses what looks like good security (tls etc). It has tons of space on it. I have a catchall account on the main domain, so junkmail@<mydomain>.com goes to it. I have bought a few domains over time and I put them on their too. I can't figure out how to setup the catchall account.

If you want personal email server, this is great, works reliably.

quickthrower2
I use Zoho. For about 20 bucks a year I can add unlimited domains and the UI is quite nice. I use catchalls with rules so I can have a different email address for every login and every subscription.
fghtr
https://posteo.de

Based in Germany. 1 euro/month for 2 GB. Green energy. 3 aliases included. Anonymous payment with a post letter. Comprehensive encryption.

(happy user)

Upd: Free Javascript as confirmed by FSF: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-javascript-guideline...

Other recommendations by the FSF: https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems

stupidperson
Green energy in Germany.. this is coal + Russian gas, right? Unless exactly the right amount of wind is blowing.
ZohoMailSupport
@miles, you can try out Zoho Mail ( https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html ). We have free edition and also Trial option for Paid edition. You can even configure Split Delivery during evaluation wherein you can have some mailboxes hosted in Zoho and the rest in your existing mail system. Refer to https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/email-routing.ht... for detailed instructions. I have listed some of the articles which might be of interest to you :

Features - https://www.zoho.com/mail/features.html Security - https://www.zoho.com/mail/security.html Ad free and Privacy policy - https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html Advanced Spam Control Settings - https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/organization-spa... Delivery status indicator - https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/email-status.html

You can reach us through https://www.zoho.com/mail/contact.html for any assistance.