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Ask HN: Best Paid Email Provider?

13 points by syntaxing ↗ HN
I would love to hear suggestions for best paid e-mail provider (trying to move away from Google). I see the debate a lot about Protonmail vs Fastmail but I don't know the difference besides one being in Switzerland and the other in Australia.

21 comments

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gostsamo
Proton Mail pretends that everything is encrypted and therefore all communication is private. Fastmail does not claim such things, but relies on more conventional mailing services plus corporate clients. All depends how paranoid you are.
vinw
Protonmail have a free plan, whereas Fastmail only has a 30 day trial.

But at the $5/month level Fastmail appear to be much better value (30GB vs 5GB storage, support multiple custom domains vs single domain, 600 alias addresses vs only 5 at protonmail).

I also like what fastmail are doing with JMAP.

As they're both free for at least 30 days try them both out?

edit: fastmail also has good notes integration with iOS if that's of interest

helph67
Have been using Fastmail for many years and found their service and support to be excellent.
saradhi
If you own a domain, at 1$/month zoho mail is suggested. Never had a issues with it.
aprdm
Fastmail has been really solid, I'm actually impressed! It supports multiple domains from one account, unlimited aliases, their calendar/mail app is good, their folders works really well.. I'm happy to have moved to it.
tacker2000
Australia is in the Five Eyes group, so Fastmail would be mich more susceptible to US “intervention” that a Swiss company.

One could compare that also to Megaupload (NZ) vs Rapidshare (CH) in the past…

schappim
As a half-Swiss/half-Australian, I'd still go w/ Fastmail.

It is not as if Swiss companies have a perfect track record of NOT working w/ three letter agencies based in the US[1].

    [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/
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kureikain
What is your goal to migrate way from Google. Is it the privacy or the lock in?

If it's the privacy. then go with Protonmail. ProtonMail has some silly/marketing claim like "encryption" email which I think it just a marketing term. But they do has some nice encryption features intgrate nighly on their web app such as gpp and they are also maintain https://openpgpjs.org/

So I suggest to go with ProtonMail if you are more about privacy.

If you are more about vendor lock in, then you have to go with a provider that allow you to export data easiser. fastmail has JMAP for that.

On the side note, this is the reason I have been working on an email forwarding service[1] which has a REST API to export email out. You can literally `curl https://api.hanami.run/v1/mails` to get email in JSON format.

---

[1] https://hanami.run

tofukid
Protonmail emails are end-to-end encrypted such that the staff can’t just login to the database and read your email. Sure, maybe it’s not going to protect you from the NSA, but it’s a lot better than leaving everyone’s emails unencrypted at rest for any admin to access.
Vlad81b
And you send over insecure protocol like SMTP? Yes, it encrypt on server but does not encrypt sending and recv - email protocol does not work - that why gmail have green/red alert on income email/
tofukid
Yes, SMTP is insecure. Protonmail emails are end-to-end encrypted at rest. So server admins or whoever can’t just look at all your emails whenever they want, potentially years after they’ve been received.

Contrast that with Fastmail, Gmail, or other providers. At any moment someone who works there can look at customer emails. I prefer my emails encrypted at rest.

tofukid
I would choose Protonmail because your emails won’t be readable by their staff.

I’m on Fastmail but will switch to Protonmail when my plan is due to renew. My emails are my life and it’s unsettling that people I don’t know can access them, and that they sit on a server unencrypted.

sharmi
I use Migadu.

Unlimited domains and email ids. The limit is on the number of emails you send in a day.

replwoacause
I’ve been very happy with Fastmail after leaving Google Business.
quickthrower2
I like zoho for the value. A very featured service including unlimited add on domains and catchalls for about $20/y for a user.
ramtatatam
This is not really "email provider" but how about hosting your own email server? I'm hosting mine since 2012. This is not one-click thing, you need to understand many concepts (which if you don't know about may result in your emails landing in spam) - so I would not recommend if you just want to have an email account now. I'm collecting my lessons and building a set of podman containers to make the whole thing less of the hassle, I'm thinking about publishing this on github, though I'm not sure if there are people like me who would make use of thing like this.
syntaxing
I love the idea of self host but my greatest fear is what you mentioned, being marked as spam. Have you had that happen to you where your emails wont reach people because its marked spam?
ramtatatam
I have experienced it at some point in 2017. That day I learned about helpful websites you can use to rate your email (which is helpful because you can realize that your domain/IP is blacklisted somewhere for previous owner was spamming from it). In 2017 I learned I have to add DKIM and SPF and had no problem with spam since then. But this thought me a lesson to go through ratings every now and again, just to stay up to date with new mechanisms that are being used by biggest email providers (gmail, yahoo, etc).
Graffur
I have been using Hey and I like it. I plan to keep using it.