coincidentally (but unrelated), what is this crowd's current mail hosting recommendation?
it has consistently been fastmail in the past, and i have had a great time with them over the last three years, but it's always nice to know what else is out there.
for better or worse i've also come to use fastmail for dns management (tolerable) and even for http hosting (awful, but occasionally convenient).
History really does repeat itself. It won't be long before Cloudflare provides email, a search engine, cloud hosting, DNS, etc. and before you know it, we have another Google!
I would much prefer multiple smaller companies that do one thing well, than a monolith that, even assuming they did everything well, has complete control over our digital lives.
I'm not a fan of Cloudflare increasing centralization, but I'd take a Google-sized Cloudflare and Cloudflare-sized Google over our curre t situation any day.
Agreed. I switched the last time they were mentioned on here. I haven't had any issues and migrating was relatively painless. I still need a shared calendar solution that passes the wife test. For now, we've kept our family calendar on Gooole.
Spoke to someone who switched and said that his sent emails were ending up in Spam initially for others - could even be related to other servers but that it eventually mitigated itself and he is quite happy with the service.
As my mail client just downloads my email and I use my own domain, PurelyMail is strictly for delivering and receiving as well as having a nice webmail, for me the answers to this question they posted at https://purelymail.com/docs/companyPolicy#bus are sufficient to deal with my concern for now
I'm thinking of trying to stand up my own server on my own domain and see if I can get a good deliverability established.
It may not have better uptime than Fastmail or Gmail but it's also very unlikely to ever come under focused attack.
There's a certain resiliency in having a lot of small entities doing the same thing, compared to a handful of gargantuan ones that can take down huge user populations in an instant.
You could also stand up a receiving server and then relay outbound through something like Postmark. Deliverability is the hardest part, it's worth it to farm it out.
^^^ This 100%. It's relatively easy these days to run a mail server, inbound even has a level of resilience that serves most people.
It's being delivered into the inbox that is an issue. You can eventually get there with a good IP and time but it's best to farm it out - plenty of services out there for it.
The PRO/CON page [0] says they don't have 2FA yet, is that still true?
And anything else you'd mention as a con? I'm trying to remember why I didn't put them on my short list, maybe it was the 2FA thing, but I think there was something else.
I've been using https://mailfence.com/ for a couple years, only one outage I can remember and the one time I had to contact support they resolved my issue very quickly.
Me too. This is my third year with them I think. I believe there has been three downs. The worst was for almost a day IIRC.
I like mailfence for several reasons. Quick, at personal support is one important factor.
However I do think it would suit any provider if they publicized an annotated downtown log, so that we didn't have to guess how often or why they had issues.
Yandex gives me storage, reliability, custom domains and government spying for free. How can Fastmail compete when it charges for the same things? They don't even have custom domains on their cheaper plan.
Switched from Gmail to Fastmail in 2008. No regrets. Haven't considered anything else since (and didn't notice these recent problems I now read about). Email hosting is something I'd want to change very rarely. Track record counts for a lot; good-AND-profitable email hosting is tough, and I generally wouldn't trust any entity [in this space] that's been around for <5 years. Fastmail's been at it for 20+ years now, and I'm reasonably sure I don't have to worry about changing anything for at least another 5-10 years.
>coincidentally (but unrelated), what is this crowd's current mail hosting recommendation?
I had been using my ISP's email for imap connectivity from my home and phone.
They are getting out of the business of supplying the circuit I have with them and am now moving away from that ISP.
I chose to host my own email (I already owned my own domains and hosted my own MTA for those domains) on a local imap server. Heck, I even host my own authoritative DNS zones.
While there are single point of failure modes with that, nothing I do with my personal domains would kill me if my (multiple) ISP links are down for a few days.
Not the solution for everyone, but it works for me.
Fastmail is on the expensive side by my standards, and has occasional service interruptions like this, but I'm basically happy with them and would go with them again. A much cheaper option is mxroute.com (watch for a black friday promo) but that is more DIY and is a smaller operation. In all cases, if you want a long term email address, use your own domain (doing that costs extra in Fastmail's case) rather than one belonging to the host. That lets you switch hosts if something makes you want to do that.
If you want to use your own domain it's $50. I'm disappointed that they stopped the $10/y plan, since I had a standing offer to give those away to friends and family in order to get them off of gmail/yahoo mail (I'd pay the first year and renewals would be up to the recipient). The current plans are a bit too expensive for that, and more than most non-cognoscenti would be willing to pay renewals for.
The thing about most SaaS companies is a majority of your support calls come from your lowest tier customers. In a service like email where a huge number of problems are a mystery due to other mail servers possibly mishandling email Fastmail have probably added up the numbers and realised that dropping the cheapest plans results in significantly less support costs.
I was on a lifetime plan years ago, which to their credit they continued to honor even after they stopped offering it to new customers. I still woudl be, but needed some additional feature, maybe additional domains, can't recall, and now I'm on the $50/year plan. Still worth it to me.
mailbox.org left a good impression. Linux people who seem to know what they are doing. Hosted in Germany, you are not required to tell them any contact information (not sure how they could trace you via the payments).
I have not really used them, although I have their cheapest account hanging around. Not able to make a recommendation, but maybe someone else can comment.
Been using them for nearly two years now. I’m on the 2,50€ plan, which I think is now legacy and was upped to 3€, because that’s the cheapest plan which supports own domains.
They offer a bunch of extra stuff like cloud, video conferencing, calendar etc. but I’ve never touched it.
In my opinion the interface is terrible and the settings are not so user friendly, in the settings menu is a kinda sub-settings menu which seems to be embedded from a subsystem…? But if you’ve got everything setup and provided you’re using your own email client, the service is top notch.
Never had a problem, maintenance and stuff like this was always communicated clearly and early. They split the parent company behind mailbox.org into its own one and even this one was very nice communicated.
I’d love to try providers like Purelymail because I think 30€ per year for my few mails is a bit overkill but the money is well spent on people knowing what they are doing and most important, the servers are all hosted in Germany.
YMMV but I’m happy with them and would definitely recommend them!
I wish they had an app or an app that would make catch-all feature more usable. Ability to reply from any random email I had used as long as it's on my domain.
For basics they are fine. Their cheapest plan is not the old cheapest. They added some new plans and now on cheapest plan there's literally no support (not even email or ticket) and many features simply cut off - no personal domain either.
IMHO one must not consider a paid email provider if it doesn't support custom domain, no matter how cheap that plan is.
UX is pathetic and there's no sign of that being fixed.
I still quite like Fastmail. I'm also looking forward to getting the convenient new masked email addresses once 1Password 8 is stable (you can create them now in Fastmail's UI, but it'll be a lot easier with the browser extension)
Fastmail's been great for me, I love it. Unless I can find a similar premium domestic (US) offering that's near feature parity, and not a trillion dollar megacorp, I couldn't imagine leaving them.
Can anyone educate me why companies choose to buy secondary domains for their status pages? I find it confusing and would trust `status.company.tld` immediately rather than having to think about it and verify - which you can’t really do when the issue comes up.
Allows for completely separate stacks running the status page, including DNS and registrar. In theory, you could run your status page using zero infrastructure common with your main domain.
It wasn't DNS in principle that caused the outage.
If I recall correctly, it was their DNS servers that did that in a convoluted kind of way but not because of DNS as such. Due to some connection error or another the servers that also run DNS ordered the routers to withdraw the BGP routes to all Facebook properties which in turn killed access to said DNS servers.
Everyone hireable for ops not only knows what you meant to say, not what you said, but that they’re also solving for completely different problems than you’ve inferred. It’s not about who hosts the target.
Having it on the same domain could be a single point of failure in the case that their DNS nameservers go down. If their status page is on the same domain and they have bad DNS issues, it would bring down their status page as well.
I assumed it was because of you're having issues with your primary domain (bad DNS records, DNS provider outage, etc) then you've got a separate domain with a separate provider, that hopefully has a more separated failure domain
The obvious answer to me is complete isolation, especially if the issue is related to DNS.
If you’re having major network problems, there’s a good chance your DNS server will go down too, which would more than likely take down your subdomain as well.
You would want to host the status page on completely independent infra, such that if your service goes down, it doesn't take down the status page as well. This includes DNS, hence the separate domain.
For example, with Facebook's recent outage, because they hosted their status page on the same DNS server as their regular service, they weren't able to communicate the outage on their status page.
Is there any email service that can be used in concert with a password keeper like 1Pass or LastPass to generate unique email addresses in addition to unique passwords per site? I think this might be a nice way of improving privacy and safeguarding email from spam, or at least help identifying the source of leaks.
I own my own domain, and thus have the luxury of using *@domain.com as my email. So when I give an email to SketchySite.com, it’s sketchysite@domain.com.
Really easy, and costs me very little to do (CloudFlare is my registrar; Fastmail my email host). Highly recommend you buy a domain for email. Looks professional, too.
Unfortunately if you do not fully own your own ICANN registrar, for example, like Facebook [1], then your domain remains open to the weakest link: humans and social engineering [2].
An Njal.la hosted domain was successfully transferred to Namecheap (through no fault of Njal.la). Obviously, this is very rare and extremley targeted.
I do this too, with Fastmail, but they do have a limit on how many aliases you can have without paying them more (last I checked).
The way around this is that they let you do alias+something@domain.com, or for sites that won't accept a plus address, alias@something.domain.com. This works very well for me, although I get funny looks when some vendor asks me for an email address and I give them e.g. alias@your_company.domain.com. Especially fun when you end up having to spell it out while the clerk eyeballs you like you're trying to screw with them.
I started doing this thinking it would let me identify who was selling/leaking emails to spammers. I now have a lot of unique email addresses like this, one per vendor. Fastmail is either excellent at filtering spam without me ever seeing it, or vendors just aren't selling/leaking my address(es); the only 'vendor' that I'm sure distributed my address after 3+ years is a state government entity.
This was a great feature of Fastmail but it isn't portable as many other mail providers don't support it. So if you think you might want to switch in the future, keep it in mind, the + addressing is easier to migrate to other providers.
Technically you can already do this with gmail using the +tag trick, e.g. myemail+tag@gmail.com, where the "tag" can be the name of the website you are signing up for. The emails will all go to your myemail@gmail.com account, but they'll be tagged with the tag.
If your email dress is firstname@domain.com, Fastmail redirects e-mail sent to mysite@firstname.domain.com to your inbox. For example, if your e-mail is bob@dole.com, you could register on Facebook with facebook@bob.dole.com, and e-mails to that address would show up in your inbox.
I’ve been on Fastmail for about 4 months now. This is the first service interruption I’ve seen & didn’t even notice it. I’ve used a lot of other providers, but from what I’ve experienced over these past months, Fastmail is one of the best. Their IOS app is great as well. Any provider is susceptible to outages due to volumetric attacks.
Their customer service is amazing as well. Ive been a user for 3-4 years now and when I first started I contacted them about several issues which were all purely me being a noob, and not only did I hear back from a human being, it was quick and the answers were immediately helpful. I cant speak highly enough of Fastmail as a user
For me, I had a bad experience that soured me on them. I signed up for service and forgot to change over my credit card or something and the service lapsed. So a few months later, I signed back up for another six months of service and it said I had only 3 months of service. So I double check and I did sign up for the six months of service. So I contact customer service and they say that they were giving me service when I wasn't signed up so they're going to charge me for that even though I wasn't even using it then. So I ended up only getting half of the service that I paid for in the end and they were just like tough luck when I contacted them.
Im not sure what you expected to happen there? You still had service (meaning they didnt just cut off your communications in case it was important) and when you came back they charge you for it. I think it depends on how you view that. One one hand they didn't just turn everything off the minute you didnt pay, on the other hand they wanted you to pay for what you were still using..
I'm being pretty clear with my expectations. I didn't expect to pay for a service I wasn't using and I didn't expect to be charged after the fact without being informed ahead of time, when I signed up for new service.
Their Android app also doesn't have offline support, which makes me sad. Email is a great fit for offline first, and it's always frustrating to see a notification and tap it to get a loading screen.
Not sure yet. ProtonMail doesn't work offline either and is apparently not straightforward to use with other clients. I wish it were sensible to host your own email, but I've heard that's a horrible misadventure.
ProtonMail iOS app works offline, at least you can read email and draft email offline. The client is also open source but they don’t seen overly keen on accepting contributions.
I wouldn't switch mail providers over this... There are other email clients out there (although, it's sort of nice to use a first party one), and IMAP (or JMAP) should work fine for offline.
I would probably not switch if it were only issue #1 or issue #2, but with both it has me shopping. I might fail to find a better alternative, of course, but I haven't given up yet.
A different client is definitely the fallback, though I haven't found a great one of those either. Granted it's been ~6 years since I last searched.
Do they have this feature that if you have catch-all enabled and you had just used a random email on some website random-email-addr-smjgg@your-domain.tld and you receive email sent to that address and when you reply it automatically starts the reply from random-email-addr-smjgg@ and not from some preset-alias@?
Because on Mail.app (iOS/Mac) if you want to reply from that random-email-addr-smjgg@ you have to first add that in "Email Address" for that account in Settings. I am trying to find an app that does it (my mail provider is not fastmail, it's mailbox).
I don't think this feature is present in any third party mail app (and frankly mailbox is not going to release an app with this feature) and honestly that would be weird to manage as in how do you know gmail.com is not the user's own domain but some-other.tld is. But Fastmail does know this as their app is not a common third party app.
Lack of this feature makes full use of catch-all very unintuitive.
On mac, that feature is actually available in MailMate, which remains the best in class email client I’m aware of. It’s the only one with that feature though.
This features (to reply using the alias the email was sent to) was available on AquaMail Android (not free) years ago, though you had to configure it which was painful if you changed phones a lot.
Thunderbird can do this with some configuration for replying to emails - set the pattern of the "Reply from this identity when delivery headers match" value of Account Settings. It's not as good as the addon Virtual Identity used to be, but it works for me 85% of the time (see https://github.com/absorb-it/Virtual-Identity/issues/22#issu...).
For new messages you still need an extension like Identity Chooser or to manually edit the from header before sending.
Absolutely. I’ve been a happy customer as my primary email service (for my entire family, via a custom family domain) since 2012 and while there have been outages in that time I’ve honestly never “noticed” one until I see it posted somewhere like here. I love Fastmail and hope they continue doing what they’re doing for a long time to come.
Ideally this wouldnt need to happen.
In a perfect world we should just be able to shut down ideas we dont like without resorting to this kind of behaviour.
Fyi (in case fastmail is reading this), fastmail is down (smtp and web site) right now, though status page says issue is resolved. I can handle the interruption but it would be nice if monitoring picked up stuff like this and updated the status page automatically. That might be a decent cloudflare workers app...
It's not. Unfortunately. Might be up for seconds and then down again for minutes.
Very annoying. I am not going to complain though. They've offered stable service for years.
I've been using Fastmail for years now and love it. I understand that no SaaS can have 100% perfect uptime always, and this is the first Fastmail outage that I can recall experiencing. So, just in case anyone is worried seeing this, I'm a happy paying customer and Fastmail has a lot of goodwill built up with me.
FastMail used to be awesome till two years ago when the downfall started. First it was the makeover and then things stopped working.
At this point from a privacy perspective they are terrible. Not only because of Taliban style Aussie privacy laws but their system too is anti-privacy.
FM system automatically creates contact lists from all emails, automatically backs up deleted emails, drafts etc. You have no control on this and is ideal for govt data mining and social graph generation. Sure they say it is for your benefit but then allow me to turn it off. Given people regularly get home police visits in Australia for Facebook posts and overall police state climate does not help.
So time to stay clear of FM. They want you to pay money so their govt can trawl through your email and possibly impersonate you if need arises. No thanks, I can get that at Google.
Tutanota and Mailbox.org have superior offering with encryption at rest. Tuta has clients for all platforms with client device based crypto.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadit has consistently been fastmail in the past, and i have had a great time with them over the last three years, but it's always nice to know what else is out there.
for better or worse i've also come to use fastmail for dns management (tolerable) and even for http hosting (awful, but occasionally convenient).
And seems appropriate if FastMail is having DDoS issues.
I would much prefer multiple smaller companies that do one thing well, than a monolith that, even assuming they did everything well, has complete control over our digital lives.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing/
https://www.cloudflare.com/email-forwarding-waitlist-sign-up...
Spoke to someone who switched and said that his sent emails were ending up in Spam initially for others - could even be related to other servers but that it eventually mitigated itself and he is quite happy with the service.
It may not have better uptime than Fastmail or Gmail but it's also very unlikely to ever come under focused attack.
There's a certain resiliency in having a lot of small entities doing the same thing, compared to a handful of gargantuan ones that can take down huge user populations in an instant.
It's being delivered into the inbox that is an issue. You can eventually get there with a good IP and time but it's best to farm it out - plenty of services out there for it.
I've been doing that for decades.
I had some deliverability issues back in the early aughts, but I haven't had issues for many years.
Over the past decade or so, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and not running an open relay (not that I ever did that) has kept deliverability very good for me.
That said, none of the IP addresses I've used are on consumer ISP ranges. That may have an impact too.
And anything else you'd mention as a con? I'm trying to remember why I didn't put them on my short list, maybe it was the 2FA thing, but I think there was something else.
0: https://www.migadu.com/procon/
I like mailfence for several reasons. Quick, at personal support is one important factor.
However I do think it would suit any provider if they publicized an annotated downtown log, so that we didn't have to guess how often or why they had issues.
I had been using my ISP's email for imap connectivity from my home and phone.
They are getting out of the business of supplying the circuit I have with them and am now moving away from that ISP.
I chose to host my own email (I already owned my own domains and hosted my own MTA for those domains) on a local imap server. Heck, I even host my own authoritative DNS zones.
While there are single point of failure modes with that, nothing I do with my personal domains would kill me if my (multiple) ISP links are down for a few days.
Not the solution for everyone, but it works for me.
I have not really used them, although I have their cheapest account hanging around. Not able to make a recommendation, but maybe someone else can comment.
They offer a bunch of extra stuff like cloud, video conferencing, calendar etc. but I’ve never touched it.
In my opinion the interface is terrible and the settings are not so user friendly, in the settings menu is a kinda sub-settings menu which seems to be embedded from a subsystem…? But if you’ve got everything setup and provided you’re using your own email client, the service is top notch.
Never had a problem, maintenance and stuff like this was always communicated clearly and early. They split the parent company behind mailbox.org into its own one and even this one was very nice communicated.
I’d love to try providers like Purelymail because I think 30€ per year for my few mails is a bit overkill but the money is well spent on people knowing what they are doing and most important, the servers are all hosted in Germany.
YMMV but I’m happy with them and would definitely recommend them!
For basics they are fine. Their cheapest plan is not the old cheapest. They added some new plans and now on cheapest plan there's literally no support (not even email or ticket) and many features simply cut off - no personal domain either.
IMHO one must not consider a paid email provider if it doesn't support custom domain, no matter how cheap that plan is.
UX is pathetic and there's no sign of that being fixed.
If you just need to receive and send occasional email at your domain however, iCloud+ may be sufficient and you may already be paying for it.
If I recall correctly, it was their DNS servers that did that in a convoluted kind of way but not because of DNS as such. Due to some connection error or another the servers that also run DNS ordered the routers to withdraw the BGP routes to all Facebook properties which in turn killed access to said DNS servers.
If you’re having major network problems, there’s a good chance your DNS server will go down too, which would more than likely take down your subdomain as well.
For example, with Facebook's recent outage, because they hosted their status page on the same DNS server as their regular service, they weren't able to communicate the outage on their status page.
Really easy, and costs me very little to do (CloudFlare is my registrar; Fastmail my email host). Highly recommend you buy a domain for email. Looks professional, too.
An Njal.la hosted domain was successfully transferred to Namecheap (through no fault of Njal.la). Obviously, this is very rare and extremley targeted.
[1] https://registrarsec.com/ [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8833/dark-fail-fake-court-...
The way around this is that they let you do alias+something@domain.com, or for sites that won't accept a plus address, alias@something.domain.com. This works very well for me, although I get funny looks when some vendor asks me for an email address and I give them e.g. alias@your_company.domain.com. Especially fun when you end up having to spell it out while the clerk eyeballs you like you're trying to screw with them.
I started doing this thinking it would let me identify who was selling/leaking emails to spammers. I now have a lot of unique email addresses like this, one per vendor. Fastmail is either excellent at filtering spam without me ever seeing it, or vendors just aren't selling/leaking my address(es); the only 'vendor' that I'm sure distributed my address after 3+ years is a state government entity.
It looks like all tiers can do 600 + 15 per user; I don't remember if it's always been like this, but I was pretty sure there was a limit.
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360060591073
Looks like a subtle difference between alias, with its outbound identity, and catchall inbound.
This was a great feature of Fastmail but it isn't portable as many other mail providers don't support it. So if you think you might want to switch in the future, keep it in mind, the + addressing is easier to migrate to other providers.
Otherwise I've been super happy with them.
A different client is definitely the fallback, though I haven't found a great one of those either. Granted it's been ~6 years since I last searched.
Open to suggestions!
https://k9mail.app/
Because on Mail.app (iOS/Mac) if you want to reply from that random-email-addr-smjgg@ you have to first add that in "Email Address" for that account in Settings. I am trying to find an app that does it (my mail provider is not fastmail, it's mailbox).
Lack of this feature makes full use of catch-all very unintuitive.
For new messages you still need an extension like Identity Chooser or to manually edit the from header before sending.
That said, it does sound the status page could use an update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28964509
At this point from a privacy perspective they are terrible. Not only because of Taliban style Aussie privacy laws but their system too is anti-privacy.
FM system automatically creates contact lists from all emails, automatically backs up deleted emails, drafts etc. You have no control on this and is ideal for govt data mining and social graph generation. Sure they say it is for your benefit but then allow me to turn it off. Given people regularly get home police visits in Australia for Facebook posts and overall police state climate does not help.
So time to stay clear of FM. They want you to pay money so their govt can trawl through your email and possibly impersonate you if need arises. No thanks, I can get that at Google.
Tutanota and Mailbox.org have superior offering with encryption at rest. Tuta has clients for all platforms with client device based crypto.
https://therecord.media/ddos-attacks-hit-multiple-email-prov...