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Ask HN: Best paid email provider with great support?

2 points by pdevr ↗ HN
I do not have the time to set up and maintain my own email server.

I have too much of my information with one single email provider - yes, the most popular one. The support provided by this provider, even if it is a paid account, doesn't seem to be great.

So, I am looking to switch my primary email provider. I want someone who offers great support.

Which email provider is stable, will be around for another 10-20 years, and offers excellent support?

What do you use and why?

10 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] thread
muhblah
Hetzner in the Webhosting package
__d
Fastmail.com / Pobox.com

I've used pobox.com since 1996. They forward inbound mail to somewhere else, and provide an outgoing SMTP server. So you can manage your email at Google or Apple or Microsoft or wherever, and change that whenever you like, while retaining the same public email address.

Fastmail, OTOH, provides a full IMAP+SMTP service, plus CalDAV and CardDAV. So it's a complete replacement for Google/iCloud/Outlook. It's a paid service, and they are very aware that if you're actually paying, you need decent support. You can use your own domain name too. They've been around since 1999.

Not email, but I can also recommend Fruux as a standalone CalDAV + CardDAV provider. It just works, at least for me. I think they've been in business since 2007.

pdevr
That's a quarter century of experience - thanks a lot for sharing your experience!
stereoradonc
15 years with Fastmail. No complaints.

Went down once in my usage; it was a major DdoS attack, and they have mitigated the issue. Standards compliant email and all bells and whistles.

pdevr
Thank you for sharing this. Can Fastmail employees read your email?
pdevr
Most of you have (so far) recommended Fastmail. Can Fastmail employees access your messages? If they can, how do you mitigate or avoid that risk?
369548684892826
You can mitigate this risk in the same ways that are already available to you with your current email provider, for example using PGP in your email client. But that requires configuring with everyone you communicate with.

ProtonMail tries to solve this problem but it has its drawbacks. If your email is end-to-end encrypted then you can't do server side search, to search through your email it has to be done on the client.

ProtonMail's help page on how to search when all your email is encrypted: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/search/

FastMail's blog post about why they don't do end-to-end encryption: https://fastmail.blog/advanced/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/

vmoore
Protonmail, Tutanota