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Ask HN: Best Gmail Alternative?

29 points by reissbaker ↗ HN
I keep seeing threads on HN about people getting locked out of their Google accounts for automated errors like the .DS_Store issue, uploading blank text files, or even just mysteriously for no apparent reason — and of course, Google customer support is nonexistent and won't help you recover your account.

Since losing email access would be pretty devastating for most online accounts, I'm wondering: what are the best alternative email hosts from a customer service perspective?

(I do not want to host my own mail server.)

55 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] thread
leed25d
I use Yandex. It is not my primary account, I use Gmail for that. I use Yandex for a grease trap. If I need to sign up for an account just to read an article, use Yandex. If I need to buy something from a seldom used website, use Yandex. You get the idea.
Minor49er
I have enjoyed Outlook, though I can't say I've spoken to their customer service.

Otherwise if you go with a smaller service and use it to send messages to Gmail recipients, there is a good chance that Google will automatically reject your messages as unsolicited spam, even if you were emailed first and even if you have no URLs in your message.

More to the point on your question, you could create a second account on Google or another service, then automatically forward all of your email to that. If you get locked out of your primary account, you will at least have a backup somewhere

freedomben
If it's just a personal mailbox, Proton Mail has been amazing.

It it's a custom domain or business emails, I've been using Zoho Mail for a couple of years and it has been fantastic. It's also the most reasonable pricing I've seen at $1 per user per month (compared with GSuite at $6 per user per month).

ksaj
I use Zoho. The spam detection is really good there, which is a bonus.
sdwolfz
I've bought Proton Mail. But I don't like the fact that I depend on their mobile app instead of being able to use K9-Mail and their proton-bridge on desktop to connect to Thunderbird. Also they don't allow you to initiate an email with "From:" begin an alias (like "me+somealias@mydomain.com", you can only use "me@mydomain.com") (workaround is doing it from Thunderbird). I even requested this as a feature but their Support rejected the proposal.

Because of those I think I'll switch to something else (maybe Fastmail or Migadu) when my subscription ends in two years (I bought it with a 2 year discount and a sale).

decrypt
Any standard email host with IMAP access and a custom domain will do. I like Migadu.
minroot
https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-rec...
kevincox
I tried out Migadu but I found their calendar service lacking for me. Specially I wanted to be able to generate private calendar links to be imported by others. Unfortunately I also need to tie my calendar and email provider together for server-side scheduling on mobile.

The other oddity is that the expect you to set up the DNS records before they active inbound mail on the account. This means that in order to get set up you will need a period where mail is rejected. However by reaching out to support I could get them to active the account first, then I could add the records for a zero-downtime migration.

Other than that the service looked really good.

outime
>I keep seeing threads on HN about

Gmail alternatives. I’m not sure if anybody else noticed this but every week or every other week there’s the same thread about alternatives. Sure I can flag it but I don’t get it, the suggestions are always exactly the same, no difference whatsoever. Is it so that people just don’t like to use the search function?

Klonoar
HN has fallen into a bit of a rut on a few topics lately, e.g:

- macOS “failing” and Linux on the desktop

- Mozilla and Firefox death spiral

- Electron and yearning for native applications

- And the aforementioned topic here

That said, for the most part it’s really only one at a time on the front page so it’s easy to skip if you wanted to.

As to why this phenomenon exists, I dunno. Reddit has the same problem, though I think it’s more pronounced there due to scale.

sam0x17
"The year of the Linux Desktop" is sort of an in-meme that transported to HN over from Slashdot and has been around since the very early 00s. Nothing to see here on that one -- every year is the "year of the linux desktop"
Klonoar
I mean, I agree with you - I was on /. way back in the day, and was a writer for Linux.com. I've lived the meme. :)

My point (which might be better re-worded) is that I've noticed it's picked up more on HN in the past year. No idea why.

sam0x17
Well slashdot has editors. HN is all upvoting without real editorial selection going on, so instead of seeing the regularly scheduled yearly "year of the linux desktop" post you'll see it 2-3 times a month because it's a popular idea and many are still encountering it for the first time (given how rampant mac use has become in the dev community)
lsferreira42
And shell script, there is a sudden interest in shell scripting here last month
dang
Hmm - not so many big threads as far as I can tell, although there was a major one in the last year.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

jsnell
In the last month:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30223538

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30128198

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30071730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30004468

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725018

And the fairly related discussions, where the original topic was not asking for recommendations, but that was what a lot of the discussion ended up about:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30345201

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30248203

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30025276

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29997776

For one month, that is starting to feel quite repetitive.

dang
Ah, that's where they all were :)

Good point!

kgwxd
I've been on this site for 11 years, your mention of a search function baffled me. I see it now.
gigglesupstairs
It has bad discoverability because of its placement. I am sure placing it on top would seemingly be an obvious resolution here but looking at the age of HN, I feel @dang must have had some reasons for it to not be on top already.
k__
I switched to Protonmail a few months ago.

They are okayish.

Their security features are awesome. The onion app is outdated. The UI is generally a bit meh. The mobile app sucks.

Skunkleton
> Their security features are awesome.

The certainly implement a layer of security on top of email, but as always the weakest link defines the strength of the chain. How often can you use these extra security features, given the capabilities of your peer? Back in the PGP days, I think I was able to send a real (not just some test email) encrypted email less than 5 or so times? I can't imagine things have gotten much better since then.

Edit: not saying to give up, but perhaps email just isn't a good choice for secure communication. I've had lots of success with Signal for example.

julienpalard
Just choose one that pleases you / make sense for you.

I mean, email is federated, let's use it this nice feature wisely and stop trying to get everybody on the same service.

To answer your question I'd vote for Tutanota or Protonmail.

reacharavindh
Happy Fastmail user here. I tried protonmail, but the lack of real full text search killed it for me.
pivic
Full-text search now exists in ProtonMail: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/search/
reacharavindh
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I don't think I'm going to move back to Protonmail even after this implementation. This essentially means that every time I open my browser tab for email (which is how I prefer to use email), I have to build an index before I can search for something. That is too big a tax on usability for encrypted emails. The ironic thing is IMHO, email is already a leaking abstraction that cannot be encrypted. In this case, unless I demand all the humans I send my secure email to to also use Protonmail, my ultra secure email simply lands as plain text in their Gmail account. So, I might as well use Fastmail, and have the convenience of full text search when I need it.

My goal is to pay for my use, and prevent my email provider from profiling all my emails and selling it to advertisers. If I need a secure way of communication, email would probably be the last method that will come to my mind.

doomrobo
I really like using Fastmail. For raw features, it's got a contact sync, calendar sync, custom domain suppport, a snappy webmail client, push notifs (which Gmail does not support outside the official app), a robust spam filtering language, integration with 1Password that lets you make per-site masked email addresses, and a lot more.

As for security: I only care about account security, not confidentiality. As a friend said to me recently "as far as I'm concerned, emails are digital postcards". For account security, Fastmail has 2FA and revocable per-client passwords.

gsej
I've also gone for fastmail. I looked at tutanota, but they don't have import of external mails. The pricing plans for protonmail were strange. Not enough storage or custom domains on the plus and personal plans and I recall you couldn't buy more (might be wrong about that - but it wasn't revealed until I created an account ), They have a very expensive "visionary" plan but it's limited to 6 users.

With fastmail you can have multiple domains, and your users can have different payment plans. Their import from gmail was very quick with no hitches.

jasonpeacock
Fastmail also integrates really well with custom domains, much better than GMail ever did.

Overall, moving to Fastmail from GMail was one of the best things I've done in my online life.

kevincox
One problem that I had with FastMail is that they were bouncing too many messages. I also found that some important-to-me services were being rate-limited from sending email for weeks, even though none of the email received was marked as spam (by their filters or explicitly by me).

I tried adding the senders to my address book as recommended and nothing changed, I also tried reaching out to support and they took weeks to respond then said "they look spammy". I get that all providers need to do some filtering but if the customer is saying that they want a specific set of emails saying "they look spammy" is not a good response.

I ended up picking another provider and closing my trial account.

sirnicolaz
I am using Posteo. You pay 1 euro a month, it runs on renewable energy and it's a European company (German to be exact). Supports everything that's needed for privacy and security. And it allows you to create as many aliases as you want, for 20 cents per month (I found this feature very useful).
mccorrinall
Germany’s privacy laws became shitty in the last two decades.

Email providers are obligated to log all incoming emails after they received an order of a court. Also they must provide a copy of the inbox (can be sometimes encrypted, depending on the provider. Not all providers encrypt their inboxes.)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Mail-%C3%9Cberwachung

jsnell
> I keep seeing threads on HN about people getting locked out of their Google accounts for automated errors like the .DS_Store issue, uploading blank text files,

Note that you've misinterpreted those threads. As far as I can tell, those were not reports of anyone being locked out of the account. They were just notified that the sharing of those files over Google Drive had been disabled.

blunte
There have certainly been posts on HN of people losing access to their actual accounts.
blunte
I have been a happy paying Zoho customer for years. $4/month, and I have a dozen domain names setup and tons of aliases and catchalls.

If you have a problem, customer service is responsive and helpful… actual humans.

nameisname
I am also using Zoho for a custom domain for a while now and it's been quite good. Customer support is decent and usually get a reply within a day or two if via email.
pwned1
Fastmail. And you can use your own domain, which you own, rather than a domain someone else owns.
mccorrinall
Im using mailbox.org right now, which costs 1€ per month. Only went down once in three years for about 30 minutes. No other issues so far (except that the webdav path is insanely long when using webdav for stuff like keepass).
digisign
Namecheap supports webmail on their mail accounts that come with their domains. It's cheap (approx $10-$20/yr) and at privateemail.com. Private whois and unlimited "catchall" addresses for spam isolation included. It's good and reliable, though I prefer Thunderbird to access it from my computer.
amirkdv
I've been a happy FastMail customer for 8 years now. Migration from Gmail was a breeze too!

The only feature I've missed in all this time is schedule-send which they seem to have indefinitely put on their backlog.

jedberg
This comes up a lot and the suggestions are always the same, but here is my question:

Do any of the alternatives have priority inbox? I've spent years training my priority inbox in Gmail and it works nearly flawlessly now.

Does any paid service even come close?

drcongo
I use Readdle's Spark as an email client and find it does a much better job of this than Gmail. Plus you don't have to fight that horrific gmail interface.
keb_
I like using IMAP, so ProtonMail with their required IMAP bridge and mobile app is a no-go for me. I like Migadu, but as mentioned in the past in several threads, they have a mixed track record (although they have been good to me). Their webmail is decent enough (RainLoop), I use Thunderbird to back up my e-mails locally, and K-9 Mail on the phone (awesome FOSS app).

My next choice after Migadu would likely be mailbox.org

MrPatan
Any with your own domain, because then you can change the provider later if you make a mistake
rspoerri
I'd recommend an own domain with a hoster that has decent email service.

If the service ever leaves you, you leave the service. Nothing they own you cant host on another service provider. In case your email gets hacked you still have another layer of ownership.