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Ask HN: Which email app can be trusted with my data?

22 points by behnamoh ↗ HN
I'm looking for an email app on desktop and mobile because the Gmail website experience sucks.

There are lots of apps out there, mostly priced. But I'm worried that my data (including email texts, attachments, contacts, calendar, etc.) will be saved on third-party servers, and I already have to grapple with that issue on Gmail.

Are there any email apps that can be trusted with our data, even if they're not free?

29 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] thread
titaniumtown
I just kept using Gmail, too much work imo. I can't bother to migrate everything.
longimanus
FairEmail. I used to use K9 but FairEmail is far and away the better app. Lots of work ongoing to make it better as well
behnamoh
Checking their website, FairMaail looks promising. Too bad that it's only available for Android.
asdfqwertzxcv
Agreed. It's fantastic. Happily paid for it and switched to it from K9.
gabelschlager
I think ProtonMail is as safe as it gets without setting up your own mail server. Their software is open source and they regularly perform security audits.
gnuj3
He never asked about switching the provider, just an app to handle his Gmail correspondence due to poor interface. Truth is that everyone should switch to ProtonMail promptly but just pointing out that it isnt the answer to his question.
sshine
I’ve used FastMail happily for 4 years now. I truly appreciate the web interface and I use Thunderbird when I need to send encrypted emails.

Price comparison:

Fastmail: $5x12 = $60/year

ProtonMail: €48 = $51/year

FastMail is 30GB, custom domain, infinite aliases

ProtonMail is 5GB, custom domain, 5 aliases.

For someone who uses IMAP and creates aliases when signing up / for filtering rules, as alternative to Google’s +addresses, FastMail looks like a better choice on the surface.

Can you convince me that ProtonMail is so much a better choice? Privacy matters to me, too.

lock-the-spock
Personally I dont feel comfortable with any service hosted in the US or other Five Eyes country. I have nothing to hide but the spying and intrusion is nearly as bad as China or Russia.
Loic
If you are on Android, K-9 Mail is wonderful[0]. But you need to host your emails/calendar/contacts somewhere, for that, I am very happy with Fastmail[1].

[0]: https://k9mail.app

[1]: https://www.fastmail.com

Edited to add that K-9 is an email client (app), but not hosting the emails.

[deleted]
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chrismeller
First off, I’ll be a bit of an ass. You seem to be looking for a free option that meets your criteria. You’re on HN, you know that isn’t going to happen.

Second, split desktop and server. You can use Outlook or Thunderbird or pine from the CLI, depending upon what you care about.

Third, let’s face the server problem. There are plenty of options for self hosting all of these [1]. The trade off is that you’re going to spend WAY more time and money in maintaining it.

1: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

behnamoh
> Are there any email apps that can be trusted with our data, even if they're not free?

I explicitly said I'm not looking for just _free_ options.

chrismeller
“apps” meaning both front and backend. I think I provided an answer for both.
ggpsv
Thunderbird works great for me across different desktop operating systems. It doesn't have the best UI but it is all IMAP and it handles multiple inboxes/calendars (custom domains and an old gmail account) just fine. You can also tweak the settings for each inbox accordingly. I use the default mail app on iPhone.
dusted
I've been using Thunderbird almost as long as I can remember, I guess I trust it, but probably blindly.

Another interesting question is, which email backend can you trust? It's literally your post-box, can you really trust that to be anywhere except on a physical machine in your own home?

nobody9999
>Another interesting question is, which email backend can you trust? It's literally your post-box, can you really trust that to be anywhere except on a physical machine in your own home?

I certainly don't. All my emails are sent/received/stored on physical hardware located on my premises.

Just about anything else is untrustworthy IMHO.

Nextgrid
If you’re on Mac or iOS, the built-in mail client is not too bad. Alternatively there’s MailMate for Mac, Evolution for Linux and Thunderbird which is cross-platform.
_Anima_
An SMTP relay could make a copy of your emails before they even reach your inbox. Lack of TLS support on the sender side and the context goes clear text through relays. Encryption remains the best way to guarantee against eavesdropping.
nobody9999
>Lack of TLS support on the sender side and the context goes clear text through relays. Encryption remains the best way to guarantee against eavesdropping.

TLS support only provides a mechanism for encryption across the wires. If your email is stored unencrypted anywhere except your own physical hardware (and sometimes not even then), whoever owns that hardware can (and the likes of Google actually does) read/modify/delete any or all of your emails at their whim.

anuragsoni
If you are on macOS/iOS the built in apps for email/contacts/calendar/notes are really nice. Your data stays on your device, and no third party servers will be involved.
sathomasga
Although I would also recommend Apple's first-party apps, if you use iCloud sync, then your data is stored on Apple's servers.
usrn
Have a hard rule: no non-free software.

I've used Alpine for email and Emacs's Calendar for calendar.

qpiox
I would say only Mozilla Thunderbird!

The best arguments for a long-term mail storing solution - it keeps your emails and all your mail settings, in a form that is truly portable, so that you can easily move it from computer to computer

I am trusting it with 22 GB of emails (many tens of thousands of emails) organized in many folders.

You can have it connected to many online mail services, so it will sync (and keep an offline copy of your mail) and keep all of them separate. Or, you can configure it to sort all your email in a single place and folder hierarchy.

You can have various types of filters, separately per mail account.

nobody9999
>The best arguments for a long-term mail storing solution - it keeps your emails and all your mail settings, in a form that is truly portable, so that you can easily move it from computer to computer

Absolutely. I have emails in my Thunderbird profiles going back to 1996. No one can look at them unless they hack my systems and/or have physical access to them.

I highly recommend Thunderbird (download it now. You won't be sorry.)[0].

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net

justsomehnguy
Surprised to not to see Sylpheed here.

It's not the best MUA there, but for the last.. five? Years it was the best one for me.

No HTML mails, no JavaScript things, no pixel trackers. Sure, I don't communicate with a living people often, and the portable version I use doesn't integrate good in the OS nor it stores the password in a secure way (it's plain text there, be warned), but it serves the purpose communicating with people and ocassionly searching my emails for something.

Overall, 8/10 for the MUA experience.

Ourgon
Host your own mail server, it takes less than a day of work per year to keep things running smoothly and you always know where your data is hosted. Use a smart server for outgoing mail - your IAP most likely mandates this by blocking port 25 outgoing - and configure your MTA correctly to make sure your mail does not get bounced by Google or Microsoft (the most likely culprits to do so in my experience). Use Dovecot as MDA and access your mail from whatever IMAP client you happen to like - Claws mail, Thunderbird, K9, etc. Use Sieve [1] to filter your mail into separate folders, including a spam folder for messages marked as such by SpamAssassin which is used by the MTA to check for such.

What I use:

- MTA: Exim, greylistd + SpamAssassin for spam filtering

- MDA: Dovecot with dovecot-sieve for filtering

- MUA on Linux: mutt, claws-mail

- MUA on Android: K9

- MUA on web: Rainloop as a Nextcloud app, Roundcube standalone

I've been doing this for more than 25 years and never had any significant problems. I get far less spam in my inbox than I see in the Gmail account I registered back when that was a new thing and which I only use for testing purposes. If I am to believe the naysayers on this forum and elsewhere it is impossible to host your own mail but my experience shows they are simply wrong.

Just get a SBC, install a mail stack (MTA + MDA, Sieve, SpamAssassin, some form of greylisting if you want to use that) on it, hook it up to your residential connection, get a domain name and start experimenting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...

Froedlich
Anything that uses standard mbox or maildir formats should be fine. I have mail going back across multiple operating systems and mailer programs since 1995; it has imported without a problem each time.

From 1986-1994 I used a bizarro lash-up to get email through UUCP, which imported the messages into a DOS BBS program to use as a reader. (I said it was bizarro...) The incoming mail was in standard UUCP format, and could have been imported into any common Unix mail program of the day, and thence propagated into the future. Fortunately the BBS mail datasets were plain text, and I can still read them, even if they're not as convenient as a normal mail reader. For that matter, I can still read them running the original 1986 BBS software in DOSEMU.