Ask HN: Thinking about Leaving Gmail

I moved a handful of my domains MX records to Fastmail so that family members had a super simple UI and good UX experience. It isn't free but in some regards neither is Gmail. Either way it is very affordable. The one concern I have seen mentioned is that their headquarters is in AU and they have some very dystopian government policies but I have no idea if that has ever impacted anyone. Fastmail handle DKIM signing of your emails. I've not had any delivery issues with them as of yet after several years. If using your own domains it is easy to set up a canary alias for each vendor to limit cross-marketing and cross-market tracking. They also allow creating aliases on several of their domains but finding the alias you want may be harder.

For personal use? I use ProtonMail, but it's not free.

Many HNers use Fastmail. I'm one of them.

I think Fastmail is 100% great, but there are always some mailing lists and other recipients who might treat you as a third or fourth class citizen for sending mail from your own domain, even if you do all the deliverability stuff right.

Some people think Fastmail is a little pricey, particularly for a large inbox, but you get what you pay for.

I switched to FastMail last Feb and am very happy. For personal email, I use the cheapest plan with 2GB storage and set the Trash folder to delete mail after 365 days. So far I'm only using about 13% of the 2GB quota, even including Trash. For business email I use the next level up to enable a custom domain.

I set Gmail to forward everything to the new Fastmail email address and set a vacation message explaining that I've changed email addresses. Very painless.

In some HN discussions people said Fastmail's spam filtering is not as good as Gmail. That may be true - I dunno - but for me it has been a non-issue.

The thing I really like is it is soooo much faster than Gmail.

Getting off of Gmail might help a little, but I feel like it wouldn't help much. If most other people are using Gmail, they will have your email that way.

I've been running my own mail server for a while now and nothing bad happened so far.

Spam detection with rspamd is surprisingly good.

If you like tinkering you might consider it as well.

I used this guide to do it: https://workaround.org/ispmail

But instead of mysql I use sqlite which is easier to work with.

I also built a small app to help me manage the database more easily: https://github.com/confuzeus/mailiness

I switched to ProtonMail and it's amazing. The interface is pretty sleek and the messages between ProtonMail users are encrypted as well.

The only thing I don't like is their slightly buggy Android app but hey, at least it's FOSS.

The free tier is pretty generous, forces me to manage my emails better instead of letting it turn into a spam bin. I'd definitely recommend ProtonMail.

What do y'all think of Fastmail vs Protonmail?

Of note from a quick comparison... Fastmail is faster and more responsive. Which means a lot! Proton has second-order lag whenever I click a new message, folder etc. Noticbly less responsive than gmail and fastmail.

I also switched to Proton for business and personal and I'd never go back. I just wish they had a native desktop app.

I like protonmail. It’s come a long way. Plans are much better now, and you get end to end encryption on the same platform.

I switched to Fastmail a few years ago. Took about a day to go through all of my accounts and update the email addresses. I was really, really glad that I had Bitwarden to use as a list of every online account I've ever created.

I've been happy with it ever since. In every conceivable way my experience with Fastmail is better than Gmail. I pay $50 a year for it.

The only Google product I interact with these days is Youtube. There simply is no alternative to that, unfortunately. (I'm a consumer, not a creator, so no: that alternative video site you're about to recommend to me will not work.)

Get your own domain name for the email. This will greatly reduce the pain of switching email services. Which will allow you to try several of those.

I’ve been using ProtonMail with a custom domain and I love it !!

The web app is the best desktop email interface I’ve used and the iOS app is the best mobile email interface I’ve used

I'll add my voice to the Fastmail love. I've connected a couple of domains to my Standard $50/year (plus VAT) account, and as long as you follow all of their directions on adding SPF and DKIM settings to your domain, it works like a champ.

Setting up on-the-fly aliasing for my domains was also just a matter of following their directions, and I love the looks I get when I fill in [businessname]@[mydomain.com]. A middle-aged lady engaging in email nerdery really subverts expectations - I tell them if they're really hesitant to accept that address with their business's name in it that it's an organizational tool for me (true) with a bonus of free hacking detection for them (possibly true).

I do not say that the main reason is that I do not trust them to never ever misuse or lose control of my data.

I had Gmail for 15 years and switched to Hey in 2020. Email isn’t something I have to manage anymore, and the design is really nice. It’s not hacker-friendly as it has no API and isn’t accessible via an email standard (IMAP, etc.), and it’s $100/year, so isn’t for everyone.

I have almost moved on from Gmail (Gmail + Gsuite). I have been using Hey for almost 2 years now and I prefer it over Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/Protonmail.

And I am in the process of moving my Custom Domains to Fastmail, the only thing that irks me is their mobile app refusing to open without an active internet connection.

I use Yandex and live.com.

I just run Mailcow on my own domain. Works great.

I'm on mailbox.org . Been using them for 5+ years. I like it a lot! I use it for everything besides "cloud storage" (use Mega instead). Great for email, XMPP, etc.

Set up the DKIM with your DNS and you'll be fine with your own domain. Aliasing is great, too. There webmail / portal is okay (I use desktop / iOS instead). Help pages are really good.

What are you using in place of Google Maps?

I migrated from Gmail to mailbox.org about a year ago, but Google Maps is the one Google app I can't seem to replace.

mail.zoho.com. Super cheap with a custom domain.

I then just imap it into gmail. My main concern isn't privacy. It's gmail suspending me for some stupid reason and leaving me locked out of my life.

I'm running a mail server at home (on a small low-power server). Getting it right for incoming mails was easy (I have the chance that my ISP doesn't block anything, so I can have port 25 open), for outgoing mails it's another story... but after setting up DKIM, SPF and DMARC (yes all of them were needed, especially for hotmail), deliverability is very good.

As a backup, I created an address at Infomaniak, a Swiss hosting company, they give free e-mail (without ads -- their business model is rather selling other services like e-mail on custom domains, hosting, cloud services, etc.) with 20 GB storage (see https://www.infomaniak.com/en/free-email). At the time I did it, they were requiring a Swiss mobile number (to limit the number of accounts people can get), not sure if now they accept numbers from other countries or not. In any case, it works great, both with webmail and standard SMTP/IMAP.

Buy a domain and use Fastmail. Don't delete gmail, just stop using it. Check it every year or so for a good laugh at all the spam.

Plenty of people have the obvious choices covered, so I'll mention mine: Earlier this year I migrated 15 years' worth of email from Google Workspace to iCloud+.

Apple has been a rock-solid email host in my experience. They're not well-known as an email host, but they've been hosting email at scale for a couple of decades, or longer if you count old services like eWorld and AppleLink. (Fun fact: The first email from space was sent via AppleLink.)

I used imapsync for the actual transfer, which worked brilliantly. https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...