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Ask HN: would you pay for an email service?

16 points by numbers ↗ HN
Right now, almost all email services are from providers who use email as bait to get users to use other services. If there was a service with no other goal except to give you the best email experience, provide support and keep your data safe and not use it for marketing purposes, would you pay for this service?

25 comments

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t0
I'm happy with Gmail. I don't think you could ever convince me to switch.
EvanAnderson
Yes. I already pay for such a service from POBox.com (and have since 2002), as an example of just such a service provider. (I host my own email, too, but I like having this address as a more formal personal email address that isn't connected to any of my personal domain names, blog, etc.)
fakeer
They are not clear on how they host email and IMAP is offered in the top most tiered type of account.

BTW, their interface is most famous out there, I guess. AtMail right?

EvanAnderson
I'm not sure what you mean re: "how they host email". IMAP is a higher-tier feature. I'm using them for SMTP forwarding to my self-hosted IMAP server, so not having IMAP from them has never been an issue.

They have AtMail and Roundcube available if you elect to use them for email storage. I've used neither with them, though I do want to spin up a Roundcube installation for myself when I can find some time to tinker with it.

mattl
I pay for mail service at The WELL, an account with Pobox (I back up my Gmail there) and for SaneBox to try to keep the Gmail Inbox smart. I'd like to move the power away from Gmail (actually Google Apps) and to something I can control.
numbers
When you say "Google Apps", do you mean both email and other services like Google Drive because you're using a personal domain?
mattl
Right. I don't really use most of those things, but they're there.
arrowgunz
If the email service has anti-spam filters as powerful as Gmail and the UI/UX is as clean as Outlook, then yes.
dangrossman
Yes. 2 million users already pay Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) for that. I pay $10/mo for ten 25GB mailboxes there with a 100% uptime SLA, 24/7/365 phone/email/chat support and configurable backups.

http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/

jamesbritt
How is the spam filtering? That's what drove me to gmail.
dangrossman
I never see spam in my mailboxes. It's first-class. The only false positives I've had were occasional HARO (Help-A-Reporter-Out) mails. With all the ads PRWeb injects into what's already a list of links, it probably should be called spam these days.
PaulHoule
I have to turn off the spam filtering from Rackspace because it loses a lot of real mail.
fparker
Don't you need to buy a minimum pack of 5 accounts/mailboxes? That was what prevented me from buying. I think there is a way to bypass it but didn't found it out. Happy FastMail FWIW.
a3n
fastmail.fm

there are many others

stevekemp
I've never used Fastmail, but didn't they lose a lot of customers with a hastily designed "user interface" upgrade that dropped lots of features recently?
a3n
Their new(er) UI was in beta for awhile, and I believe is now the default.

You can use the classic if you want. I don't know if they lost any users over the issue, but it would have been unnecessary since using the beta was a choice, and you can use classic now.

I use the newer web interface at work.

At home I use Thunderbird, connecting to fastmail through imap and smtp.

cdvonstinkpot
I've been with Fastmail for years, and have always been happy both with the service technically & with the customer service. As for their new interface, I don't use it because its buggy, I check the box to keep using the old one. Apparently it'll be feature rich once it works right though, with a reading pane & dropbox integration among other things.

My favorite thing about Fastmail is that the email is lightning quick, there's no lag between sending or receiving emails like there is on free email services- up to 90 seconds on aol or yahoo.

The worst part is that the multi factor authentication, or hardware authentication can be bypassed, making it essentially useless. If you just say you lost your yubikey, you can still brute force your way in, which isn't okay with me.

manicbovine
I don't like the idea of monolithic email products. I wish I had the option to purchase the following items a la carte:

* A polished email client with consistently designed mobile, desktop, console, and web apps.

* Spam filtering and email classification [1]

* Sending/receiving

* Archive/backup

[1] Especially this.

dangrossman
I.e. Gmail (web and app clients), polling Rackspace Mail (sending/receiving), sitting behind Barracuda Email Security Service (spam filtering & anti-malware), synced to GMVault (archive/backup)? The only problem is the limited number of options for some of those pieces. SMTP/POP/IMAP enable all the the mixing and matching you want.
manicbovine
Thanks, I've been looking for something like Barracuda.
gesman
Email service - internet's oldest profession.
zombio
No, I think it would be pretty hard to convince me to pay for a service when Gmail is already so easy to use.
nickfromseattle
Yes I would pay for email, but I think its a very hard industry for startups. The industry is consolidating around certain players and their economies of scale make it extremely difficult to compete. Owning and maintaining infrastructure and email systems is high consequence, technically difficult and expensive. Even well known email providers that you've heard of actually white label bigger, more sophisticated providers infrastructure/mail system.

However, that shouldn't stop you from trying. It’s really easy and cheap to validate your idea. Sign up as a reseller at Rackspace, Intermedia, Apptix, etc. Now go get customers- direct customers are good, but channel is king in email hosting space. You want to build a partner channel of IT consultants that go into small businesses and do managed services. They’re already providing IT, selling your email is an easy upsell and extra revenue for them.

If you can get a ton of resellers/consultants, spending money on your own infrastructure becomes slightly less risky.

waxjar
If it did the same as GMail does and GMail didn't exist, I would. It's just so convenient.
fakeer
Yes, if they have these:

1. Awesome webmail and IMAP

2. Calendar

3. Task

4. Chat with logs

5. Privacy without any ifs/buts

6. Speed

7. Easy data takeout