Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail?

[livingpunchbag]

Hello

I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.

I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.

I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.

What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?

Thanks a lot.

[greenyoda]

You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)

[dewey]

Fastmail is great, one of the services I love paying for and importing from other providers also is very easy. They even support native push in the iOS stock mail app if you are interested in that.

Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.

[vortico]

Seconded. This is the answer right here. I've been using it for my personal email for 3 years and company email for 1 year. Their support, web app UI, mobile app, data access policies, and prices are great.

[Multicomp]

Fastmail is the best. I make great use of the subdomain mailbox aliasing feature (website)@(username).fastmail.com

[cschmidt]

I've used FastMail for years. You pay them money, so you are the customer, which is how it should be. Your data isn't being mined.

[Semaphor]

Not that it's really needed, I've found out about fastmail on HN and it's regularly the most recommended email service here, but I've been a very happy customer for 5 years now. Support (the few times I needed it) was always quick and helpful.

[livingpunchbag]

OP here. What would be the advantages of moving to fastmail.com instead of staying with my Dreamhost-hosted email? What do they do better than those hosting providers that also provide email? Since I already pay Dreamhost for hosting, what would justify the extra $5/month? Are they inherently more secure?

A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...

[66d8kk]

Long time fastmail user. Has anyone here managed to automate the creation of aliases? I create a random alias address for every service I sign up to and those steps of creating that alias add a little bit of tediousness.

[chewz]

Another happy Fastmail user..

ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.

[herhor]

Same here. Another one (which has a free tier) is mailfence.com, but I prefer fastmail's UI :-)

[EnderMB]

As a service, it's fantastic. The only issue I've had with Fastmail is if you ignore a new email notification on their Android app, you won't receive future email notifications. Not a huge problem, unless you're receiving time-sensitive emails.

[ssss11]

I second FastMail they’re fantastic

[seanwilson]

Just curious, but what do you need support for?

[eeutb]

Fastmail is too expensive. They have no competition. I wish someone would come around and disrupt those prices.

[some_account]

Fastmail is the best.

[zhte415]

For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com?

You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app.

I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.

[blablabla123]

Protonmail is great. It has all features necessary but at the same time it's not creepy at all - like Gmail is.

Apart from that, in fact I have this long-term project to self-host all my stuff. So far I managed to do this only for my calendar (using Apple's CalDav server). E-Mail is my next goal but even if I have it running, I'll start transitioning slowly. After all I think it's not that much maintanance effort once it's setup as long as it's managed through Ansible or Docker.

[newscracker]

It's still cumbersome or close to impossible to move out of Protonmail along with one's emails. The IMAP support is still in beta, and has been under consideration for a few years now. The easiest way to move out of Protonmail is to abandon one's emails there and start afresh somewhere else.

[uncle_d]

Seconded - I am also very happy with ProtonMail.

[wowtip]

I have a free Protonmail account set up since a couple of years back. But I found the lack of calendar always pushed me back to G Apps. I think the search functionality also was a bit lacking.

[maxk42]

I've been using Protonmail for quite a while. It's excellent.

[penglish1]

Another happy fastmail.com customer here.

I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise.

There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year), even if the hardware itself were free, and you were not counting the cost of the internet service (eg: using your own home internet), and you were willing to accept that you might fail to update some things, sometimes, etc. If you value your time at all. Even at say, minimum wage.

Not to mention the deliverability issues etc.

If you just love doing it, then, by all means, do it. Just don't imagine it is somehow less than $50/yr, or comparable in quality.

I do wish Fastmail had more competition, even if it cost a bit more, and (as the Fastmail folks here have said) the competition participated in open standards and contributed to open source. I think others are "in the works" particularly with (even more) security/privacy emphasis. But, IMHO, eg: protonmail does not currently directly compete. We'll see what pans out.

[nhumrich]

> even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info

It sure does: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo...

Because there are no ads in the paid version, (and because they are dealing with hippa/soc2 etc.) They have no need to look at your data.

[taneq]

> There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year)

If you're talking about self-hosting at home, then probably true unless you're using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the server.

You can get web hosting including email at your own domain for somewhere around $50/year, though. I think I'm paying $26/year for hosting and $13/year for domain registration (or thereabouts, it's a trivial amount anyway) which comes with as many email addresses as I want at the domain, 10GB storage, and some amount of web traffic (50GB/mo maybe?) that's never been an issue.

[majewsky]

I use the mailbox offering of Posteo (https://posteo.de) and am very happy with it. They're a small business located in Germany that does not do any bullshit (no ads, no tracking, etc.), and ticks a lot of the checkboxes for ethical business (as much encryption as possible, careful examination of court orders instead of automated law enforcement access, exclusive usage of renewable energy, etc.). I usually go in via IMAP, but their webmail looks pretty okay as far as I remember. The basic offering is 1 € per month for a mailbox, a CalDAV calendar and a CardDAV addressbook; but I think you can sign up for a free trial if you just want to have a look.

(Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)

[dimitar]

They look great! However I don't seem to find an option to use a custom domain.

[akudha]

Just one Euro per month per inbox? That is awesome, I wonder what their margin is

[Jaruzel]

I find the worst part of running a private mail system is the spam. It morphs so often that you are always fighting a running battle just to keep it under control. Achieving a zero-spam target is almost impossible. The larger players (gmail/Office365) only manage to do it because they are handling millions of messages a day and have thousands of honeypot addresses just for spam catching. As a small player there's no way you can compete with that.

My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be.

I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me.

If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.

[dmm]

I've run my own email for years and I don't have a serious spam problem despite posting my email everywhere. I get maybe 1-2 spam messages a week. The only spam mitigation I use is greylisting and the zen.spamhaus.org blacklist.

[sliken]

Use one of the DNS based blacklists (amavis, mailfilter and other similar tools are supported on most linux platforms) and add greylisting. Sure if you want to go the extra mile you can train the filters, generally I find it not worthwhile.

[hoechst]

I have not tried it yet myself, but heard good things about Proxmox Mail Gateway: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway

[mada360]

You could try mail in a box - https://mailinabox.email/. It's really quick and easy to set up and is generally secure, I couldn't imagine someone would target a single mail server over a massive host like gmail or hotmail.

This website https://www.privacytools.io/ is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.

[1ba9115454]

Even if you secure your side of communications you're at the mercy of people who send and receive email to and from you.

If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts.

You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse.

A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.

[fencepost]

I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive.

I wish I could bold this, but:

For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized.

Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering.

It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that.

GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.

[maltalex]

Self-hosting is tricky to get right and the cost of getting something wrong is high.

One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu

They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)

[pmlnr]

It's not tricky, it's tedious. There's nothing tricky about it. You need a static IP, reverse DNS set to system hostname, "regular" DNS for the system hostname, DNS SPF entry, DKIM, DMARC, and authentication - it can get complex but it's quite straightforward.

On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you.

[^1]: https://www.iredmail.org/

[^2]: https://mailinabox.email/

[spondyl]

I can recommend the folks over at Migadu (https://migadu.com) which is a small Swiss email host. Their support is very responsive and I never had any issues while there.

I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it.

Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done.

Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.

[steaminghacker]

I run several mailservers but my main email addresses go to fastmail.

the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works.

I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal.

FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers.

my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes.

So these are for side projects. not for real work.

another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.

[mehrdadn]

Whatever email service provider you choose, make sure to still (a) keep backups of emails just in case (maybe sync an IMAP client periodically), and (b) use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.

[isostatic]

> use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.

I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it.

I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun)

I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.

[synchrone]

https://cloudron.io/ has a very decent email setup plus a lot of other apps all one-click installable.

Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.

[fredsted]

Virtualmin is a little old-school, and hosting-oriented, but you can easily set up a mail server with SPF, DKIM, SSL w/ LetsEncrypt, etc. out of the box. I've never had any problems in over 5 years with sending or receiving and I just turn on automatic updates for Debian. Only issue is if the IP you get from the hosting provider is blacklisted, so remember to check that before you start setting it up. I use DigitalOcean for hosting.

[Rjevski]

Office 365? It's a paid product from the ground up so they're less likely to terminate your account, and they actually have support.

> having phone apps reading all my email

That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.

[timwis]

I left Gmail once, but what brought me back was its separation of "primary", "promotions", "forums", and "updates". I don't know how I'd get through my emails without that. Has anyone seen another service that does something like that?

[dod9er]

Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them. I was just going to start with https://mailcow.email/ on a cheap vps. But thanks to this thread I will also be evaluating migadu, seems a nice fit with even less hassle for me.

[laurent123456]

I use OVH https://www.ovh.com for emails and domain (as well as VPS) and never had any problem with them. They have a built-in spam filter, which is pretty efficient.

[bcrack]

After spending a few years in a similar situation, and not wanting to maintain my own server, I settled with using runbox.com. It's an economical and privacy-oriented, mail provider which allows (necessary for my needs) using your own domain. They have very quick and excellent support (the few times that I needed it) and also offer a CalDAV/CardDav service. Their web interface is lacking (I believe it is about to be updated) but this is an non-issue for me science I use mutt. I'm not aware of a mobile app (I personally use and suggest the excellent K-9 mail OSS app).

[ar-jan]

+1 for Runbox.

I do wish they had better filtering options.

[amelius]

Whatever service you try, make sure that you literally own your email address (i.e. domain name), so you can always walk away without problems.