Bonus question: what email inbox client do you use?
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I self host. Don’t.
Proton. Yes.
I used to pay for Gmail, then I used Proton Mail about a year, and I’ve been using Fastmail for the last couple of years, which I recommend. I don’t know of anything that’s as feature-rich and easy to use as Fastmail. You may not be interested in all those fancy features, though.
I use MacOS/iOS Mail clients, but also Thunderbird as I’m trying to wean myself off of Apple’s ecosystem and onto Linux/FOSS.
+1 for fastmail… it’s one of those products that isn’t trying to trick you… you pay for it, and it’s just a solid product that tries to be the best at what it is…
it’ll let you have as many domains and aliases as you like, including wildcards for email (and lets you reply/send appropriately using any of those aliases)
it’ll let you pull all your calendars and push events into a single one of your choosing - it doesn’t have to be theirs
i could probably replicate some of what it does with my home server, but it’s really nice that i don’t have to
Does it have good spam filtering like Gmail?
Yep! It’s decent
i can’t remember the last time i got spam… i don’t know if it’s as good as, but it’s not a problem that i’ve noticed
I really want to move my domain from Google to Proton, but family accounts at Proton are so dang expensive. Fastmail is far cheaper than Google, so that looks like it might be a really good option.
yeah i have my single email account setup with 5 different domains and a multitude of different aliases - including *@auto. so you can sign up for throwaway [email protected] and nobody knows that it’s a throwaway so it never gets blocked by services (and the + trick in emails is well known by people doing nefarious things with email - they’ll automatically strip the wildcard part out so it can’t be traced)
Protonmail, it’s fantastic. Sleek design, solid feature set, integrates with Thunderbird if you want to use that.
Fastmail, 100%. Reasons:
- “Encrypted email” only works between encrypted providers. ProtonMail and Tutanota are both very inconvenient, and all I want is an email that’s not scanned for marketing.
- Since 2018, ProtonMail kept getting worse, especially with the recent AI stuff. Dodged bullet, IMO.
- $6/month = Custom domains, and any amount of emails under those domains. I can send and receive from any domain
xxx@yyy [dot] lynndotpy [dot] dev, for example. - CalDav and CardDav provider = Contacts, calendar, and reminders sync. Works perfectly on iOS too, if you like that.
It replaced my finnicky NextCloud for half the cost.
PGP encrypted e-mail works regardless of the provider btw.
True but go and explain that to the regular Joe…
yeah… it’s pretty hard to get non-techies to use encrypted mail. even proton’s encryption is pretty useless as it’s decrypted in their web client anyway.
You forgot the Fastmail killer feature. Masked email addresses.
I might have to change my provider. Paying the same with a worse featureset.
ProtonMail. Works great for the most part.
Except their desktop “app”, which is total shit. It’s just a webview in an electron framework. If I wanted to keep a webview, I’d just keep a tab open in my browser. Or a separate browser window if I wanted to keep it separate.
If you use the paid version of proton you can use basically any third party client (I use thunderbird)
I am aware. But I feel like just a reasonable client shouldn’t necessarily be considered a premium feature.
This is exactly what I’m doing too.
I’ve hosted my Mail with them for over a year, still have them as my backup. I wouldn’t really recommend them, as they don’t adhere to the standard protocols which infuriates me. As a result, you can only use a proper email client on PC with the back they call bridge, you cannot use a proper client on phones, forget syncing of calendar and contacts.
There is more, especially for the non-mail products.
as they don’t adhere to the standard protocols
To what standards protocols do you refer? (I’m honestly asking; I’m not very knowledgeable about email architectures.)
As a result, you can only use a proper email client on PC with the back they call bridge
I thought that is kind of required simply due to the nature of their email service being end-to-end encrypted and with the decryption key being stored locally only.
Am I misunderstanding something?
You’re not. The whole point is encryption so the bridge is a must.
I meant IMAP, SMTP, POP3. It’s true that they do some encryption shenanigans, but firstly I don’t really see the benefit over just using encrypted SMTP and encrypted IMAP, and secondly we already have PGP for that, IMO it would be better if they made that more accessible.
Some people might not be bothered by this, but it bothers me a lot. Which is why I left. The reduction of usability is not tolerable.
Besides that, they also don’t support CalDAV and CardDAV (syncing of contacts and calendar), which is something that groupware absolutely needs to be viable for me.
You might disagree or not care, if so, good for you, there is definitely much worse than proton.
shenanigans
To call it “shenanigans” IMO doesn’t give it due credit.
As for the PGP thing, I’ve been with ProtonMail since they were in beta way back in 2013-ish and one of their founding goals was to provide encryption that was accessible to even casual users.
And like it or not, PGP is a thing that is quite confusing to most people, assuming they even know what it is.
Besides that, they also don’t support CalDAV and CardDAV (syncing of contacts and calendar), which is something that groupware absolutely needs to be viable for me.
Couldn’t agree more. They really need to extend Bridge to support calendar sync.
If bridge could have the DAVs and we could host it on a non localhost IP, it would be a compromise I could live with. As it is now, you’d have to install it in any VM you have, and of course it also doesn’t run on phones.
👍
Mailbox.org with my own custom domain ([email protected]) and Thunderbird for an email client.
I would highly recommend it. It is cheap and includes almost a complete replacement for Google services (email, contacts, calendar, online drive, etc).
Please consider your privacy. Giving all you emails to Google (or other mainstream data harvesters) basically gives them deep info about your whole life (purchases, travel, communication…everything).
Having a custom domain let’s you go to any provider you like if you want to switch.
I’m with mailbox too and generally it’s been pretty solid. The only thing I dislike is that their 2fa implementation is weird, and maybe that I can’t get a separate password to put in my server.
On the other hand you get a lot of solid email related things for good privacy and a pretty cheap price. They even host a thing for encrypted video calls and a document server for collaboration.
Posteo. Happy with them. For client, gnus in Emacs. Have it configured to do Autocrypt too, but almost nobody else on the planet does 🙁
I also use posteo for four or five years now. Really happy and never had any issues so far.
Can vouch for Posteo. I’ve been using them for years and I have no reason to switch anytime soon. They’re privacy focused, the price is great, there’s IMAP support and CalDAV too and a bunch of other things.
Tuta. It’s great but no third-party client support.
I self host, on a personal domain I registered in June 2000. Mostly followed a 13?-part tutorial at I think linuxbabe dot com, was the first one that seemed to genuinely be trying to help you set up a good environment, not just as a way to say “doesn’t this sound difficult? Impossible even? Coincidentally you can pay us to do this instead.” Except I put everything on its own VM instead of all on one. (Even a VM for just opendkim, which was maybe not necessary.)
Mostly iPhone mail app and/or Roundcube webmail.
Yes highly recommend it, for receiving email. Greylist blocks like 99.8% of spam. Sending works fine for me, because it’s an old domain with history. I don’t think brand new domains have the same experience.
Proton for personal email. Not immediately needing to escape but once my free email runs out of storage I plan to switch to something else because of the concerns raised by the incident with the French climate activist.
IIRC they warn people not to use recovery emails if they’re concerned about leaking information, idk why though
Gmail and protonmail. Both give me no issues at all.
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Mxroute with thunderbird as a client and mail on iOS for mobile.
Unlimited domains and rock solid. Just don’t expect lots of hand holding the company focuses on making email work you have to sort out your own details. That being said they have good documentation.
2nd Mxroute. I got the black Friday deal a few years ago. I love using the catchall to make emails on the fly for when I sign up for different services.
I do exactly the same thing. Some more spam from time to time but usually thunderbird catches that for me.
Zoho, because it’s email server is free to use for custom domain adresses
