
Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email? - yorby
because switching to another email provider is not enough if most people are still using gmail...
======
benjaminl
Fastmail is a great standards based Gmail alternative. They use Cryus Imap
under the hood and give back to the community. It is both powerful and easy to
use. They were the only ones to be able to accommodate my formally self hosted
overly complicated email setup. For the truly esoteric needs, they support
custom Sieve code. [1]

For business purposes Office 365 is great. It has the full power of Exchange
under the hood. (I was recently able to setup forwarding only email addresses
to external email addresses, without needing new licenses or setting up
mailboxes.)

[0] - [https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/12/why-we-
contribute/](https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/)

[1] -
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html)

~~~
sk1pper
I second FastMail. I originally tried Proton, but the iOS app is kind of
annoying. FastMail seems really polished on all platforms. Setting up custom
domain was a breeze.

------
lucideer
There are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your
question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know
there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but
this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page.

In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to:
what do I use email for and how else can that work.

I had already mostly switched from email to instant messaging (Facebook,
WhatsApp, SMS, Riot.im, etc.). These have some of their own problems but
that's a different discussion so the remaining use-cases are:

\- open source code mailing lists: Github issues, dependent on adoption but
most seem to have moved here

\- private company PM emails: many moved to Slack which I detest, or an issue
tracker which is not so bad, or other dedicated PM software. There's usually
not much individual choice here though unless you're running the company.

\- newsletter updates: these typically come from services like MailChimp so
using non-Google email to receive these is fine.

\- account confirmation: highly dependent on adoption but SMS is becoming an
alternative here often

\- official correspondences: job applications, etc. There is no alternative.
Possibly a space with room for disruption but it would be incredibly
challenging.

Generally though, many options sub a federated technology with a lot of user
choice (email) for a centralised walled garden. While I'd recommend Riot.im
for the messaging part, my main comment here would be that it would be nicer
to just have a built-in email client feature or plugin that alterted you in an
obvious manner to the service you were communicating with (doing lookups on
the To:/Cc:/Bcc: fields before you send. AND a not-just-for-geeks viable
alternative to Gmail that could gain ground over time.

~~~
fwgwgwgch
Up voted because I'm one of the guilty people you mentioned

I wish there were a standard of sorts in im space. It's not signal because it
doesn't allow for saving conversations.

~~~
lucideer
> _standard of sorts in im space._

As mentioned, there's XMPP.

As well as Signal, there's also Matrix.org which is used by Riot.im.

You could argue there's now too many competing standards (ActivityPub has some
similarities in a way too), but without having ever implemented an XMPP client
myself, seemingly people had enough issues with it for there to be significant
traction given to replacements like Matrix.

Personally I was always a fan of XMPP, and the idea/concept (just not the
implementation) of Wave really excited me at the time. Momentum behind XMPP
seems to have slowed so I've been giving Riot.im a trial. Sofar I really love
it, so I'm once again hopeful.

~~~
stephenr
XMPP is _still_ the protocol of choice for most IM/IM-like client-server
services.

The major difference is that all the major players have turned off (or never
enabled) federation, and dont advertise that its xmpp.

Honestly I think the non-xmpp open source projects will never succeed to the
point of being ubiquitous. NIH strikes again.

~~~
Arathorn
Sadly openly federated XMPP is far from ubiquitous (relative to SMTP, or HTTP
as federation success stories, or proprietary alternatives like WhatsApp and
Slack).

Matrix is also far from ubiquitous too, but we categorically did _not_ create
it out of NIH syndrome. The whole point was to provide a protocol with
entirely different primitives: history sync rather than message passing; group
channels rather than 1:1; decentralisation rather than federation. And also a
totally different governance model (no extensions; just a fat monolithic
baseline that should “just work”). Obviously the experiment is still on and it
remains to be seen if Matrix will succeed to the point of being ubiquitous,
but to accuse it of being NIH is massively to miss the point.

~~~
stephenr
XMPP has multi user chat and history sync extensions.

It also has a several open implementations that have proven scalability.

I’m also not really sure what you mean about “decentralised rather than
federated”. This is from the matrix.org faq:

> Matrix provides open federation - meaning that anyone on the internet can
> join into the Matrix ecosystem by deploying their own server.

No extensions means no customisation for the purpose at hand or for future
enhancements.

So tell me again about how matrix is so different?

~~~
Arathorn
I’m not disputing that XMPP can be used to build a modern chat environment
with history and group chat. The question there is one over the primitives
that the protocol provides. As you say, these features (and decentralisation,
via FMUC) are provided as optional extensions in XMPP. In Matrix, they are the
core primitives of the protocol. To put it more concretely: Matrix works by
replicating chunks of conversation history between servers - _not_ by
forwarding stanzas. And there is simply no concept of a 1:1-only coversation;
all conversations happen in rooms which may have an arbitrary number of users.

On the federation/decentralisation question: yes, matrix servers federate with
one another networkwise. But the data they exchange is decentralised: it is
equally replicated over all the servers which participate in a room, using a
merkle DAG to enforce integrity (like git, or a blockchain).

> No extensions means no customisation for the purpose at hand or for future
> enhancements

This is not true. Matrix is extensible at the data level - you can put
whatever you like into it and define whatever semantics for it, a bit like
HTTP. But the API itself evolves as a single entity released by Matrix.org,
and folks are very welcome to contribute their future enhancements into it.

> So tell me again about how matrix is so different?

A loose analogy could be svn versus git (architecturally, given XMPP is much
higher perf than Matrix currently). Classic XMPP MUCs are centralised to a
given domain like a svn repo; if you try hard enough you can decentralise them
(FMUC), just like svk existed for svn. Or alternatively you could write a new
system with different primitives like git.

I hasten to add that the analogy is not exact and Matrix isn’t remotely as
successful as git, but it’s an example of where sometimes it doesn’t hurt for
a different technology to come along and shake things up.

------
arpa
Email. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and
if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time
username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual
message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so
your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.

~~~
lucideer
Yes. This.

The unique link solution is a tricky one, transmitting the credentials is a
chicken egg problem. Something like keybase.io is designed to solve this kind
of problem but of course not everyone uses PGP and they never will. It will
remain a tricky problem.

~~~
arpa
The only way to transmit credentials, I believe, unfortunately, is via out-of-
band communication, e.g. sms/IM/phone/face-to-face. Not exactly convenient,
but if you need the message to stay secure from human adversary, it is
probably the only way. If your adversary is a machine (your peer in gmail is
in control of his/her account, and is not wiretapped by an actual human/you
simply don't want google to feed on your emails/you are not an enemy of
mossad), a captcha would probably do, along with something like we see in
email verification links.

------
ShorsHammer
Gmail has the best spam prevention. I'd love to hear arguments against this,
but its why i stay.

~~~
ioddly
I have a gmail and fastmail address (the fastmail address is plastered all
over the internet in plaintext as well), I can't say I've noticed much of a
difference between the two.

~~~
hargup
Agree with this, I have been using Fastmail for almost 3 years and its spam
filter works pretty well for me.

------
propogandist
Fastmail

the outrage with facebook? the ability to read your mail keeps gmail free.

------
tinus_hn
If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to the internet?

Because Google is a major presence on the internet...

This question doesn’t really make a lot of sense. What are you trying to
achieve?

------
p2t2p
Oh, didn’t read your question carefully as well. IDK, there is no viable
alternative as of now. Asynchronous, federated messaging system that
replicates messages to every host in the chain (you have it in sender’s
client, on recipient server and on recipients devices, all of them, provided
its IMAP). I don’t know, I really think it is wrong to speak about email as
about particular tech. It is bunch of protocols and technologies that form a
_concept_. It is hardly possible to replace the concept. If you change
everything, but keep the way people interact with it you will get same email
simply delivered through different protocols. Like Fido. Almost the same thing
but through different protocols. I think we’d better off advocating for people
to pay for their email services than change the concept of email itself.

------
probably_wrong
While not for everyone, I ditched Gmail for my own self-hosted server. I
started gradually with low-profile accounts, and moved slowly towards more and
more important things. It's a lot of fun, if you're into server stuff.

------
mirimir
My main complaints with Gmail are, 1) snooping content and metadata; 2)
resisting anonymity; and 3) nuking accounts without recourse.

For anonymizing identity and metadata, I use Tor. Which I access via nested
VPN chains, just in case. To secure content, I use GnuPG. That is, Thunderbird
with Enigmail and TorBirdy. I've found both vfemail.net and cock.li to be
decent no-bullshit providers, and both have Tor onion mail servers.

Sure, some of your correspondents may use Gmail. But there won't be anything
useful for Google to see.

------
orionblastar
I need GNUPG to encrypt messages from my friends when we brainstorm ideas and
inventions. So I use Thunderbird with Engimail I have Yahoo and Gmail accounts
and set up message filters.

I'd like to have a webmail address that does GNUPG on it, but the average user
does not use encryption.

Also I dislike having to give out my cell phone to verify because I get junk
calls when they sell my info.

------
shubhamaggarwal
Zoho Mail - [https://www.zoho.com/mail](https://www.zoho.com/mail)

------
rmwaite
Lavabit: [https://lavabit.com](https://lavabit.com)

It looks like you can run the server on your own hardware, but I have not
tried this so YMMV.
[https://github.com/lavabit/magma](https://github.com/lavabit/magma)

------
8_hours_ago
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few years ago and couldn’t be happier.

I much prefer to pay for a product than be the product.

------
soundpuppy
Protonmail

~~~
itazula
I like Protonmail, I use it. But one should realize that search works only on
the headers, because, well, the content of your mail is encrypted ... doh!

------
Doctor_Fegg
I’m using Runbox. Better pricing for multiple accounts than Fastmail since the
latter ditched their family plan. The webmail interface is a bit clunky but
otherwise I’m very happy with it.

------
billconan
outlook.com or self hosted I guess

------
pujjad
Posteo - [https://posteo.de/en](https://posteo.de/en) "Green, Secure, Ad-Free"

------
marssaxman
What do these things have to do with each other? Why would you need an
"alternative to email" just because you stopped using Gmail?

------
davidbwire
[Zoho]([https://www.zoho.com](https://www.zoho.com))

------
ry4n413
Office 365 Business - Outlook

------
acct1771
KolabNow (Switzerland).

Read their webpage before brushing off. Underrated.

------
O_H_E
Protonmail

------
iscottj
gmx.com

------
fwgwgwgch
How does it matter if most people are still using Gmail? Email is a very open
and widespread protocol. I'd continue using email 100%.

~~~
davewasthere
Because even if you're not on gmail, almost everyone you're emailing will
be... therefore, your emails are on Gmail by default.

~~~
fwgwgwgch
OK I misunderstood. Good point.

