
Ask HN: Low-maintenance alternatives to Gmail? - livingpunchbag
Hello<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;d probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.<p>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?<p>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.)

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

~~~
MandieD
If it were possible to profitably do what they do as well as they do, but at a
lower price, someone would be doing it already.

It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to
go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring
them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm
concerned.

~~~
eeutb
I disagree. Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw,
hosting, sw, maintenance, etc. It simply doesn't add up.

The only reason they are not disrupted, I believe, is that most people are
okay with free email, and businesses that want to be more secure keep their
email inside their premises.

~~~
nmjenkins
> Those prices are simply too high if you factor in the price of hw, hosting,
> sw, maintenance, etc.

FYI ~70-80% of our business costs are staff. We are the primary maintainers of
Cyrus ([https://cyrusimap.org/](https://cyrusimap.org/)) the open source mail
server we run. We develop our own webmail, which we believe is the best in the
world. We do a lot of standards work: at the IETF we're heavily involved in
both the EXTRA group (maintaining IMAP) and the JMAP group (new advanced sync
protocol which we hope will in the future replace IMAP/CardDAV/CalDAV). We're
also involved with CalConnect developing future calendaring standards, and are
contributing to ARC development with M3AAWG and the IETF. Good engineers ain't
cheap.

On top of that, we run our own machines, built to our own specifications to
continually get faster performance (including putting indexes and recent mail
on enterprise-grade SSDs) and more reliability (live replicas to secondary
machines and data centres).

If you can do all that for $5/month, well, we welcome the competition and hope
you too will work together for a more open, standards-based future.

~~~
hvidgaard
I love that you interact with users here :)

Do you have any plans to add tags/labels in your web and app client? It's a
very flexible feature that enable some (very) productivity increasing
workflows for me.

Lets say that a mail tick in from the scouts, it's a bill for this years
summer camp. With labels I would label it Invoice and Scouting. If I need to
see all invoices for 2018 I will just search for that label and received in
2018. Same with mails relating to scouting. Without labels I can only save it
in one folder, and searches are not guaranteed to catch everything unless I
constantly make sure a search captures the mail every time I would set a label
on it.

~~~
nmjenkins
While promising future stuff is always dangerous, I’m pretty confident we will
have something for you later this year.

~~~
hvidgaard
I'm looking forward to it! It's the only thing I need to achieve an acceptable
WAF, and finally get her to actually use it rather than keep using GMail.

------
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.

~~~
kertis
Protonmail isn't bad, agree. But I don't like their mobile Android client
because it can't group emails (each email even response is new one). But again
I am using free version, so no complains. :)

Google mail is more feature-rich of course.

------
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...](https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/google-
cloud-security-and-compliance-whitepaper.pdf)

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.

------
majewsky
I use the mailbox offering of Posteo ([https://posteo.de](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.

~~~
nachtigall
+1 for Posteo, but they do not offer custom domains. See 3rd question at
[https://posteo.de/en/site/faq](https://posteo.de/en/site/faq)

If you want this, then I'd check out
[https://mailbox.org](https://mailbox.org)

See [https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-
individua...](https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individual-
domains/)

------
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.

------
mada360
You could try mail in a box -
[https://mailinabox.email/](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/](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.

~~~
newscracker
For me, it's all the commercial, financial and similarly sensitive emails that
matter the most. Those companies are certainly not using a free Gmail account
for the most part, and whatever paid service they use (GSuite or Outlook365 or
other) wouldn't mine this information. With my use of a paid email service
that has no ads and promises privacy, this part is handled. Personal emails
from those who use Gmail would get mined and profiled, but that's a harder
problem to solve. I do try to push people out of free email services and to
paid ones that are cheaper and more suitable for privacy.

------
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](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/](https://www.iredmail.org/)

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

~~~
maltalex
> 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.

Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security,
high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups,
spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things.
Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots...

None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started,
but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally
managed service.

~~~
blablabla123
> None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started,
> but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally
> managed service.

Depends what kind of security, availability is a part of it. When you forget
your password (or it gets hacked and someone changes it), you can just re-
deploy the whole thing. On Gmail you might be screwed. On self-deploy backups
seem mandatory, which mail user backs up his or her E-Mails?

As far as I have heard, if SPF, DKIM etc etc is properly configured, blocking
won't happen. I don't have this running yet but this is my next project.
Probably I'll go with postfix, there are bizillion plugins for exactly these
things and the configuration will be automated with Ansible. So once it's up
and running, I expect this to be pretty much care-free.

------
spondyl
I can recommend the folks over at Migadu
([https://migadu.com](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.

~~~
ganlub
Migadu works great most of the time, but it takes forever to get a reply from
their support.

------
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/](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.

~~~
nebulon
More information on how email works on Cloudron can be found at
[https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/](https://cloudron.io/documentation/email/)

------
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
Watch out for vulnerabilities though. I always recommend staying away from
such "panels" like Plesk, cPanel, etc. Virtualmin is no exception.

~~~
SwellJoe
Our security history is pretty good, and we provide a wide variety of security
features like 2FA, TLS with Let's Encrypt certificates, various password and
login policy options, etc.

I would argue that non-technical users are safer using Virtualmin (I can't
speak to the security history or features of any other panels) than doing it
themselves, because it's easy to make security mistakes when doing it yourself
if you don't have a lot of time to research all the options. If someone can
invest the time to learn how to manage all of their own services, and can
invest the time to build out all of the security features included in a
default Virtualmin installation, then absolutely removing the GUI is removing
one vector of potential attack; you should always turn off services you don't
need. But, based on history, I can say with reasonable confidence that
Virtualmin is probably not going to be the way an attacker gets in (it's
probably going to be weak passwords, old software, poorly designed custom web
apps, etc.).

Disclaimer: I work on Virtualmin.

------
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?

------
faissaloo
You might want to take a look at cock.li, the guy who owns it is pretty dead
set on keeping the feds away and is really hands off about what you use it
for. I've been using it for my personal correspondence email for about a year
now and it's been fine.

~~~
lgregg
Those domain names are something else...

Why do you trust him?

~~~
gexcolo
you shouldn't trust him, he gets google alerts and finds threads on hacker
news and posts wacky comments like this one

~~~
lgregg
I see what you did there.

------
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/](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.

~~~
bjrnio
Check out github.com/hardware/mailserver, just finished setting it up for
myself and feels great.

------
laurent123456
I use OVH [https://www.ovh.com](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.

~~~
milani
I experienced having my account suspended all of a sudden with no notice; the
problem livingpunchbag is trying to avoid.

~~~
laurent123456
I've been with them for nearly 10 years for shared web hosting, domains,
emails and VPS, and never had such problem. Customer support is not as good as
it used to, but still ok. Did they say why your account was suspended?

------
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.

------
th0br0
How about [https://kolabnow.com/](https://kolabnow.com/) ? You can also self-
host Kolab.

~~~
carlos22
Kolabnow is rather expensive and we had a lot of problems with it. The up-time
was also very upsetting. Experience was 2 years ago.

Self-hosting of Kolab is not very flexible and a lot of work. We use self-
hosted SoGO now and are very happy.

------
wastedhours
I use [https://zoho.eu](https://zoho.eu) \- decent apps, reasonable tools,
similar configuration to GApps.

Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium
offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and
fairness perspective.

------
kotrunga
Use protonmail.com.

They're the best, and have much better security than other "secure" emails,
like Fastmail.

~~~
bjrnio
> and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail

Can you elaborate?

~~~
kotrunga
tldr- they both seem to be very secure email providers, with some differences.
To fully grasp differences, read the links referenced below.

I've done some research, but not much. I should have researched more before
speaking, so if I'm wrong, please let me know! I just want to have the most
secure email. Anyway... here are a few things I've found. I'm no security
engineer, so others may have more insight.

First thing is the location of the datacenters. Protonmail's servers are
apparently under 1000 meters of solid rock in a bunker, and they claim it
could even survive a nuclear attack. (And, they aren't in the US)
([https://protonmail.com/security-details](https://protonmail.com/security-
details)) Even if that's there for marketing purposes, it's kind of cool.

To compare, FastMail also has good security, but it's based in New Jersey, and
I don't think it could survive a nuclear attack ':)
([https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html))

That stuff is important, but unless something crazy happens, I doubt there is
going to be any serious physical attacks on the servers. But, you never know.

ProtonMail is open source, and I know some of FastMail is too. Not sure if it
all is or not.

ProtonMail has end-to-end encryption, and while FastMail has encryption, it's
not 100%, and on the above /security.html link, it seems employees have access
to some data, and full encryption is still a work in progress.

From the link: 'At this stage, some system log data (which could contain
personal information) is temporarily stored on un-encrypted disks on
individual servers, however we have an ongoing project to bring encryption to
all system logging as well.'

Probably the biggest thing is when a company is forced to hand over data.
ProtonMail keeps a Transparency Report, so the world knows about everything
dealing with this. ([https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-
report/](https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/))

ProtonMail is under Swiss law, and FastMail is under AU law. They both claim
to not answer to US claims, but FastMail does have servers in the US, so I'm
not sure how that all works.

Anyway, you can read more on their sites from the links provided. Hopefully
some of this was helpful.

------
mrmondo
Very happy Fastmail user here, it's great (and fast!) to use, I've _never_
noticed any outages, calendar always _just works_ , search is excellent, it's
device and OS agnostic and the organisation makes massive contributions to
open source and mail related communities.

------
hidden_sheepman
Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but checkout Tutanota
[https://tutanota.com/](https://tutanota.com/)

I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have
a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.

------
MaryTurner
You can try servermx.com the give all the features commonly provided for an
email account and also some extra ..you can try the service for free (30 days)
no credit card required Mary

------
TangoTrotFox
I have only positive things to say about tutanota:
[https://tutanota.com/](https://tutanota.com/)

------
messutied
No one using iCloud email? I’m giving it a try atm, I think if you’re in the
apple ecosystem it can be a good choice, anybody else experimented with it?

~~~
gzu
I’ve recently switched most of my old gmail account to ICloud. Extremely easy
to use with the iOS and Mac system. I’m (currently) ok with apple handling my
email data, much more so than google. Have had no issues whatsoever.

------
hux_
I just moved all my email accounts to China.

~~~
ganlub
Is thay supposed to be better?

~~~
Lunatic666
If you assume that every hoster is reading your mails, then moving them to
China would give you the advantage, that your content and your meta data are
not relevant to your new Chinese hoster, so ad targeting etc. would be gone,
because you probably don't check Chinese sites frequently

------
Major_Grooves
I've recently been having this problem with Gmail:
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/gmail/-isLElPcsOo/ym26YaEEAgAJ)

where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here
encountered the same problem?

------
hknd
low-maintenance email will not work. You get what you pay for, it will always
either be high-maintenance, or you'll have to pay for the service.
Unfortunately, fighting spam and keeping stuff up-to-date is not as easy as it
should be.

------
togusa2017
I use protonmail. No complaints

------
grizzles
wildduck.email looks pretty good for a modern mail architecture w/ failover.

------
arisAlexis
protonmail works very well and is very secure

------
laamalif
for security paranoid minds: protonmail.com

------
homero
33mail

------
carlhjerpe
If you're OK with Putin reading your mail instead of Google if say Yandex is a
great alternative!

~~~
segmondy
Yup, I use gmail but I also use Yandex with my own domain. Google is the
greater evil if I had to pick between them, Russia & China. Any data I give to
Google is more likely to be used against me in the USA than the other 2.

------
Szero
cock.li

------
trisimix
Obligatory check out protonmail

------
pavanear
Fast mail is great services

------
airbreather
mail.com

~~~
Rjevski
It's free and ad supported. There's no way they're better than Gmail.

~~~
chiefalchemist
> "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?"

You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.

~~~
Rjevski
My point was that it was ad supported and so had the exact same drawbacks as
Gmail, but in addition being much less advanced.

------
happyvalley
Happy user at mailbox.org

They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have
a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even
send them money by post for complete anonymity.

Edit: You can use a custom domain

~~~
craftyguy
I like their inbox encryption feature, all inbound mail is automatically
encrypted with your gpg key. This means that mails downloaded to clients must
be decrypted with your gpg key, and it's impossible to read mails in your
inbox with their webmail thing. This means that if your device is stolen, your
emails (their contents) are still encrypted.

