

Ask HN: What is your favorite gmail alternative? - washedup

Looking for a light and simple email host as an alternative to the now bulky gmail&#x2F;google complex.
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dangrossman
Thunderbird on desktop, K-9 Mail on Android. Rackspace Mail hosts the
mailboxes on all my domains. $2/mo/mailbox, 25GB storage, 100% uptime SLA,
24/7/365 phone/chat/email support, configurable backups. They have a webmail
client but I don't use it; I prefer native apps.

[http://www.rackspace.com/email-
hosting/webmail/](http://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail/)

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nailer
I don't know of any gmail alternatives that exist.

Gmail is primarily a search based inbox. If you (like the person earlier) are
making something based around IMAP then you're doing a 90's era web mail app.
Nothing wrong with that, it's just not gmail.

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gmuslera
My main gmail alternative would be going back and have a self-hosted one. For
personal mail installing a mail server and if you want a web interface (plenty
of good ones) to access it is not hard, and can be made pretty secure. But
would miss excellent gmail spam filtering (not hard to add a spam filtering,
what is hard is adding one as good as gmail one) and search (didn't tried any
self-hosted mail search engine yet to judge).

If what worries you about gmail is privacy, then yahoo won't be an
alternative. There are a few alternatives suggested in [http://prism-
break.org](http://prism-break.org) (including guidelines to install your own
one)

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workhere-io
[http://www.gandi.net/](http://www.gandi.net/) : 1 GB IMAP account included
with domains - hosted in France. Another alternative (hosted in the US) is
FastMail (see my review here: [http://blog.workhere.io/my-experience-with-
fastmail-as-a-gma...](http://blog.workhere.io/my-experience-with-fastmail-as-
a-gmail-replacement/)).

As for IMAP clients, I like [http://airmailapp.com/](http://airmailapp.com/).

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skram
This has been asked a gazillion times, but my personal pick is Fastmail.fm. I
like both their web interface and their IMAP compatibility has never failed
me.

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a3n
Exactly. Thunderbird/IMAP from home, web from work.

They also have read-only LDAP access to the addressbook. If it allowed writes,
I'd have thunderbird save contacts to it, but it's a step.

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woutervdb
A domain for a project of mine uses GMail for e-mail (I don't trust my server
with hosting a 99.99% up mail server: it's too cheap to be able to), while my
personal website uses Microsoft Window Live Domains. My WLD is then used
inside GMail though, so for the client I can't really give any good
recommendation. The server for WLD seems fine, not good.

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grandpoobah
Outlook seems to be the only worthy competetor, but if your main goal is to
get away from Google then I wouldn't say Microsoft is a much better option.
Personally I use Gmail with my own domain and try to keep regular backups of
all mail so that in the event things go south I can quickly move to another
provider.

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Strategist
I've personally found Opera's Fastmail & Zoho Mail to be pretty good.

During the start of the whole NSA/Prism spying thing, many people mentioned
that those were two they were switching to.

~~~
workhere-io
FastMail, while an Australian company, is hosted in the US.

~~~
whichdan
Also, they've recently branched back off from Opera and are now an independent
company.

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mknits
I use [http://rediffmail.com](http://rediffmail.com)

