
Ask HN: E-mail providers in 2019 - jason_slack
This year I&#x27;m moving away from all things Google.<p>First step is e-mail. Whom do you all recommend? I&#x27;m happy to pay, no need for a free service. IOS and Android apps would be nice to have.
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madamelic
I assume you mean personal email?

I like FastMail. Just as much as Google Apps ($5 / mo), privacy-focused and
the way they handle multiple domains on the same account is better than
Google.

My one annoyance with Google was if I want to send something from
"hn@<mydomain>.com", I would have to prove I could send from that address by
clicking a link... that went to the same inbox.

FastMail allows you to edit the "From" field freely when you have one of your
domain fields selected.

They don't have an iOS app but they do make it very easy to add your account
by downloading a profile.

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mtmail
We recently switched our company to [https://runbox.com/](https://runbox.com/)
([https://runbox.com/about/company-values/](https://runbox.com/about/company-
values/)) Our previous hoster kept trying to upsell us webhosting, SEO
services, kept adding us to more and more newsletters, so one reason was to
choose a company that does only one thing (email).

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howard941
Self, on a $9/mo VPS . I use Vultr but DO and others can do the same.

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jason_slack
Can you explain more about your setup? How do you avoid being black listed and
other common mail sending issues?

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howard941
Sure! I run qmail, dovecot, djbdns on one of their stock FreeBSD 11-RELEASE
images on their cheapest static-IPV4 level. Blacklisting hasn't been an issue
(knock wood) anywhere except for Yahoo and they were impossible mail
recipients when I had a real business static CIDR space so screw em. The VSP
is great about maintaining the inverse address mapping. I have the SPF
records, not sure that they do anything.

Edited for copy and expletive deletion

~~~
jason_slack
Cool. Any kind of setup guide you can point me to? I've got some familiarity
with this from about 10 years ago when I used to host my own mail.

~~~
howard941
Sorry, nothing for the whole kit and kaboodle. But there are good individual
stand-alone guides:

For the underlying guts, the FreeBSD handbook
[https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/index.html](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/index.html)

Freebie book online for qmail is at
[http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html](http://lifewithqmail.org/lwq.html) .

lwq.html or the OS's port collection will point you to DJB's (mandatory)
djbdns config instructions. Do you remember how to manually edit DNS zone
records? He uses a unique format but you'll still need to remember which
resource records to use. By now there must be great online DNS resources? I
don't know them. O'Reilly's dead tree books weigh on my bookshelf.

dovecot comes with excellent documentation and man pages and worked out box of
the FreeBSD port collection.

I left out one other use. I subscribe to about 30 mail lists, all but NANOG
o/s related. I have those emailed to the VSP instance and use a really simple
mail2news.py script to pipe it to rnews for forwarding to a private INN server
that sits behind a dynamic IP to preserve and read mail lists with a
newsreader as $DIETY intended. With a static presence and a cheap VSP it's so
much easier to make things work the way you like them. I hope you try it and
get into it as much as I do.

More copyediting...

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fxfan
Outlook now has labels and a chat that works and you can sort by sender and
what not. Spam filter sucks

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pieterhg
I love FastMail. Multiple domain support, unlimited aliases and a fast mobile
website. It's just really great.

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justaguyhere
I was looking at Zoho Mail yesterday, not sure how it stacks up against
FastMail though. Slightly cheaper

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mattkrea
Fastmail. Cheap and reliable. I've been a customer for a good number of years
now and love it.

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ColinWright
I have a domain and my ISP hosts my email. I connect with POP3, send via SMTP,
and use the mail client of my choice.

Not sure why anyone would do anything else.

