
Ask HN: Whats the best alternative to Inbox? - softinio
This week I read google are closing down Inbox by gmail. Curious to see what alternative everyone are considering or is everyone simply going to use gmail.
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ssijak
Shutting down Inbox was the last drop in an already full bucket of Google
failures that pushed me to start migrating everything Google that I am using
currently to other services. For email/calendar/contacts, I am currently
evaluating Fastmail. I like it for now, simple and fast and I like the
multiple domains and aliases feature that I need. I also like how they
represent them, they are just providing service for the money, nothing else is
happening with our data, no ads, etc..

~~~
songgao
I migrated to Fastmail from Google Apps a couple years ago. When Inbox came
around, I moved everything back to google. While Fastmail is a wonderful
service, I don’t think it has the features that Inbox provides. so I’m not
sure it’d be a good alternative to Inbox.

~~~
ssijak
What will you do now when Inbox is dead?

~~~
songgao
Not sure. I’m like everybody else looking for good alternatives here :)

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georgeoliver
I suspect I'm in the minority but the biggest draw of Inbox for me is the UI.
I have used gmail with Stylish rules to eliminate most of the default UI, but
it breaks periodically with CSS changes (not to mention Google banned Stylish
recently, I have yet to look into alternatives).

IMO the Inbox UI is miles ahead of default gmail, and all of the other
graphical email clients I've found on web and desktop mimic the traditional
email UI.

It seems like I'm left with changing gmail's CSS or using a terminal email
client, but I'm not relishing it as it seems like a step backward when all I'd
like is a simple webmail client with a nice UI.

~~~
expiredtofu
Stylus is a fork that (supposedly) doesn't track you.

------
7ewis
I love how Inbox just mostly hides emails I'm not bothered by.

For example, right now in Inbox I see two bold email subjects within the
promos section - very minimal, makes it look like everything has been read.

Whereas in Gmail, I have four bold emails spread across the page making my
inbox look messy and that I may have missed something important (I haven't).

I know I can change the inbox type to improve it, but just out of the box
Inbox does such a great job at hiding it whilst still letting you know it's
there.

~~~
catacombs
This doesn't answer OP's question.

~~~
Klathmon
And neither do all the other replies saying "use fastmail" or "use gmail"

At least this one is furthering discussion

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niksmac
I am using Spark for a while now,
[https://sparkmailapp.com](https://sparkmailapp.com). I like the Smart Inbox
and notification feature. You should try once before moving to anything else.

~~~
speg
It looks like this is the best alternative. But what is their business model?
I just gave them access to iCloud and FastMail and gmail. Are they now
scanning everything and selling it?

~~~
niksmac
Their Privacy Policy says

You have a wide array of rights that we respect. Among those the right to:

\- Require access to your personal data;

\- Require rectification of your personal data (this is less relevant since
otherwise we could not provide you with the service);

\- Require erasure of your personal data;

\- Withdraw consent to processing of your personal data, where applicable;

\- Lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority (in the EEA) if
you believe that your privacy rights have been breached.

[https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy#privacy_9](https://sparkmailapp.com/privacy#privacy_9)

------
phaser
I host my own postfix server on FreeBSD and use the Evolution IMAP client on
Linux. I haven't been in a situation where I need web access to mail in years
so for me it's equivalent.

I started out about 6 months ago with this great guide:

[https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-
guide/](https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/)

The cost of a convenience like having a free email account is participating in
the demise of the protocol-based networks that we have replaced with
centralized products. There's many other great IMAP clients and maybe some of
the features of Gmail/Inbox can be recreated using server side rules and
scripts.

~~~
giobox
While this is still email, this arguably stretches credibility as a suggested
alternative for someone looking to replace Google’s Inbox app!

Classic hacker news “just roll your own email server”...

~~~
borplk
Every time an email client is mentioned here there's this classic and
repetitive comment thread under it that goes like this:

\- I run my own postfix, dovecot, mutt, emacs, gnupg, gpg, pfsense yadda yadda
(on OpenBSD!) works great ...

\- Email is too tricky to run yourself nowadays

\- Works fine for me for the past 100 years (OpenBSD vry stble, much solid)

\- ...

------
anthonys
I've been using [https://superhuman.com/](https://superhuman.com/) for a
while. It really is as fast as they say and with their focus on keyboard
shortcuts, you can fly through your inbox(s).

It's not free but then again, that's a good thing I hope. Implies they plan to
be around for a while!

~~~
zuccs
Is it Gmail only?

~~~
rahulvohra
Yep, Gmail and G Suite for now at least

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andybak
You'll need to be specific about what features you are looking for. For me -
Inbox bundles are the killer feature although it's part of a complete workflow
so there's probably some other aspects that I'm (ahem) bundling together that
are also key.

Your use-case might be different so something that's an adequate replacement
for you might not be for me.

------
ohadron
Just finished obsessing over the same question for the last few days. I'm
switching over to gmail (in the hope that some of the features will migrate
someday), and adding Todoist ([https://todoist.com](https://todoist.com)) as a
replacement for the reminders system.

But I'm still angry.

~~~
vaughnegut
How do you find todoist vs other to do list products? I've been looking around
for a while for one to settle on. What is your usage like?

~~~
ssijak
I tried every todo app on the planet Earth. I settled for 2DO. Todoist has
several limitations that I dislike and 2DO is one time payment vs monthly.

~~~
vaughnegut
Interesting. What do you find to be todoist's limitations? I'll check out 2DO

------
marpstar
Left Gmail for FastMail a few years ago and never looked back. Well worth the
money.

~~~
coffeefirst
What do you like about it, besides just not being Google?

~~~
Semaphor
Much faster interface than gmail. No tracking, no ads. Actual support.

~~~
nullcipher
What support have you required? Will they tell me why an email for marked as
spam? Because it marks my domain which clears all ham tests as spam...

~~~
chrismorgan
Yes, our support can help with that. In most cases, what we’ll do is actually
something that you can do yourself: the spam filtering goes through
SpamAssassin, with the standard rules and a few extra ones of our own, so you
can normally do a good job of figuring it out by looking at the X-Spam-hits
header, though figuring out what an obscure rule actually _is_ can sometimes
be tricky—the documentation of them is often quite poor. That will commonly
lead to things like: “the sender is in this blacklist, and the IP address
lacks RDNS, and the message didn’t include a meaningful text/plain part, and
the text/html part lacked the <html> and <body> tags (which spammers often
omit but real senders almost never do), and it did this other weird thing that
spammers commonly do; and if you fixed one or two of them it’d stop being
classified as spam”.

------
sampl
I’m just going back to Gmail. It has most of Inbox’s best features.

~~~
pests
Apparently, Bundles will be added as well to Gmail.

~~~
andybak
Do you have a source for that? I would quit most of my whining if I knew that
was to be the case.

------
Yetanfou
Your own mailserver running on your own hardware on your own premises routing
to your own domain with an MX backup routed to someone you trust who is on
another provider - you can do the same for them. Add a web mail client if you
want to have web access (Roundcube has served me well for many years now, the
Nextcloud/Owncloud mail client also works but lacks some features). Do this
and you never have to worry about being left out to hang because of some
company dropping a product or going bankrupt. Maintaining a mail server takes
about 8 hrs/year which - if translated into billable hours - might be more
expensive than using a commercial alternative but it also gives you far more
flexibility and freedom in how to handle your mail. Make sure to route
outgoing mail through a reliable smart host to avoid it being blackholed by
the likes of Google and Microsoft.

Source: personal experience, I've done this for about 23 years now. There are
many others who have detailed their experience running their own mail servers
on this site...

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=run%20own%20mail%20server&sort...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=run%20own%20mail%20server&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

...and elsewhere.

~~~
ssijak
Sure, let us just replicate yours 23 years of experience and knowledge in a
few days..

~~~
Yetanfou
What a silly remark, with that attitude you'd never start anything 'new'. Of
course you do not need to 'replicate 23 years of experience ... in a few days'
to run a mail server. There is plenty of information on the 'net on the
subject of running one of these, it is far from rocket science and something
which I assume the average HN reader can handle with ease. Don't take my word
on it, just read around a bit and ignore those who decry the foolishness of
doing something yourself when you can pay people to do it for you.

~~~
roguewit
That's a lot of assumption, there. You assume we all have an extra box lying
around to serve. You assume we all have the DIY attitude--or the time--to set
one up. You assume that all E-mail users are smart enough to do this. And you
assume (for my case, at least) that setting up AND maintaining a premise
e-mail server is something we all WANT to do (after, you know, a long day of
tending to company servers and equipment). And, finally, there's the
assumption that the irrelevance of this avenue (as it IS outside the scope of
the OP's question) is warranted or welcomed feedback.

------
timwis
I switched back to Gmail a few months ago. Used boomerang for snoozing until
Gmail added the feature itself. The biggest benefit for me is the auto
filtering of primary/social/updates/forums. I've yet to find an alternative
that does that. Otherwise I'd love to use something like FastMail. Not sure
how I'd get through my inbox otherwise without this filtering.

------
pmlnr
If you're after an android email client, try FairEmail[1]. It has some inbox-
like features, plus it's open source.

[https://email.faircode.eu/](https://email.faircode.eu/)

------
lowlevel
I would be interested to know if there are any free alternatives to
g-suite/custom domain email. I'm not sure what Inbox was, but I've been using
gmail/g-suite for many years without any real issues. I'm only using it
because it's been free, however the free edition is no longer available to new
signups. I've been recommending FastMail or Office 365 depending on who's
asking me for advice, and I really would like to have a free option as many
people I talk to are non-profit, charity, or simply resource limited.

~~~
codazoda
I just use my domain providers email forwarding service to forward to Gmail
(or whatever) and then change the from and reply to addresses to my domain
email address. Should work with just about any service to get your own domain
email and be able to move on to another provider at a moment's notice.

------
bsg75
I'm using paid accounts on both Fastmail and Protonmail. I have settled on
Fastmail now for primary use.

Its not as feature rich as some services, but it covers what I need. Multiple
account fetch, simple identity management for sending from those accounts, and
a basic calendar to aggregate work and personal schedules make it just handy
enough.

The idea behind Protonmail is interesting, but Fastmail was just a bit more
convenient. The calendar is a differentiator for me.

I'm apparently one of the few that did not prefer Inbox.

------
KozmoNau7
I dumped Inbox for ordinary Gmail, because Inbox felt just smart enough to be
neat, but dumb enough to screw up a lot. Most of the mail I receive is not in
English, which may be part of the problem for Inbox.

Later I completely dumped Gmail for a reputable hosting provider and a
personal domain name. Full cPanel setup and Roundcube webmail does what I
need.

~~~
youngbullind
I receive mail in English, Spanish - and occasionally French - and I've been
so impressed by the categorisation, and even auto-reply suggestions in both
English and Spanish (too small a sample to say on the auto-replies with
French). Maybe there are other languages it's not hot with, but these at least
I'm happy with. On the plus side, this is a feature that's made it to Gmail
already, so if they can handle hiding non-critical messages till the morning,
I'll be happy to switch back.

~~~
KozmoNau7
Danish probably isn't a huge priority for Google, unlike world languages like
French or Spanish :-)

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xte
My personal choice, personal email hosted by a well-know provider (around 20
euro/years) sync-ed locally via mbsync and sync-ed to my desktops via muchsync
(to sync tags&c). For webui Roundcube or Mailpile.

IMVHO the era of "free" mails is ended.

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motiw
Centask is a task manager integrated with Gmail inbox. You can hide emails by
scheduling them you can also group emails, to-dos, links and files under the
same task.

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softinio
funny enough after posting this I went to gmail after a long time of not using
it to see what its like. Got prompted to upgrade to a new UI early. I said yes
and most of the inbox features I used are there. Just not as nice looking. So
now I understand why they want to shut it down as most features added to gmail
and I wouldnt be surprised if the rest of the features move over too.

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sidcool
Zoho suite is a very robust alternative to GSuite. They have all services that
GSuite provides and then some more.

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deathtrader666
Check out [https://newtonhq.com/](https://newtonhq.com/)

~~~
nitroll
[https://blog.newtonhq.com/goodbye-newton-
ae6b506fd94f](https://blog.newtonhq.com/goodbye-newton-ae6b506fd94f)

------
AndrewDucker
Thunderbird on desktop, K9 on Android.

The only time I ever use webmail is you search for an old message.

------
gravypod
Are there any open source email clients that are as polished as GMail?

~~~
Yetanfou
Roundcube [1] does a good attempt of mimicking the likes of Thunderbird,
Rainloop [2] has a more 'modern' look and might appeal more to those looking
for such.

[1] [https://roundcube.net/](https://roundcube.net/)

[2] [https://www.rainloop.net/](https://www.rainloop.net/)

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na85
Fastmail, hushmail, and ProtonMail are among the better Gmail alternatives.

I'm not sure anything out there strictly replicates the exact feature set that
Inbox or Gmail had/have

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ymolodtsov
Superhuman.

~~~
joeblau
I was going to switch to this, but they don't have integrations for my
companies email. I really can't wait to try this out though.

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gordon_freeman
Yes. It's Gmail.

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swingline-747
For multiple users: Anyone use Kolab? Zimbra per-chance?

