

Ask HN: Alternatives to Gmail? - snoopybbt

Hello HN!<p>Let&#x27;s assume that for some reason you don&#x27;t want to use GMail for your emails.<p>And that also, you don&#x27;t want to run your own mail server.<p>What are the alternatives to GMail, comparable in services and quality?<p>I think this is a general interest question, but by the way, I&#x27;m mostly interested in SMTP&#x2F;IMAP access, a decent amount of space, reliability.<p>Thanks in advance!
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latch
I've been using fastmail for a while. It's been solid. A trickle more spam
gets through (like, 1 every 2 weeks instead of 1 a month). The android client
is solid (had been using K9 before its release). $40/yr for email is more than
reasonable in my books.

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x0x0
does it do labels ala gmail or is it folders (ie only one label per email)?
Their website doesn't seem to answer this question so my strong suspicion is
it is a folder based email architecture.

Thanks!

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latch
Your suspicion is correct.

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a3n
fastmail.com

[https://www.fastmail.com/help/](https://www.fastmail.com/help/)

[http://blog.fastmail.com/](http://blog.fastmail.com/)

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sjs382
I use Zoho for my startup's email, mainly because it's free at our usage
level, and we're very budget conscious at the moment.

The only downside I've encountered so far is that the Zoho Mail Android app
doesn't support multiple accounts, so if that's something you need, you're
stuck with a pop3/imap client.

I started off using Google Apps, using a Domain Alias for my personal GAFYD
account, but keeping the "me" identity and the "startup" identity separate
became a little bit unwieldy.

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greenyoda
Some answers in this recent post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8951464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8951464)

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snoopybbt
Oh, great, thanks!!

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sergiotapia
I use outlook.com - it's good for an email website.

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zamalek
Or the bigger variant: Exchange 365. After live dropped support for custom
domains I switched to that. I was looking specifically for activesync support,
but it also covers IMAP/SMTP/reliability.

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27182818284
It is amazing how this comes up on HN so often.

There is a serious startup that could take advantage maybe. Or heck, I'm going
to recommend fastmail.fm, anyway, so I have to wonder if they're growing like
mad.

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ukigumo
[https://kolabsystems.com/](https://kolabsystems.com/) is really good and you
get a full groupware solution.

Or run your own kolab server in an AWS instance for instance. :-)

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nailer
I'd be interested in an actual gmail alternative: search-based email, ie, an
API that is explicitly NOT IMAP and where a single message can live in an
arbitrary amount of folders.

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getdavidhiggins
\- fastmail.fm

\- mailbox.org

Running your own mail server is only difficult if you're a security pedant and
want ultra-perfect security & privacy. Perfect security is a massive
enterprise. Even Google with their seemingly endless amounts of money can't
even achieve perfect security. NSA backdoors in Gmail anyone?

Mailbox.org is German, so they sort of care more than others. Fastmail is
second best, but again - I have yet to see any serious efforts by them to
ensure security/privacy.

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levidurfee
I like [http://www.zoho.com/](http://www.zoho.com/)

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jp
They have a good spam filter.

