
Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail - AmazingWill
I'm currently attempting to move away from Gmail to a email provider that respects my privacy.<p>Can anyone on HN suggest a online service that protects my privacy, has IMAP support and is preferably free?<p>In addition is it possible to delete most of the data Google currently ties to my profile?
======
mseebach
TANSTAAFL. Google doesn't _not_ respect your privacy, but there is a risk that
could change. Personally, my money is on that Google's ad revenue is best
protected by them respecting their users privacy.

Any mail host carries the risk of a privacy breach, either accidental, such as
a hacker attack, less so, such as selling the service to someone who cares
less or completely on purpose - simply turning around and selling your data.

All of these scenarios are vastly less likely to happen for Google in my risk
analysis.

~~~
SMrF
"Google's ad revenue is best protected by them respecting their users
privacy."

Their economic incentives are aligned in exactly the opposite direction. The
more they know about you the more money they make, ergo the recent privacy
policy changes which now tie your data across all of their services. In my
opinion this is already a privacy violation, even if they don't sell my data
to unscrupulous marketers. It should be opt-in. I believe the relevant quote
is from Eric Schmidt, ""Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line
and not cross it."

If you read their privacy policy, there is an entire section called
"Information we share" that is worth reading. It's short, so that's good.

But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't
resell my data to some "unscrupulous" marketer they are respecting my privacy.
If at some point in the future they buy-in to Zuckerbergs "everyone should be
open about everything" philosophy and create another privacy policy that isn't
opt-in... I guess we're all screwed.

~~~
mseebach
First, I do not consider munching my data algorithmically to serve me ads is
any more a breach of privacy than SpamAssassin feeding my email into a
Bayesian corpus of "ham".

Many people seem to have a problem with the outcome of the process being ad
revenue rather than spam suppression, I emphatically do not share that
concern.

> But still, I don't completely buy the notion that as long as Google doesn't
> resell my data to some "unscrupulous" marketer they are respecting my
> privacy. If at some point in the future they buy-in to Zuckerbergs "everyone
> should be open about everything" philosophy

My argument centres around the fact that they already have a very profitable
business model based on this data and thus they are unlikely to "pull a
Facebook".

If they start changing direction on the business model, chances are that it
will be foreshadowed some time in advance, and luckily it's downright trivial
to switch mail providers as opposed to "switching" away from Facebook.

~~~
icebraining
_it's downright trivial to switch mail providers_

Yes, but on the other hand, that only prevents them from getting any new
emails; they still have all your emails up to the moment you decide to change.

~~~
mseebach
While I'm sure the wrong people can do nasty things with a large back
catalogue of e-mails, for marketing purposes knowing what you're up to _now_
is vastly more valuable. Which means that if Google start scaring people and
they leave, their current, profitable business model is hurt.

------
yabai
I have successfully left Google and Gmail. I began to worry about the amount
of information Google had of mine (about 8gb worth of email). I now pay for
email. I have thought about setting up a mail server - perhaps that will come
in the future.

I have also installed tiny tiny rss (because I used Google Reader) on a
server. I also installed Coppermine to host photos. So far, I am very pleased
with my shift away from Google. I also try to use duckduckgo and scroogle as
much as possible. I will say that I believe Google does have the best search
engine. Google search has been the hardest habit to break. Perhaps there is
another search engine that respects its users privacy?

I worry about OAuth. I think we should battle to end OAuth - forcing users to
be part of a social network/service to use their service is a horrible
practice.

~~~
readme
I run my own mailserver on a linode VPS. For my own personal use, it's
extremely stable and hasn't been down once for the 4 months I've been using
it. I've got fail2ban, logwatch, and logcheck set up to monitor security. The
distro is ubuntu server. They have a great guide for setting up postfix and
dovecot.

Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

~~~
icebraining
_Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product._

I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

I pay for Cable TV and yet I'm still their product.

It's not as clean-cut as that; you need to read the small letters and always
use caution, paid service or not.

~~~
davyjones
> I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

Your HN usernames are required on the YCombinator app forms. There is a good
chance that they will go through your comment history to get a feel of your
personality. I would think that this figures in their "buying" process (they
are buying a part of your company after all). If you look at it like that, you
are the product.

~~~
thhaar
More likely than that, for the average user, is the fact that every
contribution to a free, search engine indexed content site is 'unpaid work'
and your content becomes the product that brings in new visitors and interest
who search for the startup/web terms we all use.

Of course if you support a site, you'll be happy to help promote it. But what
happens when you change your opinion on a matter that becomes
important/illegal in the public eye, without the option to remove your now-
offending content? Or if you plain just want to stop supporting a site? If
people are guarded when making comments because of this risk, is the free
service improved or worsened?

Email, picture or opinion, make no bones about it - our content is always
product in some way. Content lock-in should rarely be tolerated. I'm surprised
it is here, TBH. I happen to greatly appreciate this community, but I in no
way agreed to give ownership of my thoughts in return for the right to
interact. I'd rather pay with a content export/removal option than hand over
the sum total of what little wisdom I have.

~~~
icebraining
I find it interesting that the terms of use (licensing and all) are nowhere to
be found. Barring implied licenses (I don't know if there is relevant case
law), you could probably force them to remove all your comments with a simple
DMCA takedown request, since you hold their copyright.

------
wicknicks
I'm just curious -- what specific privacy intrusions are you worried about?
Google lists its privacy policy here[1]. Also, web based email services can
always look at your personal content, if not today, tomorrow. If you really
need absolute privacy, I'd recommend setting up your server. You can retain
your Gmail address, by just setting up the right forwarding options.

[1]: <http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/>

~~~
bmichel
Maybe it's just me, but I'm scared by this sentence from the Google ToS:

"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google
(and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce,
modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations,
adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with
our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and
distribute such content." -- <http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/>

~~~
zalew
Last time people spread panic about this exact same phrasing was when Dropbox
updated it's terms, it's needed to provide their services.

------
sridharvembu
(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho) We would invite people to try Zoho Mail. We
have come a long way in the past few years, and we are investing in a ton of
R&D to ensure we are world-class.

We offer our consumer edition free-of-cost and ad-free and we intend to
continue this indefinitely, and we charge only business customers. This is the
same policy we follow with our Office suite as well - whatever we offer free,
we offer it ad-free.

~~~
porker
How do you respect privacy any more than GMail does? Your email isn't hosted
in the EU, what extra protection is in place?

~~~
mseebach
And more relevant - how do you ensure that you will keep this respect?

While I'm very sympathetic to your business model, it's still a loss-leader
for your business offering. Can you guarantee that you will never attempt to
monetize this (probably) huge and growing dataset? Tomorrow, next year, and
(especially) after a private equity manager starts waving cheques with many
zeros on them in under your nose?

------
MtotheThird
Disclaimer: I work for Google, this is my personal opinion, yadda yadda yadda.

I've used (and continue to use) Fastmail for many years behind a personal
domain.

To call Fastmail reliable is a bit of a laugh. They've had at least three
severe outages in my time there (we're talking 24+ hours without mail access).
To their credit, nothing was lost in the end, however I was fuming by the end
of the last one and determined to switch to Gmail. However inertia has kept me
from doing so -- last time I checked it was tricky in Gmail to import a
complicated set of folders like I have and retain the structure, so it's
always been something I plan to get around to once I have time. Yeah right.

FWIW, I don't think there's been a significant outage since the Opera
purchase. And I'm quite pleased with what I've seen of FM's beta interface.

~~~
antoncohen
I've done a few migrations to Gmail/Google Apps, I'm actually in the middle of
one right now. It's pretty easy to retain your folder structure, especially if
you have IMAP and are going to Google Apps. Nested Labels has been moved from
Labs to a standard feature. I think there is a still a 40 char folder path
limit, so make sure your folder names are short enough before migration, e.g.,
rename "Mailing Lists" to "Lists".

Google has the Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool, which does IMAP sync
with any normal IMAP server. The tool is Windows-only, they used to have a
web-based version but they discontinued it (WTF Google?!). It requires
2-legged OAuth, which requires Google Apps for Business. But Google Apps for
Business has a free trial with no billing info required. So what I do is sign
up for Google Apps Free, upgrade to Business, do the migration, and downgrade
to Free.

If your mail in stored in a mail client (POP3-style), you can add Google Apps
IMAP to your mail client, and drag and drop your folders/mail from the old
account to Google IMAP. Be sure to hold down the Ctrl key (or whatever) to
_copy_ not _move_. This method also works if you are going to normal Gmail.

There is also imapsync, a Perl command line tool, and a few other tools that
do things like Maildir to IMAP sync.

------
asifjamil
Just out of curiosity, which aspect of Google's privacy policy seems fishy to
you?

I think any way you look at it, there is a basic compromise you make with
Gmail: either Google holding all of your info, or someone being able to hack
into your account due to security vulnerabilities. Also, not to mention the
tools and email filters Google provides.

------
ciudilo
During last few month Google has shown its true face and it is not pretty. It
is very clear now that they are under the impression that there are no viable
alternatives to their services. My main reason for moving off Gmail is a need
for clear relationship with my provider. I want to pay for the services I
receive in order to be able to complain when something goes wrong or when
there is something I don't like. I don't want 'but it is free...' argument
showed in my face when new design is forces upon me, email is down for a whole
day or there are drastic changes to privacy policy.

If you are looking for Gmail replacement definitely try out fastmail.fm

------
dwyer
Depends on what you consider respect of privacy. If you mean any provider that
doesn't use software to scan your email for keywords, then that rules out any
that incorporate a spam filter, and I can't think of any that don't.

I personally don't see how targeted advertising is any more intrusive than
spam filtering. Sophisticated spam filters scan for keywords and classify
words based which emails you read and reply to, emails from contacts whose
emails you read and reply to, etc.

It's all automated in either case. Nobody at Google is reading your mail.

~~~
goodside
Why do you think nobody is reading his mail? In September of 2010 an employee
was dismissed for spying on the mail and Google Voice calls of four underage
teenagers he had been meeting in real life. There have to be people at Google
who have authority to read read the mail of users for less scandalous reasons
for this to even be possible.

~~~
jonknee
This will be the case for any mail provider. If you host yourself you still
count on the fact that traffic to your server isn't being snooped on and
always have the possibility of the authorities going in and snatching your box
if they need to see your email (that won't happen with Google, but Google will
comply with any requests and turn over your mail).

Encrypt your email if you want privacy. For even better privacy, don't use
email at all (encrypted or not the headers need to be in the clear).

~~~
icebraining
_always have the possibility of the authorities going in and snatching your
box if they need to see your email_

Encrypting your incoming email[1] fixes that particular problem. It's still
not as good as getting others to use PGP, but on the other hand, it doesn't
require getting others to use PGP ;)

[1]:
[https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_E...](https://grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email)

------
Maro
Microsoft's Office 365 online office suite has an Outlook webmail client which
was flawless well when I gave it a shot using Firefox. I think it costs $6/mo,
no ads, no spying, because you pay for it. I don't know how well the search
and spam filters work.

<http://www.office365.com>

Here's a demo video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOpCmUXLmTA>

Note: This is _not_ the same thing as Hotmail.

~~~
sarnowski
Just because you are paying for the service does not mean that they respect
your privacy. You can also pay for Google Apps, but what you get is not worth
the money. Depends more on the company than on the pricing model.

(This is just a general hint - not against Microsoft. I don't know how they do
their job.)

~~~
Maro
Microsoft advertises Office 365 / Outlook by saying that unlike Gmail, they
don't "peek" at your email for ads.

The "Gmail man" ad:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXqrTfOWx60>

~~~
ortatherox
That was an internal video to try raise morale in Microsoft and get some
people switch, it's pretty safe to assume gmail reads your emails as much as
their spam filters does. But as well as doing the spam filtering on the
results it does ads.

~~~
Estragon
Yeah, just looking at mail to model spam is one thing. Looking at it to model
the user's life and interests is quite another.

------
Sander_Marechal
Why not host your own? It's not that hard. I run my own using exim4 + dovecot.
It's pretty easy to set up. Plus, as a bonus I set up mutt on my server as
well so when I am somewhere else I can just ssh into my box and read my mail.

~~~
scraplab
This is much more of a pain that it seems. To ensure deliverability you need
to ensure that you manage SPF/Domainkeys records, that you're not running an
open relay, and configure your own spam filtering. It's all quite easy to mess
up, so I'd only recommend it if you know what you're doing. Your time is
probably worth more than the few currency units/month for someone like
fastmail.fm to do it properly.

~~~
techsupporter
There are several[1] guides[2] that demonstrate how to set up a full-featured
and secure e-mail system. Personally, I run my own e-mail on Exchange Server
2010--complete with a multi-copy database availability group and multiple
front-end servers--but I'm known for overkill.

1 - <http://flurdy.com/docs/postfix/index.html>

2 - <http://www.mail-toaster.org/>

~~~
yabai
Why would you choose to run Exchange?

~~~
techsupporter
Because I like it, I'm good at it, and it plays nice with all my devices that
support ActiveSync. Cloud providers have added support for ActiveSync, but I'm
too much of a control freak to give up my self-hosted setup (both due to
perceived privacy problems and spam concerns). At this point my Exchange
environment is a collection of virtual machines spread across two physical
machines (and two disk sets in one machine), so my hardware cost is minimal.

~~~
yabai
Fair enough.

My employer uses Exchange (for some reason still running Exchange 2003!!!) and
I have always struggled getting mail clients to play properly with exchange. I
have finally given up and am running Outlook virtually.

------
voidr
It's not Google who you should be afraid of it's your government, if your
government cares about data protection, than Google will not risk it, it's not
worth it, even if they are evil,

But if your government forces Google to make a wiretap interface for them,
they have no choice.

Either way they are in the hands of the government.

------
ansy
I recently attempted such a move, but Google docs held me back. I realize any
true paranoia agent would never use Google Docs, but if you ever collaborate
on documents it is irreplaceable. Not to mention other people are creating
shared documents on Google Docs that I need to use.

True, I could move just migrate the email, contact list, and calendar
somewhere else. But then I would have two contact lists that need to be
synchronized between my new provider and Google Docs and forward any
notifications from Gmail.

Then I realized just how much I rely on Google's email search. Finding an
email within tens of thousands is instant on Gmail. It is nearly impossible
with anyone else.

In the end, I abandoned trying to move away from Gmail / Google Apps. After
all, there is nothing stopping the admin of any email system from casually
reading inboxes or being forced to turn over data to a government authority.
And Google does have some history of fighting back for information requests,
where I can see much smaller providers folding under pressure more quickly due
to limited resources.

And the argument against self hosting has been repeated here already, but the
risk of loss of service is far, far the worst thing to happen for email. If
you don't care if your email becomes undeliverable for hours or days at a
time, you really don't need to be paranoid about email.

------
corkill
You can use <https://www.google.com/takeout/> to see and download a lot of the
data you have in Googles services.

In the dashboard all the options are down the bottom to delete all your info
etc.

~~~
sbarre
Darn I was hoping Gmail was in that list. Purely out of curiosity I'd love to
download the 20,000 messages I have in there to do some analysis..

~~~
dnlk
Gmail is not in that list, because they have IMAP access
(<http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail>).

You can just setup your account in for example OSX Mail, after synchronizing
your messages will be in ~/Library/Mail (albeit not in a really nice folder
structure like pure mbox or maildir, but you should be able to convert them
without much hassle). Or you could use offlineimap
(<http://www.offlineimap.org>), which gives you an IMAP dump/backup of your
messages (in maildir format if I'm not mistaken). That said, the possibilities
of getting your mail from IMAP are almost endless, just choose whatever suits
you.

Btw, keeping 20000 mails just about anywhere might be convenient, but I really
wonder what for (to clarify, I have maybe 300 mails right now on my own server
and I regularly dump old stuff, while dumping for example registration mails
right away due to security reasons)?

~~~
sbarre
Thanks for pointing out the IMAP approach. I use IMAP on my phone but never
really considered using it download _all_ my mail.

I'll give offlineimap.org a look..

To answer your other question, I have 20k emails because Gmail doesn't delete
by default, so I just archive as I go..

I'm a zero-inbox type so I use labels and searching a lot. Those 20k emails
are surprisingly well organized..

------
gtklocker
As long as data is concerned, <http://google.com/dashboard> will tell you
about everything tied with you account.

I'm currently trying to do this as well and the only viable solution sounds
self-hosted email. I tried a bit with hushmail and Tor (also look at
hushmail's Diceware for password encryption) but it has a tight limit of 25MB
for free accounts.

Good luck.

------
mapleoin
Lavabit is pretty good. I've been with them (Personal Account plan) for about
4 years now. No downtime, IMAP and a stated goal in caring about their users
privacy. The webmail interface is pretty modest, but they do provide a way to
set pretty advanced regex server-side filters. You have to upgrade to a paid
plan if you want decent SPAM filtering though. They're also planning a
surprise upgrade soon.

<http://lavabit.com/>

Zohomail is an interesting alternative. They say that they do not sell ads
because they are a profitable subscription-based service. Email is free for
personal use, has good IMAP support and a decent webmail interface. You can
also use your own domain for free. The only problem I've found with them is
that the email filtering is limited to a few common fields (e.g. no specific
headers).

<http://www.zoho.com/mail/>

~~~
tluyben2
Sorry, but for real work the ZOHO web interface is unusable. I'm not the only
one who thinks that :) Especially if you are used to Gmail, ZOHO works like it
has been written by drunk people.

Lavabit seems quite interesting.

Anyone going to write a Gmail clone for installation on your own servers
finally? I would pay quite a bit for that.

~~~
sridharvembu
(Disclosure: I am the CEO of Zoho) If you could take a moment to tell us what
you find unusable about Zoho Mail, I would assure you we would listen to the
critique seriously (and perhaps even do something about it if we agree!). You
can also contact me at svembu at zohocorp com and yes we use Zoho Mail
intensively in our 1400 person company.

~~~
tluyben2
It's good to know you use it yourself :) I use, because of one of my biggest
clients, your mail client every day as well.

Already presented my disclaimer: I have been working with Gmail since it's
inception. Before that I used all kinds of different clients; all not very
nice. The best I used was mutt by far. But that pre-gmail ;) I'm talking about
the client, not about Google as cloud mail storage provider, although I really
don't think they are evil yet as people seem to think.

I digress.

So this is more a shootout than a face value comparison, although most points,
I believe, would annoy me as well without the gmail comparison.

Biggest: speed. Basically that's my biggest issue. ZOHO is slow. Very slow.
This is not only the mail app, this is everything (the project management app
makes me bang my head against the wall every week I have to enter hours as it
takes... yep, hours...). But for the mail app, something I use intensively,
this is really quite unworkable. My colleagues at the client all use Outlook
with Zoho as they cannot work with the mail client as it is too slow to really
work with.

With gmail you click on a message and as by magic, instantly it opens the
entire thread. For the current page even when your network is gone. With Zoho
you see 'loading' then you wait. And wait. And then it appears. Next mail.
Loading... The agony. It's like it was the year 2000 and we just had Ajax.

No internet detection; when internet is down even for a little bit, Zoho mail
becomes unusable. It takes forever to notice internet is down and it will be
showing 'loading' forever and nothing works even if you are back again.
Refresh fixes it, but it seems brittle. Sometimes the CSS breaks, sometimes it
just give random error messages when you click on anything. Even though the
internet was back for a while already.

This is probably a matter of taste, but screen real estate; when i'm reading a
message i'm not interested in the rest of my messages. I want to use most of
my available screen for reading that message (like gmail...).

Spam: I get tons of spam; I have ancient email addresses and they attract 100s
of 1000s of spam mails per month; in gmail I notice NOTHING of this, really
absolutely nothing. In ZOHO the spam filter is almost not noticeable for me, I
keep clicking spam until my wrists are locked up.

And then the little things, the ergonomics; it just feels clunky. Not as bad
as the project management app (I am no interface designer, but come on :(, but
it just feels old and heavy. If Google taught anything for mail client
designers; not everything has to look/work like Outlook.

This all makes me say ZOHO web mail is not ready for heavy mail users even
though a lot people use it for that; a lot people also use Lotus Notes, that
doesn't prove much. I will pay more attention and mail you with my findings
because now I only see the big points clearly, but the whole experience is
actually just 'not good'.

You did a marvelous job of building this company; my compliments. You have a
lot of good products and you managed to build this impressive array of
products at an amazing rate. But that has it side effects; polishedness is one
of them. I know a lot of people who work with Zoho products every day and for
some of them they still cannot find how to do some things ( I won't name my
nemesis again here ). Would it hurt to add employee 1401 who is a $400k/year
UX guru to overhaul everything? I think it would make all the difference.

Thanks for replying here!

------
huhtenberg
Tangentially related -

I would pay for an email service with an off-site delivery for Gmail
recipients. Basically, it should hold any email that is to be sent to GMail
servers and instead send a note saying "You've got mail, pick it up here
[https://<url>](https://<url>). Anything like this out there?

~~~
hollerith
That's hardcore!

------
darklajid
I try to get myself to start blogging for a couple days now and wanted to
start with my journey away from the big G.

For me the solution is my own vps, self-hosting. I'm 90% there, having set up
the new system, backed up my GMail contents, added a webmail solution and now
I'm looking at the last (but so damn important) 10%: Choosing a backup
solution (and I won't fully migrate until I have a backup in place that I
successfully restored once).

I understand that this isn't for everyone, but for me this proved little work
so far and it's really flexible (I'm authenticating via yubikey now, for
example).

------
mutant
I've moved my family's email to Rackspace's hosted email (not exchange). I
have an SLA, and I own data. So far the loss of spam filtering and webmail are
my biggest aches, soon achieve searching will be added to that list. I
sometimes wonder if Google didn't have the same role as anti-virus companies
did. Secretly promote viruses to over value their software... Google's spam
filtering is amazing now that I have to contend with RS's lackluster spam
services, so it's another case of "you need us, because it's a scary world out
there."

Whatever the case, I'm happy to be off gmail.

------
16s
I highly recommend Tuffmail. They are awesome. I am a longtime customer:

<http://www.tuffmail.com/>

Edit: It's not free. It costs like 2 dollars a month for the smallest account.

~~~
poutine
Another suggestion for tuffmail. Used them for years. Stable and does what you
need.

------
mbateman
Is Gmail for Business any different privacy-wise than free Gmail? (The free
part is less important to me.)

~~~
shampoo
My understanding is it is different:
[https://commons.lbl.gov/display/google/Google+Apps+-+Privacy...](https://commons.lbl.gov/display/google/Google+Apps+-+Privacy+and+Security+Overview)

------
nuttendorfer
And while we are at it maybe a good alternative to Google Calendar? I've been
wanting to switch away from these two for some time now.

~~~
pedrolll
Yes, this is definitely relevant to my interests as well. So far I haven't
found anything as good as GC and even that is not as good as I would like it
to be.

~~~
a_a_r_o_n
Besides gmail's superior spam filtering, this is the one thing I miss from
google.

I look around once in awhile, and I never do find a good solution. My current
solution is Thunderbird's Lightning extension, and I cringe every time
Thunderbird updates, which is often now that Mozilla has the constant update
fetish.

I would love to find a reasonably priced calendar solution with a company that
I believe will be around for at least five years.

I _really_ wish fastmail did calendars. Are you listening FM?

------
pors
What is exactly the privacy concern that makes you move away from gmail?

~~~
AmazingWill
When I consider targeted advertising and the sheer amount of data that I've
pumped into Google services over the years it's scary to see how accurate of a
picture advertisers and co have of me.

~~~
jenhsun
I suggest you can opt out Google's ads first. Hope these work.

Save your opt-out preference permanently
<http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/intl/en/plugin/>

Ads Preferences Manager <http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/?hl=en>

Google Advertising and Privacy <http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/>

------
dangrossman
I've used Rackspace E-mail for years (formerly called MailTrust) with my own
domains. It's $2 per mailbox per month, minimum of $10 per month. POP, IMAP
(with push notifications) and a decent webmail client I don't use. You get an
actual SLA and 24x7x365 support by phone/web/email.

------
antoncohen
What privacy concerns do you have? Real people reading your email? Computer
programs scanning your email? Is it about ads and not privacy?

It's my understanding that virtually no one at Google has the access
privileges required to read your email. That won't be the case at most smaller
mail hosts. If the host supports IMAP, they can read your email, there is no
way around that. I trust Google's security way more than most companies.

If it's about programs scanning your email, well, spam/virus filtering has to
do that. And I personally don't care what some computer bot knows about me, as
long as a real person doesn't snoop around.

In my opinion ads are not an invasion of privacy, and if you want free you
will get ads. Google Apps for Business can have ads disabled, only $50/year.

------
PRL
As most here, I'd advise to go for a commercial service. Selfhosting is fun
but can cause unnecessary headaches.

Fastmail seems to have an impeccable reputation. I have been using sherweb for
several years now. Works very well. It's a bit more expensive but you also get
a lot more, too. Think calendar, contacts. Plus, most smartphones work
wonderfully with the Exchange mailbox. They are located in Canada. Last but
not least, the webmail interface finally works well in other browsers than IE.
[http://www.sherweb.com/hosted-exchange/hosted-exchange-
featu...](http://www.sherweb.com/hosted-exchange/hosted-exchange-
features?rl=true) They also support IMAP.

Are there any good hosters based on Zimbra out there?

~~~
peacetara
For zimbra, I've used <http://www.simplymailsolutions.com/>

They are based in the UK, so you have to convert their pricing, but Their
service has been fabulous. It's Zimbra. I eventually ended up moving to
iCloud, with my new phone, I ended up losing some income streams, and wanted
to cut down costs, but otherwise I'd still be with them. There is also 01.com,
I used them some too, they are fine, if you need a US based provider.

------
JoshTriplett
Privacy and free don't work well together; a free provider has to support
itself somehow, and most of the ways it could do so inherently reduce your
privacy.

Personally, I'd suggest going to gandi.net and getting a domain name from them
for $15/year, which comes with email: 5 real accounts, umpteen forwarding
accounts, IMAP, SMTP, and a decent webmail client (roundcube). Plus, you get
an email address at your own domain, not tied to any one email provider,
making it easy to switch later if you want.

------
dotmanish
I use RackSpace e-mail hosting for own domain and also for business mail
hosting. Haven't had any issues with them yet (after around 2 years).

Edit: It has IMAP, but isn't free.

------
a_a_r_o_n
fastmail.fm has a free account, but it's nowhere near the space that gmail
provides. But it's good enough.

I originally used fastmail's free account just to have a backup smtp server
for when gmail or whoever I was with at the time went down. gmail does go
down, happened more than once to me.

fastmail has a $5/year account, which is probably where you want to start if
you're concerned about "free."

I think their next level up is about $20/year.

------
replax
If you are lucky (fast) to get one of the first raspberry PIs, you could host
your own mail server on one of those. Put SpamAssasin on there, get ssh
running and the other mail programms you need (plenty of guides on the web for
that), set up a rsync script for backup and then it's pretty much set &
forget. Then when the SD card dies on you, you stick a new one in and resync,
ta-da!

~~~
geeknam
Or you could get a SheevaPlug (I've got a TonidoPlug). The most economical
personal home server :)

------
greyman
AmazingWill, in my opinion, if you want to ensure privacy, online service with
IMAP is not the solution, because:

1) You don't know who has (or will get) access to the emails stored at the
servers.

2) You don't know if your account will not be hacked.

In my opinion, you either need to:

a) host your own email server, or

b) periodically download your emails through pop3s to your own encrypted
drive, not leaving them on the server

------
cyber
Ah, my fellow geeks. Excellent discussions on replacements for the backend
infrastructure and handling. :)

Now, does anyone have a replacement for the UI/client? Something good and
multiplatform that a) deals well with multi media (images, attachments, etc)
and b) still retains MH semantics?

The use of MH style semantics is what attracted me to the whole thing back in
2004.

------
conradfr
GMail for Business ?

~~~
rms
That should work.

~~~
gtklocker
Shit rms says.

------
fileptr
Recently, the company i work for decided to move out of G apps(paid). The top
mgmt got some doubts abt google employees reading our emails. We were trying
to close some deal with Google. I think they did it after some credible
suspicion.

------
weezuh
If one is worried about privacy, he/she shouldn't send their email in
plaintext, readable by not just Google, but the rest of the world. If one
cares about privacy, look to encryption.

------
abhishekdesai
Try using Zimbra community edition. You will need a server and some technical
knowledge to set it up but it is good. My company's official emails are hosted
on Zimbra since long now.

------
a_a_r_o_n
pair.com has cheap shared hosting which includes email. In some ways they're
more flexible than solutions like fastmail. It's a middle ground between total
outsourcing and running your own server: you get a shell account, yet you
don't have to keep the server up.

I used pair.com for this and other purposes for many years, happily, and I'm
thinking of going back. I'm on fastmail at the moment. One surprising
development: pair.com used to be freebsd-only, and now they offer ubuntu as an
alternative.

------
copenhagencoder
<http://www.gandi.net/> offers free IMAP/POP with their domains. Hosted in
Europe (as far as I know).

------
ksec
Late to the Discussions, but i am surprise no one has mentioned atmail
-www.atmail.com

They have a cloud solution too.

Personally i think this is the best email services.

------
andrewcooke
runbox - <http://runbox.com/> \- seemed best when i looked for a replacement.
they're based in norway, but not free. however, i eventually decided to run my
own (on linux, using mutt terminal reader and mairix search (nice and fast);
mail delivery by forwarding through my isp).

------
dhruvbird
An email is exchanged between >=2 people. One of them securing their account
has little (if any) effect on privacy.

~~~
dasil003
Let me reply with equal banality: for two people to secure their email, one
must.

------
pewfly
I have a question regarding these so-called highly secure email providers
which respect privacy. Is the data on the servers of these services encrypted?
I mean, isn't it too resource consuming to do something like that? And if it
is encrypted, do they do it like LastPass, with a client side JavaScript
decryption module?

------
digamber_kamat
People should anwer the question asked and not go tangential to the question.

------
zyfo
The reason Gmail is free is because they have ads. I wouldn't expect to find a
free and good email service.

Here's one that costs some money: <http://fastmail.fm/>

~~~
masnick
The new beta web interface for fastmail.fm looks pretty good:
<https://beta.fastmail.fm>

~~~
aDemoUzer
It that a joke? Cause clicking on sign up took me to:
<https://beta.fastmail.fm/%3C?%20Signup%20?%3E>

------
shareme
A question, what is the difference between Google reading your email and using
data and the ISP eMail service you have chosen.

Seems to me that Google has a better track record than y other IPS email
provider you could chose at this time.

~~~
Estragon
Scale and business model. My ISP is not trying to help people sell me stuff by
modeling my life and interests.

------
hasantayyar
Maybe you can use another mail client (web or desktop) but your mail hosting
service can be still gmail (with pop3 and smtp services).

~~~
AmazingWill
Still serves targeted ads and my data is linked to my Google profile. One of
the things I want to escape from.

------
porkbird
Apple's iCloud. It's free (up to 5GBs), no ads, and Apple is not in the ads
business, hence, they have no use of your personal data (as opposed to
Google). I have no idea how good are they in actually protecting your personal
data, but I don't recall significant breaches of mobile.me/icloud in the past
year.

~~~
executive
> Apple is not in the ads business

Really? <http://advertising.apple.com/>

~~~
porkbird
Yes, sorry, they are. They are not serving web ads though, nor we have a
reliable account that they collect information from user's iCloud emails to
enhance the relevancy of iAd ads.

