
Ask HN: Good email host? - frequentlywrong
Anyone know of a good IMAP host that I can use with my own domain?<p>Fastmail is good, but quite pricey (cheapest option if you have your own domain is $3.61 a month, and that&#x27;s if you pay three years in advance. On top of that comes the price of the domain).<p>For privacy reasons I don&#x27;t want to use Gmail, and I don&#x27;t want to use my own server.<p>Zoho might be an option, but it&#x27;s unclear to me whether or not it is an Indian company (the Wikipedia page is unclear regarding that), and it&#x27;s unclear to me whether or not there are possible privacy concerns with Indian email hosts.
======
masnick
Here are the options I see:

1\. Pay a reasonable amount for a reputable service like FastMail with a good
user interface

2\. Use a free, reputable service and make your peace with them selling ads
off your email (they have to keep the lights on somehow)

3\. Use a super cheap or free service that doesn't work as well as FastMail or
Gmail (you get what you pay for)

4\. Host your own and risk deliverability issues, and spend time maintaining a
server.

There is no magic solution here that works great, is free or super cheap,
doesn't require lots of time on my part, and doesn't have an ad-based business
model.

I value my time too much to consider #3 or #4.

If I didn't want to pay for FastMail, I would just use Gmail. Realistically, I
don't think Google's algorithms reading my email would have a noticeable
negative impact on my life, but I would notice bad UI or failed deliveries.

------
rufius
As a fastmail user for the last 3 years, I would say fastmail.

I pay $130/3 yr so about $3.61 a month. Considering how integral email is to
my day to day life, the cost of a drink at Starbucks seems reasonable to pay
per month.

The flexibility in configuring aliases is excellent - I maintain a couple
distinct email address domains but can send all my mail from a single account.
Not to mention my wife and I now share address books, calendars, and domains
which has all been exceedingly easy to setup.

Honestly, I think FastMail is absolutely worth it. Give them a shot - it's a
great service that I'd pay twice as much for.

------
kybernetyk
/edit: Typical case of "just read the headline and replied". Sorry for telling
you about Fastmail while you ruled it out.

I'm currently using Fastmail [0]. No issues so far (5 months in).

Switched initially because they support push on the native iPhone mail app
while Google forces you to use their Gmail app if you want push. (Even if you
have paid for Gmail for business service).

I'm using FM with my own domain. Setup was trivial. There's also a lot of
material on the web about setting up fastmail with different software
packages. (My MBP's postfix uses my fm account to send out cronjob messages).

Can't say anything about their webmail because I never really used any webmail
front end. But from the little contact I had with FM's webmail frontend it
looked tidy and was responsive.

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

------
farski
I switched to FastMail several years ago. I had been hosting my email on
Dreamhost, which was "just okay" in term of what they offered for email, but
it was costing me about as much for shared hosting, XMPP, email, mysql, etc
per year as FastMail was going to be just for email. So, like you, to me it
felt expensive at the time. It took me a while to pull the trigger.

The things that made eventually got me to make the switch were:

\- I realized email is basically a utility for me. So while I'm happy to spend
$30/mo on cell phone, $60 on my home ISP, etc, it was kind of crazy to think I
wouldn't spend $4/mo on email \- FastMail had great reviews. Pretty much every
time I did research to answer "is this really the best choice?" the answer was
always yes \- They seem to really care about IMAP as an idea. If you read
through their blog, they do a _lot_ of work to make sure IMAP is a great open
standard for communication. That means their support for the protocol is
always getting better, and they're improving OSS projects related to IMAP that
they use.

Also they keep getting better. Aside from dropping XMPP support (which I can
understand, though I have yet to find a suitable replacement for), their
service offerings have gotten better since I signed up. Obviously email is
email, but there are many little things that have received constant updates
since I joined (better admin dashboard, better mail/contact/cal push support
for iOS, more sensible billing options)

I could go on, but paying whatever I pay for FastMail service has definitely
gone from "ehh do I really want to pay that much for email?" to me really
liking supporting them as a company. If they were to increase prices a
reasonable amount at some point, I probably wouldn't hesitate paying it.

------
confounded
Very happy recent convert to KolabNow. They have a kind of _ethical nerd
deluxe_ service, based in Switzerland. It's not cheap (I pay about $10 a
month, and that's only going to go up), but I'm very happy with it.

    
    
      Pros:
    
      - 100% green energy
      - 100% Free Software (+ meaningful upstream contributions)
      - Servers run on fully open POWER8 architecture!
      - Server for your contacts (CardDAV), calendar (CalDav), and 
      notes (IMAP)
      - Swiss privacy laws (not what they used to be, but still outside
       US, EU, N Eyes)
      - They run what seem like very fancy business-class LUG
      events in Europe. Of no utility to me what-so-ever, but I'm 
      glad to be indirectly funding this sort of thing.
    
      Cons:
    
      - No 2FA :(
      - Not the cheapest (but I'm happy to pay a little extra for 
      the above)
      - Slow webmail (moved back to native clients)
    

(Originally posted at:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12251594](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12251594))

------
kyrra
Can you elaborate on your privacy concerns with Gmail? Google Gsuite (formerly
apps for work) has some fairly strict privacy controls.

[https://gsuite.google.com/learn-
more/how_google_protects_you...](https://gsuite.google.com/learn-
more/how_google_protects_your_data.html)

~~~
frequentlywrong
Google Apps is too expensive for a single user, and Gmail collects my personal
data.

------
TrevorStepnikkk
I can highly recommend [https://mailbox.org/en/](https://mailbox.org/en/) .
Based in Germany, complying to German data privacy laws. The smallest package
is 1€/month with 2 GB storage for e-mails, 3 aliases, POP3/IMAP, calendar,
address book, tasks. There are also options for anonymous registration and
payment. They also have encryption built in: you can do PGP encryption in the
webinterface. It also shows you whether there is working transport encryption
(SMTP with TLS/STARTTLS) for each addressee. This might sound like a marketing
post but i am a highly satisfied customer and really like the service. I have
catch-all addresses for +5 domains ("Office package") and everything works
like a charm.

Edit: changed currency

~~~
frequentlywrong
After having checked out their website, the one thing I don't like about them
is how they say they'll reject spam before it reaches users' accounts (i.e.
reach the spam folder or inbox). That sounds like a good thing in theory, but
I've seen so many legitimate emails be marked as spam by aggressive spam
systems that I fear losing legitimate emails if emails looking like spam are
rejected and don't even reach the spam folder.

~~~
TrevorStepnikkk
In my 1,5 years of usage I haven't encountered any incidents of missing mails.
As I understand it they rely on greylisting which makes it infeasible for
spammers.

There have been e-mails that took around 5 minutes to show up in my inbox, but
this was mostly with "low-traffic-domains" and only for the first e-mail.
Subsequent e-mails have been delivered instantly.

And: it's a really nice not to have to check one's spam folder every day for
falsely marked legitimate mails. I am very happy with the automatic system.

------
x3ro
[https://mailbox.org/en/](https://mailbox.org/en/) is my goto provider for
email. its 1 euro a month, even if you have your own domain, and also does
stuff like calendar and address book if you want.

------
frequentlywrong
Speaking of FastMail pricing, I don't understand why they wouldn't display
their multi-year discounts anywhere on their page (if it's there, I can't find
it). You have to have an account to be able to see the discounts. But for
those who're interested, the discounts are the following:

The Basic account (normally $30 a year) can be purchased for three years at
$80.

The Standard account (normally $50 a year) can be purchased for three years at
$130.

The Professional account (normally $90 a year) can be purchased for three
years at $230.

------
dubcanada
Zoho is based in USA. It would carry the same privacy concerns as the other US
companies.

Without knowing exactly what you want it's hard to say. There are literally
thousands of email hosts.

~~~
frequentlywrong
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation)
says that "the company is headquartered at its largest campus in Estancia IT
Park in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Formerly, it filed headquarters in
Pleasanton, California, USA."

~~~
CLGrimes
They still have an office in Pleasanton, CA.

------
Core-UX
[https://protonmail.com](https://protonmail.com)

Unlike Germany, Switzerland is not a U.S. ally and as such, it doesn’t have to
comply with the NSA or other U.S. authority demands.

They just recently released standalone apps for iOS and Android and I believe
they are working on desktop apps as well. The Web interface is fast and modern
and its creators come from CERN, with deep respect for civil liberties online…

------
sashk
I was researching this. And still am.

I always come to conclusion that either I have to host mail for myself, or use
Google Apps.

I can't trust Microsoft to host my email, nor I want to trust Rackspace (for
some odd reason, two feedbacks I received were from people who had negative
experiences with them). Zoho is nice choise, but they had multi-week outage
year or two ago, with somewhat unclear notification to users.

Fastmail was always second choice, because it was more expensive for amount of
mail I have now, which will need to be stored on their servers.

Also, as I'll be hosting email for family, I calculate for 5 accounts.

Google Apps came out to 25/month.

Self-hosting option came out to one Linode machine, plus one other VPS
provider machine located in different location for backup MX. That came out to
15/month.

Fastmail was more expensive at the time (was I looking at business account for
some reason?), but their pricing page --
[https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/](https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/) \--
shows that they are same price as Google. Can't seem to find their multi-year
discount information.

~~~
teddyh
> _Self-hosting option came out to one Linode machine, plus one other VPS
> provider machine_

So, that’s what “self-hosting” means nowadays? Because of course we can’t have
these infernal machines in our _homes_ ; what are we, _savages_ , to sully our
hands with _manual labor_ and _physical hardware_? /s

Note: Your home is the only place where you can host your server and be
reasonably sure that the government is at least going to show you a _warrant_
when they want all your data.

~~~
sashk
I understand that, but unfortunately my provider at home is blocking port 25
(both directions), so that's not an option.

~~~
jethro_tell
Use a home machine then tunnel to one VPS for an endpoint. Saves one box.

------
programminggeek
Paying $4/month for email is worth it. I pay a lot more for a lot less
elsewhere.

If you are on HN, I can all but guarantee you this - you've already spent more
than $4 of your time even doing the research and posting on HN.

If you can't afford it, go get a minimum wage job somewhere and work for an
hour. That covers the $4 right with a few bucks to spare...

------
ajdlinux
Personally, I've given in and just let Google raid my emails, but I have heard
_very_ good things about FastMail from quite a few people. The FastMail devs
are pretty well known within the Australian open source community for being
quite decent people, if that matters to you :)

------
brhsiao
I recently had this exact question. I finally decided on Pawnmail
([https://pawnmail.com/](https://pawnmail.com/)). It's free and you get 2 GB.

I was worried whether it'd randomly shut down, so I emailed the creator,
[http://pastebin.com/raw/eWG8RQqk](http://pastebin.com/raw/eWG8RQqk), and it
looks like it'll be safe for a while.

I have no idea whether using services like these is a good idea.

~~~
frequentlywrong
"Pawnmail currently has enough funds to support 221 more days of hosting." It
seems to be a free project (getting money from donations) run by a single
person. No, thanks :)

------
Manozco
I'm currently using FastMail and I would need to have a huge money issue in
order to stop using it. The main thing I like is the possibility to use
"alias", which basically allows me to have different e-mails for each service
I'm using. Coupling that to the fact that they support catch all adresses and
I rated them best email service forever. The only thing misssing would be an
automation from specific e mail alias to folder, currently it is a two step
action.

~~~
joshka
You should be able to just create a folder that matches the name of the alias
and it just works (assuming you turn on wildcard aliases). Incidentally this
opens up an odd vulnerability that allows people to effectively store email
directly in your drafts folder. Add to this the ability to blacklist any email
address that ends up on a spam list (using a disabled alias) and you're pretty
much spam free.

------
hummerbliss
fastmail - Been using their service for couple of years. Here is how I
migrated from yahoo and gmail.

1\. Bought fastmail service and a personal domain. 2\. Import yahoo and gmail
email (they warn you to use it as onetime service and not as backup). 3\.
Autoforward all my gmail and yahoo to my fastmail. 4\. As you get emails, you
can make decision of unsubscribing/changing email addresses of various
services.

------
wje
Run your own!

~~~
sakopov
I thought there is a high chance of getting blocked by spam filters if you're
not using a reputable email host. Is this true at all?

~~~
Feld0
+1 for "running your own". I have a cPanel license on a personal server and it
handles a lot of the rigamarole. Once you have DKIM and SPF set up, it
practically runs itself.

The network your IP is in makes a difference. My mail server is currently at
OVH, which is a good enough neighbourhood for Mailjet to have built an email
business there.

I _very occasionally_ have an email bounce back (once a year or less). The
bounce message typically includes information on exactly why it bounced and
how to contact the receiving server's operator to figure it out.

The vast majority of the work goes into the the initial setup, which takes an
evening if you're using a packaged mail stack. [1]

[1] If you want a free packaged mail stack, here's a FOSS one:
[http://www.iredmail.org](http://www.iredmail.org) I have no experience with
it but have heard good things.

------
mappu
Be careful with using your own domain, there have recently been a number of
high-profile attacks based on hijacking the DNS.

~~~
frequentlywrong
I haven't heard about those. Do you have a link to a web page that explains
more?

The reason I'd prefer my own domain is quite simply that I'd like to avoid
being locked into a specific email company.

~~~
mappu
I've read a number of stories on the topic - the basic technique is to
identify the domain registrar or DNS provider and attempt to manually reset
the password by spear-phishing with the customer service rep. Once you're in,
MX can be redirected to a host of the attacker's choice, and then you can
initiate password resets on any number of third-party services.

One example of a DNS-based MX hijack is
[http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/attackers-take-
contr...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/attackers-take-control-of-
lenovo-com-hijacking-e-mail-and-web-servers/) although i'm at a loss to come
up with some more specific (and exciting!) examples that i can clearly
remember.

It's a vulnerability that simply doesn't exist with gmail/hotmail/outlook.com
addresses. Do you know whether your domain registrar and DNS providers' CSRs
mandate 2FA or allow multiple attempts at guessing security questions?

EDIT: [https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-
username-...](https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-
username-24eb09e026dd) used the same attack.

------
AlligatorAxe
Try Rackspace Email - rackspace.com/email -- They have 25GB IMAP boxes for
$2/mo and 24/7 support

~~~
TuringNYC
I realize this is a sample size of 1, but i've had poor experiences with
Rackspace's cloud offerrings. Unlike AWS and SoftLayer, both of which I also
use, it was very difficult canceling Rackspace's services. Some residual block
storage would get left behind, it would not be referenced anywhere and you'd
keep paying month after month. It took almost a half year of calls before i
was able to cancel all the services. Discussions would be as follows: \- Me: I
want to cancel all services \- Them: OK done \- Me (month 3): I want to cancel
this other service I still got charged for \- Them: Oh, that one too? \- Me
(month 5): I want to cancel this other residual service I still got charged
for \- Them: Oh, you want it all gone?

~~~
ryanlol
I think Amazon is still trying to bill me for an EC2 instance "seized" by the
FBI in 2013. Perhaps it's still running somewhere without networking.

No amount of contacting them seemed to help, so billing departments unable to
deal with edge cases isn't restricted to rackspace.

Oh, and Softlayer sent me a bill a few days ago for a server cancelled 6
months ago.

------
frenck
If you care about your privacy, then you could consider ProtonMail as well..

Based in Switzerland and cares a lot about encryption and privacy.

[https://protonmail.com](https://protonmail.com)

~~~
frequentlywrong
I've tried them as well, and they are very good (and probably the right choice
for extremely privacy-minded people), but they are - like most email providers
Swiss - very expensive (while not offering the same amount of features that
FastMail has, except for in the privacy department).

------
jghn
Not Dreamhost, their spam filtering has gone from mediocre to nonexistent over
the last few years.

------
sandworm101
Hushmail.com

I use it in my practice. It is Canadian (Vancouver) and really does care about
privacy.

------
eikenberry
gandi.net offers free email accounts on your domain if they are your
registrar.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Seconding this recommendation. Their email hosting also lets you set up
multiple accounts per domain, and a huge number of email aliases for those
accounts, so that you can easily create service-specific addresses or
addresses that forward to multiple places.

If you want more storage than their default 1GB, I suggest running your own
IMAP server and running getmail to download all your mail continuously, while
still using their SMTP server for all incoming and outgoing mail to avoid
having to worry about deliverability. getmail supports IMAP IDLE, so it can
download new mail and add it to your IMAP server the moment it arrives.

(Or, if you don't want to do that, you can pay Gandi for more storage.)

------
jupiter90000
runbox.com

------
alphabettsy
FastMail or Zoho!

------
meira
I recommendation yandex domain.

~~~
logane
What kind of privacy concerns are there with email providers based in Russia?

~~~
sakopov
This gets asked every time Yandex mail is mentioned. Nobody can answer this
question. We can just speculate that Russia is evil and wants to read your
emails. Just like Yahoo which scans and analyzes your emails apparently for
NSA or Google which scans your emails for ads. Seems to me like privacy is a
concern as long as your email isn't on your own server.

------
syngrog66
obligatory joke: I traced the OP's IP address, its coming from the HRC
campaign. (or DJT campaign. arguments for both.)

------
williamle8300
Don't use email. Just use end-to-end encryptions?!

I may be slightly churlish and glib.

~~~
myhf
Don't use glib. Just use musl.

