Hello<p>I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.<p>I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.<p>I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.<p>What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?<p>Thanks a lot.
You might want to look at Fastmail.com, a paid e-mail service with actual customer support. They provide a web-based interface, mobile apps and also IMAP access, and you can use your own domain with it if you like. (I've been happily using it for a few years now, and first heard about it here on HN.)
For your privacy concerns, protonmail.com?<p>You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app.<p>I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.
Another happy fastmail.com customer here.<p>I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise.<p>There is <i>certainly</i> no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year), even if the hardware itself were free, and you were not counting the cost of the internet service (eg: using your own home internet), and you were willing to accept that you might fail to update some things, sometimes, etc. If you value your time at all. Even at say, minimum wage.<p>Not to mention the deliverability issues etc.<p>If you just love doing it, then, by all means, do it. Just don't imagine it is somehow less than $50/yr, or comparable in quality.<p>I <i>do</i> wish Fastmail had more competition, even if it cost a bit more, and (as the Fastmail folks here have said) the competition participated in open standards and contributed to open source. I think others are "in the works" particularly with (even more) security/privacy emphasis. But, IMHO, eg: protonmail does not currently directly compete. We'll see what pans out.
I use the mailbox offering of Posteo (<a href="https://posteo.de" rel="nofollow">https://posteo.de</a>) and am very happy with it. They're a small business located in Germany that does not do any bullshit (no ads, no tracking, etc.), and ticks a lot of the checkboxes for ethical business (as much encryption as possible, careful examination of court orders instead of automated law enforcement access, exclusive usage of renewable energy, etc.). I usually go in via IMAP, but their webmail looks pretty okay as far as I remember. The basic offering is 1 € per month for a mailbox, a CalDAV calendar and a CardDAV addressbook; but I think you can sign up for a free trial if you just want to have a look.<p>(Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)
I find the worst part of running a private mail system is the spam. It morphs so often that you are always fighting a running battle just to keep it under control. Achieving a zero-spam target is almost impossible. The larger players (gmail/Office365) only manage to do it because they are handling millions of messages a day and have thousands of honeypot addresses just for spam catching. As a small player there's no way you can compete with that.<p>My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be.<p>I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me.<p>If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.
You could try mail in a box - <a href="https://mailinabox.email/" rel="nofollow">https://mailinabox.email/</a>. It's really quick and easy to set up and is generally secure, I couldn't imagine someone would target a single mail server over a massive host like gmail or hotmail.<p>This website <a href="https://www.privacytools.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.privacytools.io/</a> is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.
Even if you secure your side of communications you're at the mercy of people who send and receive email to and from you.<p>If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts.<p>You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse.<p>A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.
I see a bunch of options, and a few people complaining for many that they're too expensive.<p>I wish I could bold this, but:<p><i>For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized.</i><p>Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering.<p>It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that.<p>GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.
Self-hosting is tricky to get right and the cost of getting something wrong is high.<p>One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu<p>They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (<a href="https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html</a>)
I can recommend the folks over at Migadu (<a href="https://migadu.com" rel="nofollow">https://migadu.com</a>) which is a small Swiss email host. Their support is very responsive and I never had any issues while there.<p>I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it.<p>Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done.<p>Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.
I run several mailservers but my main email addresses go to fastmail.<p>the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works.<p>I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal.<p>FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers.<p>my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes.<p>So these are for side projects. not for real work.<p>another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.
Whatever email service provider you choose, make sure to still (a) keep backups of emails just in case (maybe sync an IMAP client periodically), and (b) use a custom domain so you're not tied to the email provider's domain in case the company goes under or something.
<a href="https://cloudron.io/" rel="nofollow">https://cloudron.io/</a> has a very decent email setup plus a lot of other apps all one-click installable.<p>Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.
Virtualmin is a little old-school, and hosting-oriented, but you can easily set up a mail server with SPF, DKIM, SSL w/ LetsEncrypt, etc. out of the box. I've never had any problems in over 5 years with sending or receiving and I just turn on automatic updates for Debian. Only issue is if the IP you get from the hosting provider is blacklisted, so remember to check that before you start setting it up. I use DigitalOcean for hosting.
Office 365? It's a paid product from the ground up so they're less likely to terminate your account, and they actually have support.<p>> having phone apps reading all my email<p>That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.
I left Gmail once, but what brought me back was its separation of "primary", "promotions", "forums", and "updates". I don't know how I'd get through my emails without that. Has anyone seen another service that does something like that?
Ohhh, this ASK-HN is godsend :D
Im in a similar situation and was evaluating several approaches. I want some decent e-mailing for my whole family (with an own domain) and at a reasonable price (just want to pay it on my own and not billing my family). So most providers are out because of per-user/mailbox pricing. With 4-5 family members its just way to expensive with most of them.
I was just going to start with <a href="https://mailcow.email/" rel="nofollow">https://mailcow.email/</a> on a cheap vps. But thanks to this thread I will also be evaluating migadu, seems a nice fit with even less hassle for me.
I use OVH <a href="https://www.ovh.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.ovh.com</a> for emails and domain (as well as VPS) and never had any problem with them. They have a built-in spam filter, which is pretty efficient.
After spending a few years in a similar situation, and not wanting to maintain my own server, I settled with using runbox.com.
It's an economical and privacy-oriented, mail provider which allows (necessary for my needs) using your own domain. They have very quick and excellent support (the few times that I needed it) and also offer a CalDAV/CardDav service. Their web interface is lacking (I believe it is about to be updated) but this is an non-issue for me science I use mutt. I'm not aware of a mobile app (I personally use and suggest the excellent K-9 mail OSS app).
I use <a href="https://zoho.eu" rel="nofollow">https://zoho.eu</a> - decent apps, reasonable tools, similar configuration to GApps.<p>Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and fairness perspective.
Very happy Fastmail user here, it's great (and fast!) to use, I've _never_ noticed any outages, calendar always <i>just works</i>, search is excellent, it's device and OS agnostic and the organisation makes massive contributions to open source and mail related communities.
Not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but checkout Tutanota <a href="https://tutanota.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tutanota.com/</a><p>I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.
Happy user at mailbox.org<p>They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even send them money by post for complete anonymity.<p>Edit: You can use a custom domain
You can try servermx.com the give all the features commonly provided for an email account and also some extra ..you can try the service for free (30 days) no credit card required
Mary
I have only positive things to say about tutanota: <a href="https://tutanota.com/" rel="nofollow">https://tutanota.com/</a>
No one using iCloud email? I’m giving it a try atm, I think if you’re in the apple ecosystem it can be a good choice, anybody else experimented with it?
I've recently been having this problem with Gmail: <a href="https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/gmail/-isLElPcsOo/ym26YaEEAgAJ" rel="nofollow">https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm...</a><p>where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?
low-maintenance email will not work.
You get what you pay for, it will always either be high-maintenance, or you'll have to pay for the service.
Unfortunately, fighting spam and keeping stuff up-to-date is not as easy as it should be.
You might want to take a look at cock.li, the guy who owns it is pretty dead set on keeping the feds away and is really hands off about what you use it for. I've been using it for my personal correspondence email for about a year now and it's been fine.