Hi all - with gmail recently instituting a storage limit, I'm starting to run into trouble with my usual gmail account. I'm recognizing the era of free everything is over, but I'd rather pay an organization that takes privacy seriously.<p>What is an email service you would recommend that will not be categorized as spam if I email the conventional gmail etc accounts?<p>Thanks
I've been using fastmail for the past 3+ years in an effort to de-google my life. It's been excellent, and I haven't had any issues with emails I've sent being classed as spam.
Most important is to use your own domain name for your email. That way you can switch providers as you like without having to change your address, and all the hassle that goes with that.<p>Personally, I like Migadu for mail hosting. The mail gets delivered, the price is reasonable, and there’s good tech support
Like several other commenters I find Fastmail to be a good email host. They support custom domains, have support for email aliasing, is easy to set up and provide a very good web UI. Unlike gmail you are actually able to select all emails in an inbox and apply actions to them.<p>They also have support people if you ever get problems, and unlike gmail they actually care about customers. Their first line of support are not super technical though.<p>I’ve had no problems using them so far. Email deliverability seems great and their service has not had any serious downtime the years I’ve used them.
I can highly recommend mailbox.org. I have been using their service for multiple years with my own domain and never had any problems sending or recieving mails from the big providers. They also take the privacy of their users data really seriously.
I recommend ProtonMail.
Or you can buy your own domain name and config a email to Zoho Mail.
but personally, I think proton mail is more secure and private. But the free version only has 1GB as I remember.
If you're a paid iCloud user or an MS365 user, both have ways to use a custom domain and tap into the storage you're already paying for at no extra cost. MS365 locks you in to GoDaddy as a registrar and I'm on Cloudflare, so I use iCloud. I'm not sure what your threat model is, so you may not be willing to consider either of these options. For me, email privacy is an oxymoron and I prefer communication methods with forward secrecy like Signal. For email, I'm mainly just looking for a vanity domain I can share with my wife for spam and mailing lists.<p>Growing past the above suggestions, at the cheap tier, I'd recommend Migadu, MXRoute, or Zoho.<p>If you're willing to pay what I consider to be Too Much For Email, then my favorites are Proton Mail, StartMail, or Fastmail. You'll want to research these heavily before transitioning though, as they may be missing features you're used to from Gmail that you find you can't live without.
Happy with Fastmail here as well - but if you're using your own domain name & are concerned about being flagged as spam, make sure you read up on how to add SPF and DKIM records into your domain DNS records. It's pretty much essential now for functional email. SPF & DKIM are basically a list of IP addresses you authorize to send mail in your name, and a public key for authenticating/signing your emails. Since you're here on HN, setting those up is definitely something you'll be able to understand & do.<p>The interesting side effect of having SPF/DKIM setup is I can receive reports from Google & other mail providers when someone tries to send spam spoofing my domain name. Seems that China Unicom & ChinaNet are running an enormous botnet that continually sends phishing attacks to Japanese Amazon users, while using my domains in the From field.
I recommend Posteo <a href="https://posteo.de/en" rel="nofollow">https://posteo.de/en</a> . Nothing special, just a simple, straightforward email provider that does what it says (including respecting your privacy). It’s cheap (1 Euro per month for 2 GB, and 25 cents for each additional GB.<p>I’ve been using Posteo for years and have never had any problem with spam filters.
<i>will not be categorized as spam if I email the conventional gmail</i><p>There will be many recommendations here about affordable and reliable email providers. I can name a couple if you really want. As for not being categorized as spam, all bets are off. Based on a myriad of posts here over the past year about gmail it seems their spam filters/detection have been a moving target and highly unpredictable.<p>As for recommendations, I set up Fastmail and several custom domains for family members to create aliases <i>email canaries</i> and they have been happy with it and not been flagged as spam when emailing gmail thus far, but that could change. I also use it for specific use cases. They have good documentation and support. They integrate well with Thunderbird which also makes it easy to each non technical people how to encrypt their emails in my opinion, though others here have had bad experiences with this.<p>My own personal theory <i>of which I have absolutely nothing to back this up with other than a gut feeling</i> is that Google likely realized the benefits of gathering data from their <i>free</i> email service is not worth the cost and are likely instead focusing on b2b commercial products like corporate email, google docs, etc... Breaking the spam filtering could be a passive-aggressive way to get people to move off the product without having to outright cancel it and deal with the blow-back. But I could be wrong.
Gmail has always had a limit on free storage quota. At first it was 1GB, then it was 5GB, currently it is 15GB. So I'm curious how much data we are talking about and whether you have considered the $2/mo 100GB plan.<p>Personally, I am paying $17/mo for YouTube Premium that gives everyone in my family ad-free YouTube, unlimited music, and 100GB of storage for our gmail and other files. It seems like a pretty square deal considering.
Purelymail [0].<p>$10/year, unlimited accounts, unlimited domains, unlimited everything. If you use unusually high amount of anything, your bill goes up accordingly.<p>[0]: purelymail.com/
I have been using Runbox - (www.runbox.com) and it seems to work well.<p>Based in Norway and claims to require using a Norwegian judge to sign a warrant before any info will be given to law enforcement etc. Not sure how you verify that though.
I'm becoming a broken record, but:<p>Just use Zoho Mail: <a href="https://www.zoho.com/mail/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zoho.com/mail/</a><p>Zoho has a history of being good: <a href="https://www.zoho.com/25/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zoho.com/25/</a><p>Zoho's privacy policy: <a href="https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html</a><p>(Disclaimer: I work at Zoho).
Protonmail. I don’t see why people use fastmail (the privacy laws in Australia are among the worst in the world), when they can get the encrypted version from proton.<p>Recently proton has offered a combo package, bundling email, vpn and storage. With client apps for proton drive, and higher storage space, it would be a great option.
I was pretty impressed with AWS's "workmail" product, and since I run all my DNS through Route53 it ended up being a very simple service to setup and run on my own.<p>It's a relatively well featured service and you can route your mail through lambdas and other advanced features if you want.. or you can just use the simple "alias table" it gives you and just have a basic mailbox.<p>It may not be the best choice if you're not already familiar with AWS, but if you are, I found it to be a reasonable and hassle free choice.
Fastmail, I've been using them for many years now.
One of my favorite features is having catch-all email addresses, like whateveryouwant@domain.tld - you can get mails to your inbox for any address in your domain. Also, you can have multiple domains, you pay for the storage.
I would highly recommend protonmail.<p>I am surprised with the top comments recommending fastmail. Is there any offering or feature I should know about with fastmail compared to protonmail premium?
I really like tutanota been a great service, I turned off sending encrypted emails. But like the fact my email is encrypted in there servers. Also like they give you 1GB but since they compress emails its like 10GB. I also believe in giving back so i upgraded.
I enjoy using HEY from 37signals. It's different than other services (more opinionated), but it keeps my inbox under control. They also take privacy seriously.<p>I was a paid subscriber for the first year, stopped for a year, and then went back because I realized how much it helped. It lacks a calendar, though, if that's important to you.