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Comment by modzu | Hacker News Reader

google seems too big to fail. what are you going to do? start searching with yahoo?

More like start searching with DuckDuckGo, use an alternate email service such as Fastmail, Protonmail, etc., and use Firefox.

By the way, what's an alternate email service the HN users recommend?

I guess you missed this monster thread from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574

i read it. tldr: there isnt one.

for all you geniuses downvoting my tldr commment: by far the 2 most popular suggested alternatives from the thread were fastmail and protonmail. fastmail costs money. for us elite hacker types its no biggy but does your mom pay for email? its not a fair competitor when 99% of people think email should just be free. protonmail is free but limits how many emails you can send and caps you at 500MB. also sign up and then try signing up for facebook. better get your ID ready...

edit: to be clear i'm not knocking either option. im just supporting my original point -- that google's recent actions do not threaten its email dominance

I went from Gmail -> ProtonMail -> Fastmail.

I left ProtonMail because it was slow and lacking features. Their reason for their snail pace of feature releases seems to be "we put security first".

Edit: Also, with ProtonMail as a paying customer, by default my signature was set to "Sent from ProtonMail". How cheesy. I'm paying for their service, they shouldn't be using me to advertise.

DuckDuckGo doesn't really do it's own indexing, it's essentially just a reskin of Bing search.

It actually uses multiple sources for regular results, not just Bing:

> from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

I remember Yandex being one of the sources as well.

Yahoo now uses Bing. Yandex is basically indexed Russian pages.

So unless you're searching in Russian, DDG is essentially a reskin of Bing search.

i dont know why your comment is being downvoted instead of being replied to. its a valid comment. sadly im seeing this all the time now -- comments being downvoted just because other users disagree. if you disagree and have a valid argument, make the argument... i digress. i pine for when hn was more intelligent

DDG has a fanbase that, like most, is not immune from cognitive dissonance.

I pay for a Posteo account and am quite satisfied with it. The webmail is just your standard run-of-the-mill webmail without any fancy features like Google Inbox, but since IMAP is supported, you can just put whatever frontend you like in front of it.

https://posteo.de/en (I'm not affiliated with them except as a customer)

lol. you propose using an alternative then immediately ask, "btw what's an alternate..."

DuckDuckGo for me. I think I’m pretty much away from Google services apart from YouTube (which lives in its own app or container tab).

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