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Comment by tietjens | Hacker News Reader

The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.

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Fastmail; I moved nearly three years ago, and never regretted it. If you can stand the five-eyes aspect, of course.

Also, I use its under-publicized 10GB of free space (i.e., additional to the 10GB of mail space allowance) to more than comfortably host LDAP data such as my Joplin data, and Floccus bookmarks.

I was always afraid to switch from Gmail, knowing the impact it would have. But I switched to Fastmail this year and my experience has been comparatively frictionless. My fear was unfounded.

That's great info. I need some encouragement to make the switch

I use fastmail for my and my family's mail, with many domains. It works fantastically, the android app and web app are very good, and it allows any settings, forwarding, clients, automation that I could think of.

The other features (files, file sharing, calendar) are also well designed and get out of your way.

Fastmail is the way. These are people for whom email is their job and focus and you get everything that comes with that, including good and responsive customer service.

But their servers are in the US.

GDPR applies if you're in the EU regardless, but it would be nice to have it split like bitwarden[.eu].

So are the email servers used by the recipients of your emails, no? Almost everybody uses gmail, so even of you don't most of your email correspondence is going to end up, or originate from, on gmail servers anyway.

Personally I do not know the last time I wrote to a Gmail-adress, so depending on location and evironment avoiding US-mailservers may be possible.

The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over.

After that it’s much easier to move provider again.

How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam.

Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this, like giving a useful error message back to the sender stating what the missing security criteria are and having a clear process for appeals (like if you got unlucky with an IP address, or if you are missing a specific security measure on your domain).

I haven’t caught it happening, at least not so far.

I have my domain pointed at Apple Mail, though. That probably helps.

Having your own domain connected to Apple Mail or Proton is fundamentally different than hosting your own email. Only the latter is at much risk of that.

You don't have to run your own server.

My parents have a domain bought from OVH (they had to move away from their ancient ISP email address) and just use the free email service that goes with it. OVH is big enough that its email servers don't get blocked by the other main providers (it's a different matter if you host your own mail server on OVH servers) and they have not had any delivery problem.

For myself, I run my own mail server and have not had delivery problems for years now (even changing servers, so it's not just a case of IP reputation improving over time).

We do sometimes have delivery problems at work (also running our own mail servers, hosted at Scaleway) but it's to be expected at the kind of volume we have, it stays within quite acceptable levels.

If you want Swiss but without the fancy marketing claims of Proton, have a look at Infomaniak.

They are to me the most legit alternative to Google Workspace/Office 365, run on their own infra and they've been here forever.

I've been using mailbox.org for 5 years and like it very much. Cost some 3 EUR per month (actually there's a 50% discount this week).

Dead simple email that just works. Their webUI is fine, but I almost exclusively use it on iOS or macOS with the default mail app. They also have some other features (calendar, office suite, video calls) that I don't use. I really like the option to create up to 25 email aliases.

I'm an iCloud+ subscriber and have moved a couple of my e-mail addresses across to use Apple's servers (about a year ago) for 'free'.

So far, it has worked consistently with no problems. The only annoyance is iyt doesn't seem that you can break multiple icloud-hosted mailboxes out into their own GUI mailboxes in the Mail client - they all get dumped into a Mailbox called 'Cloud'

I've been on Fastmail with my own domains for 4 years now, having been fully Gmail since 2004. The transition was seemless, the apps are solid and I can't imagine ever going back. The only option I'd consider would be full self-hosting, but I really can't justify the effort to maintain the one service where I need very high uptime.

There is also another German: mailbox.org

Congrats, you have more choices now :P

I have positive experience with both posteo and mailbox.org.

I’m happy with https://soverin.net/ – they’re EU based, reasonably priced, and I only use them with external clients anyway.

Another vote for Fastmail. Cannot fault, and honestly a joy to use (if that’s possible checking your email).

I'm on Migadu. They are quite cheap, offer a student discount, support multiple domains, offer a very neat snappy UI, and have an extremely responsive support.

Proton is bad because of the need to use custom clients.

I’ve been happy with hey.com. No plans on switching.

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