Comment by mr_mitm
3 years ago
What are those better options that HN likes? I just switched all my accounts to protonmail, but stories like this make me want to reconsider. The fact that they won't allow me to set up a forwarding rule in case I want to switch again doesn't help.
First of all, bring your own domain. That way you can just point the same address elsewhere if you need to switch again without having to deal with forwarding.
edit: As mentioned by a sibling comment, my email is currently on Fastmail, zero problems.
HN thread discussing Fastmail experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31989061
Fastmail user here with custom .org domain. Works great; Fastmail app and web. Very satisfied.
I don't need a custom domain anymore and I find it trivial to change email addresses. I can use 1password to locate accounts, easily migrate, apply a tag, and work through the change over a few hours. I typically change email every 2-3 years and it serves as a good way to review security settings/change passwords. Modern email providers have mailbox porting tools, and they work fine. I use to like having a domain, but dunno, for a privacy nut, seems more secure to not use one.
I don't think the hard thing is switching emails. The difficult thing is telling everyone about the fact that you switched.
> I use to like having a domain, but dunno, for a privacy nut, seems more secure to not use one.
Care to explain which are those concerns about privacy that you may find when owning a custom email address? Thanks in advance.
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Sounds reasonable. Any gotchas there? I already read that vanity TLDs are bad, obscure countries' TLDs are bad, and even .eu may be unstable. Which are good services that can sell me an .org or .de domain for a fair price?
Speaking from personal experience, if you have to spell your domain for people, you will regret it!
Also - have separate email stacks for communications and operations. Like it or not, your email is a low-friction way to get access to many of your other accounts, and maybe even a good way to LOSE access to some of your accounts. Your operational email domain should never be published, only used to register accounts and maybe do alerting, etc. You would whitelist senders. You would never use it to say anything, or associate with anyone, that someone might one day find offensive or controversial.
I have heard people say "vanity TLDs are bad" but never experienced it myself.
I have email addresses at .co.uk, .digital and .social never had deliverability issues with sending or receiving.
When I worked at a large (100m emails/wk) email service provider the key thing was sending IP reputation followed by things like DKIM and SPF DNS records on the sending domain.
IP reputation would be an issue if you self hosted your email, but using a reputable provider such as tutanota and fastmail should pose no issue.
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> and even .eu may be unstable
Do you mean you can lose your domain if your country leaves the EU, or are you talking about other issues?
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I wouldn't go for the cheapest price, I'd go to some established place in your jurisdiction with a wider product range and size, that targets small businesses. You have a chance to get some useful hotline, and things can be 'integrated' and are more likely to work, i.e. host your website - book the domain example.com - book a managed nextcloud and have it be at cloud.example.com etc.
Their email service is likely to have some credibility from the global anti-spam force. They probably have the budget for best practices and reasonable security. As you mention .de domains: The online legal text generators for Impressum/Datenschutzerklärung are likely to have the correct text fragments to use for larger vendors. Overall they just have to uphold some level of reputation I hope.
Example: ionos.de
Obscure country TLDs are fine. I've been using https://doubly.so for a decade and never had trouble with emails.
inwx + mailbox.org
The only hesitation I have with switching now is Fastmail being based in Australia.
Why? They aren't offering an end-to-end encrypted service, so as far as I know Australia's laws aren't much worse than, say, the US' laws in this regard.
HN is hooked on fastmail which is a great provider to be honest. Have a look at mailbox.org which is in business since the 90s too. Avoid the privacy trending providers promising you to encrypt your emails.
FastMail takes on PGP is very reasonable.
https://fastmail.blog/advanced/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/
I don't believe the encryption/key management from a company.
I second mailbox.org. Didn't want to use fastmail since it's based in Australia instead of the EU.
FWIW, I went from gmail -> protonmail -> fastmail, and have been very happy with fastmail.
protonmail is great as a secure disposable email, but as a go-to daily email service I found it too difficult to manage. Hard to use other email clients due to requiring this bridge, and their mobile apps and web guis are just not up-to-par with other offerings. Being able to use any frontend on mobile (and not deal with complicated proxy setups) was my biggest issue.
Using a custom domain has made the switches easier, as I don't have to tell anyone to update their contacts or worry about forwarding. Just exporting/importing, change some MX records, and I can switch providers any time.
I did the same thing. Custom domain with Protonmail. Ended up frustrated that I couldn't set up forwarding rules and alike. I realised I didn't need the privacy as much as I needed features.
Swapping from Protonmail to Fastmail was super easy. Exported all my email, imported into Fastmail, and swapped over the DNS records. Took me a couple of hours in between other tasks.
I uses FastMail after I discover this serious issue about Proton. I would say it work flawlessly and their web mail client is super fast; even faster than Gmail.
Besides, FastMail exists before Gmail and the people in FastMail are active standard protocol developers like IMAP and recently JMAP (a modern mail protocol will replace SMTP/IMAP, FastMail as a reference implementation), which is good because at least I know they understand the protocol and implement it by themselves.
> even faster than Gmail.
It’s really fast, but come on, that’s one low bar to jump over. Gmail is the electron of mail interfaces.
I’ve been a Fastmail user for about a decade (I just checked; wow!) and am very, very happy with them. I wish more companies were like them. The service is very reliable, the product is great, their support is amazing and very kind. A lot of companies get distracted by big pivots and hyper-growth ideas, while companies like Fastmail focus on doing their main job very well.
Today I've just given up on Protonmail, the Bridge is a POS. When things were reliable, I was ok to jump through hoops in maintaining a separate app, but I cannot be bothered any longer. Just set up a Fastmail account to see what it's all about.
I personally use mailbox.org for years now. Granted, I don't have remotely the usage mentioned in the linked issue and I know users that aren't very satisfied with features like the integrated office webapp, but it does everything I need (emails & calendar sync) and I haven't found a reason not to trust them.
Originally my reason to choose them instead of Protonmail was that Protonmail only works with their official client, which is a far too limiting dependency in my eyes.
I've switched to mailbox.org. They allow boring old IMAP/SMTP (that's good) and are EU-based.
Same here, mailbox.org with custom .eu domain. Very reliable.
Happy user of Migadu here, mostly because they let you bring as many domain names as you want and just charge usage.
I've been using Purelymail for quite a while now and I've been happy with it.
I'm a happy customer of Zoho Mail
Anyone has experience with hey.com?
I tried it for a year.
I'm quite positive on it, nice interface and unique useful features, and it's reliable in my experience. However you have to be ok with its particularities, mainly that it doesn't have IMAP, and it's expensive.
Ultimately it's for people who love their unique interface/features, and don't mind paying so much for email.