Comment by nsagent
6 hours ago
I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings.
Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering).
Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin alias service. Any suggestions for easily porting all those accounts to a new provider? Manually changing each and every account to a new email seems painful.
Fastmail is fine. It's somewhat limited in its UX, but technically speaking, everything works, and it's snappy. Very few outages. I really like their integrations with calendars, contacts, and mail for 3rd party sites/services. Not a ton of features or deals re: custom domains or multiple users, but it's fine if it's just for yourself. edit They literally -JUST- turned on Offline support for their app and web interface, so my only real complaint is gone. Go with Fastmail.
For a VPN, what do you need it to do? For tinfoil hat privacy stuff, get a VPS in Estonia or something. If you just want a secure tunnel while working remote, get a WiFi access point with Wireguard and Dynamic DNS at your home (it's free plus you probably have more bandwidth).
But if you get a VPS your traffic will always be linked with a unique IP. VPNs have an advantage there.
Most providers will hand you a new IP if you suspend then restart your instance. That at least spreads you pool of IPs across their AS (or some subset of it). For the price of a "reputable" VPN service, you could run 2 or 3 low end VPSes from different providers. A bit of Ansible, Python (or language of your choice), and perhaps some browser automation if the cheap VPN provider doesn't have a usable API - should allow you to automate provisioning VPN endpoints and rotating IP addresses.
That would at least move your needle around a lot, even if it isn't bringing along the haystack of all the other VPN customers sharing their endpoint IP addresses. You couldn't consider this sufficient protection against TLAs or Mossad. Or disgruntled Magic The Gathering players burnt by MtGox...
This 9-year-old issue me a bad taste for mailbox...
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
I've been on Zoho for my (and my partner's) email for 4+ years and it has been great. Chose them because there is no per-domain charge, so I have like 12 domains on it.
The configurability is extensive in both web app and ios email app. Service has been fast and stable. They rarely change anything in the UI (no random tinkering is what I mean) so it is predictable and easy to use.
Also been using zoho for at least 6 years. Cheap and reliable.
I love https://purelymail.com/ for the same reason. Unlimited domains and you can pay based on usage. I pay about 1 cent per day.
I wouldn't trust Zoho. More than 10 years ago, they shadowbanned (can not be shared or publicly viewed) my documents because it criticized Chinese communist party.
what are the charges?
Entry level is $12/year. Bring your own domain.
I'm using Fastmail and Mullvad. Both seem to work pretty well and are reasonably priced. You could also host your own on VPSs if you're feeling adventurous.
I moved to Fastmail a few years ago. No real complaints, and I’d definitely do it all over again.
That said, because I’ve not experienced any failure, I’ve not experienced how well Fastmail handles failure, which is the real measure of a company.
Similar case, I recently migrated from @mozmail to SimpleLogin and wondered if I made the right choice.
I heard using your own domains solves the migration issue but that makes your email pretty identifiable just by looking at your domain.
I wonder whats a suitable replacement candidate after Mozmail and Simple Login? One of the reasons I migrated away from Mozmail to Simple Login was that you can't initiate a email sending, which made it difficult to contact support if needed. Plus Mozmail are on Amazon SES.
> constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings
This is something I had not heard (also have been a paying user for a very long time).
I've never encountered a bug, to my knowledge. I did dislike that when they released photo storage they didn't have a proper search feature.
Same here, no bugs in Proton apps and I’m still a happy subscriber.
Proton seems to have a lot of cheerleaders that come out of the woodwork when anyone complains. I'm happy that somehow their code is magically bug free for you, since you've somehow never encountered any bugs whatsoever in their code (despite their release notes mentioning literal bugs they've fixed).
I'm glad it works for you, but their offering is frequently buggy and broken for me.
It'd be useful if you pointed out bugs instead of just implying that anyone who doesn't share your experience is some sort of shill
I would imagine this is the universal case, otherwise they would be out of business.
People that feel very satisfied or dissatisfied with something are most likely to comment. I've just been very satisfied.
For me the jank is in their billing and the plans I can purchase. I can either have a Business Mail Essentials plan or a Business Password plan, but if i want both at the same time I have to buy a plan that's three times as expensive or drop my custom domain name.
I do dislike their billing options when it comes to feature / service selection.
My experience is the apps are missing very fundamental features. Which would be fine... If you could use other clients. But you can't, except for email, kind of.
Like, the calendar on mobile doesnt even have a search function. What if I want to know when an event is happening? I just have to scroll and scroll until I find it? Come on now. Also no storage backup in proton drive??? What??? That's, like, 90% of the purpose of proton drive!
Yeah I was really disappointed they released their llm service before making an official proton drive linux client.
I recently moved from Gmail to Migadu and started to use my own domain instead. Works great so far
I moved from Proton to Fastmail (and Mullvad for VPN).
I was a a founding paying member of Proton Mail. I loved them and evangelised them for years. But after a decade, the quality of the offering, especially the mail and calendar, is almost a joke, and the company seems very distracted chasing the next big thing (the half baked password manager being one).
Comparing Fastmail’s UI and feature set with Proton, you quickly realise they are leagues apart.
And no Fastmail doesn’t provide e2e encryption. For that I use Signal, and for the few occasions where I need e2e encryption in email, I use PGP.
My only wish is that there was more client support for JMAP protocol. Even thunderbird doesn’t support it, and I can’t go back to IMAP because I like labels. Thankfully Fastmail’s own web interface is so good it is not a big issue.
I’d say they make one of the best password managers. Its probably their biggest success in recent years.
> (the half baked password manager being one).
Or a very bizarre LLM offering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657556
I've been happy with Startmail, good customer service, they don't offer any of the non-email cloud services though.
Fastmail is a good product with technical chops, contributes to open source and cares generally about being good members of the international email space, standards etc.
Fastmails interface is very plain, and it works very fast and works well.
They support a plethora of ways to do mail and have many advanced users so their mail support is very good, maybe close to running your own mail server without having to deal with rbls and getting spamlisted
I use Fastmail and I’m mostly happy with it. Their design team is thoughtless so their web and mobile offerings are disappointing. The mail hosting itself seems to be excellent though.