Comment by jwr
5 months ago
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" all over again. I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy, control over E-mail, and leading to an overly centralized system where our mail is controlled by 2-3 companies at most (about 30% of my spam comes from Google servers, they pretty much ignore abuse reports, and I have no way to block it, because they are "too big to fail").
Now we will get a slowly introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open", but will be carefully controlled so that it is slightly broken for everyone except Google. Several years down the road we'll wake up in a world where people will be annoyed that you can't receive their E-mail and will tell you to "just use gmail".
Replace "Google" with "Microsoft" and "Gmail" with "Outlook" and it's the 1990s all over again.
> I am appalled at how many people use Gmail, giving up their privacy
The article is literally about cross-vendor E2E email encryption. I mean, we all understand that you mean to invoke the Standard HN Litany Against Google here. But surely you at least should nod to the fact that the linked article stands as a point against your position, no?
I think he has a point. Slack and discord used to have IRC and XMPP, which made the decision to switch seem safer in light of the issues we experience today (holding backlog hostage for a fee, advertising, a/b tests). They timed the depreciation of these bridges so that it had minimal impact on their sales due to the existing network effects and captive audiences (employees, mostly).
We have seen this played out over and over and over again. It’s tiring, and it would be great for more people to be aware of these market capture tactics to make them less effective.
> Slack and discord
Slack and Discord aren't Google though? Not understanding the point here. You can use this argument against any product from any manufacturer, it seems like. Are you arguing against interoperability in general? Or taking an absolutist free software position that proprietary tools are never acceptable? Doesn't seem to me like that was the position upthread I was responding to.
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I've seen to many companies call things "open", when they are decidedly not "open" — Google's Android comes to mind, or OpenAI.
I don't see an RFC defining that "cross-vendor E2E email encryption" as a standard, so calling it "cross-vendor" is just fluff at this point.
Valid concern. I have been decoupling my dependency on Google for quite some time now
What is your email solution?
I was looking at ProtonMail. Now FastMail seems good too. So, wondering what is the best option between each.
+1 for fastmail, been using them for a few years now and haven't any complaints. Have many domains with them, wildcard emails are easily configured so that every service that I subscribe to gets a unique email address.
One minor issue is their JMAP[1] protocol if you want to automate email sending - its intention are good just that no one else supports it.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8621.html
I've been using ProtonMail for a few years and it's been an average experience so far, since they force the use of their apps. I've recently tried to setup kmail with my protonmail account and discovered how their business model works for imap access: you pay a subscription after which they give you access (usual deal, nothing bad about it), but then they force you to install a piece of software which supposedly handles all the communications and encryption. I've tried it, it works fine, but I'm not interested in having to run their software just to connect to their imap servers. Also, while you can use a custom email client o n pc, you are stuck with their app on android.
I'd suggest you avoid protonmail. Maybe look into mailbox.org, they actually have a pretty good service.
Fastmail is perfection.
Easy cancellation, doesn’t go crazy on you if you have a problem with credit card, super fast and light ui, can use your domain so you don’t get locked in
Not the OP. I have been happy so far with Proton Mail over the last 3 months. Moving my logins took some time, but I am pretty happy with Proton Pass for now and their other tools.
The only dilemma that I have now is whether to use my own domain name or proton.me, pm.me, etc. I currently use the latter.
Reducing the number of emails in my Gmail inbox to zero was a happy day for me. "Do no evil" my ass.
Not OP but I switched from gmail to fastmail in 2019 because at the time they were the cheapest option that provided unlimited email aliases and masked email. Masked email feels great, I feel like I’m in control of the communication. I can turn it off at any point
I use Protonmail. Gradually switching my logins over, but it takes ages.
The market is FULL of hosted providers. Every single one has its ups and downs.
I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the technical knobs that Google Workspace and MS Office 360 provide over mail routing. Clearly they have enough large customers with in-house IT staff that demand this level of control and “the rest of us” get the benefit. Once you leave their platforms it’s easy to be disappointed. I can’t say that their platforms are good just technically feature rich; Google’s insistence on silently discarding “duplicate” messages is infuriating but other platforms will have a different set of problems.
If you don’t need enterprise control… Lately, I’ve been on MXroute.com, mostly because the team seems dedicated to trying to make something good. It’s not polished yet. They are opinionated. It’s designed for you to point your MX at them and check your mail via IMAP and send via Authenticated SMTP, that’s it, nothing more. Sure, they have extra features that will work but clearly that’s not their focus.
iCloud+ is also worth looking at and is often underrated. Many folks already have a paid iCloud+ account. Here, you can just turn on “Custom Email” as a set it and forget it option.
While I’m writing non-sense, I’ll ask what others are doing for inbound mail control and spam filtering. Prior to moving to MXroute, I was using SpamStopsHere that offered incredible flexibility and control. It was acquired by Zix and then dismantled.
infomaniak has served me well. Free mailbox with domain name, Thunderbird as my interface but their webmail is fine too.
> What is your email solution?
As a data point and reminder, running your own E-mail server works just fine, in spite of FUD being spread around sometimes. I've been doing it for the last 25 years or so. Stick to Ubuntu LTS releases, use postfix for SMTP, dovecot for IMAP, and SpamHaus for spam filtering[1], and you'll be fine.
[1] these are becoming less and less useful, as most spam these days goes through Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and these companies couldn't care less about abuse reports, as you can't block them because they are too big.
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What's the best Gmail alternative wrt UI features?
Not a clue about what you're seeking. I'm using mailbox, and thunderbird as a client for my devices (android, windows, linux and macos).
It works. For E2EE, I have GPG setup on all of my devices. It costs me a little over €1/month for paid account as I use my own domain.
The experience has been good, and something I absolutely advocate for and promote.
Thunderbird is not something one can recommend to a non-techie friend as a replacement for GMail. At least the last time I checked on Android, it required additional tuning for pushes, it worked poorly when there was too many messages in inbox (which is what almost everyone coming from Gmail has), didn't provide text formatting.
I don't know about "the best", but I'm very happy with Fastmail. It has a very nice UI, it has contacts and calendar, uses open standards, and their privacy policy is fine.
I switched to Fastmail when I degoogled, and I've been very happy with it. I genuinely feel that its UX and feature set are better than what I was getting from GMail.
What UI features do you consider important? I feel that email UI is largely standardized, and the main differentiating factor is speed (and Gmail is definitely not fast).
OTOH, what Gmail does with filtering promotional crap (spam, tbh) is decent, but I haven't compared against other mail service providers, so I can't give a comparative opinion.
Good conversation threading first. For the rest it may just be that I'm used to it but I find it generally much easier to read than, say, Outlook.
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Fastmail finally made their android client work offline too.
I've had a good time with them so far and am a happy customer. You can add as many domains you want and just easily leave if you're no longer happy.
another vote for fastmail, I got my own domain and been slowly changing my email eveywhere away from gmail. No need to do it all in one go. I barely touch my gmail account anymore, feels so freeing!
Thunderbird
Do you mean a self-hosted webmail app? Or a native/multi-platform native email client?
Personally I think Gmail UI is meh - but I no longer use email that much - so terrible UI/ux and no proper quoting/threading support isn't all that problematic.
> introduced proprietary encryption scheme that will pretend to be "open"
You could say the same about Signal, how is signal more open than Gmail.
This signal? Is proprietary?
https://signal.org/docs/
https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal
Signal doesn't officially allow third party apps, unlike emails where you can use whatever app/server you want.
This is a classic "whataboutism"-style argument: derail the discussion by asking "but what about...".
Setting aside whether what you wrote is true, we are not talking about Signal here.