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Comment by t_mahmood

5 months ago

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

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.

  • I like that idea, which is why I actually rented a public IP, only to get hammered by bot networks trying to get into my ssh. Fortunately, I had the password based log in off.

    I should give this another try. But next time, maybe a VPS would be a good idea?