HACKER Q&A
📣 35post

Is G Suite a viable option for private emails? Brief comparison included


Background: Since GMail bans are based on ML and recovery rarely happens (looking at all those HN threads), is G Suite, now called G Workspace, actually a good option?

It's paid, so there should be support (or not?). Re features/price it's on par/better than some others and the admin panel is ok (eg compared to MS Business Accounts). Anyone went that path and can tell their experiences with G Suite support?

FWIW, I checked out the others and my brief thoughts:

FastMail: Looks nice and I get more email storage than with G Suite, same no privacy, had often outages

ProtonMail: Much less or more expensive storage but has privacy

MS' smallest biz account: not the private one but the business one, biggest storage, account deletion is not that easy (90 days period) which is good, admin panel is crazy complex

Hey: More expensive than prior and too experimental UI for my taste but maybe I'm wrong, pretty young

The private Microsoft 365 is quite feature-rich and cheap and easy to maintain but this Godaddy lock-in is unpredictable. It can happen that Godaddy increase pricing in the long run.

My motivation to set this up and run for the next decades.

  👤 glaucon Accepted Answer ✓
I'm surprised you say FastMail has frequent outages. I've been using it for 15 years plus and I can only remember one outage which lasted more than a few minutes. Of course others will have occurred which I didn't notice but really it's a very reliable service.
👤 shaftway
Full disclosure, I'm a Googler, but these are my own opinions.

I use G Suite (or G Workspace) for my vanity email address, but I use gmail for pretty much everything that matters.

My email is set to auto-forward to my gmail address and my gmail address can send email as my vanity address, so I pretty much just use that for everything. When signing up to third party sites I use my vanity email and the forwarding makes everything just work. But when I use Google services I use the gmail address.

Part of this is for historic reasons (I had the gmail address first), but there are some Google services that don't work quite as well for G Suite domains. Services tend to launch for gmail users first, and then, maybe, for G Suite. This is most obvious in recent acquisitions. Nest doesn't allow me to use my G Suite email when setting up an account. I assume once the Fitbit integration starts happening I won't really be able to use it there either.

👤 atian
I use FastMail for actual email but let my G Suite expire for a regular Google Account for the Docs, Sheets things because I couldn’t get over the lack of/weird support that pops up for a G Suite account on some Google properties.

I just barely use my Google Account to ensure I don’t get banned.

Also not sure what you mean by actual privacy.

👤 2rsf
> recovery rarely happens (looking at all those HN threads)

for the record you mention yourself that there is a selection bias here, someone recovering fast and painlessly won't write here

👤 maximente
i mean, only one of these options according to you is even listed as private-capable - are you just looking for good hosts?

imo email privacy is just not worth optimizing for. you could pay in cash for an account at eg posteo.de, so as to have anonymous emails, which may or may not help you with your personal privacy.