Thinking about Leaving Gmail

I'll add my voice to the Fastmail love. I've connected a couple of domains to my Standard $50/year (plus VAT) account, and as long as you follow all of their directions on adding SPF and DKIM settings to your domain, it works like a champ.

Setting up on-the-fly aliasing for my domains was also just a matter of following their directions, and I love the looks I get when I fill in [businessname]@[mydomain.com]. A middle-aged lady engaging in email nerdery really subverts expectations - I tell them if they're really hesitant to accept that address with their business's name in it that it's an organizational tool for me (true) with a bonus of free hacking detection for them (possibly true).

I do not say that the main reason is that I do not trust them to never ever misuse or lose control of my data.

Plenty of people have the obvious choices covered, so I'll mention mine: Earlier this year I migrated 15 years' worth of email from Google Workspace to iCloud+.

Apple has been a rock-solid email host in my experience. They're not well-known as an email host, but they've been hosting email at scale for a couple of decades, or longer if you count old services like eWorld and AppleLink. (Fun fact: The first email from space was sent via AppleLink.)

I used imapsync for the actual transfer, which worked brilliantly. https://blah.cloud/miscellaneous/migrating-google-workspaces...

I switched to ProtonMail and it's amazing. The interface is pretty sleek and the messages between ProtonMail users are encrypted as well.

The only thing I don't like is their slightly buggy Android app but hey, at least it's FOSS.

The free tier is pretty generous, forces me to manage my emails better instead of letting it turn into a spam bin. I'd definitely recommend ProtonMail.

Many HNers use Fastmail. I'm one of them.

I think Fastmail is 100% great, but there are always some mailing lists and other recipients who might treat you as a third or fourth class citizen for sending mail from your own domain, even if you do all the deliverability stuff right.

Some people think Fastmail is a little pricey, particularly for a large inbox, but you get what you pay for.

Get your own domain name for the email. This will greatly reduce the pain of switching email services. Which will allow you to try several of those.

What do y'all think of Fastmail vs Protonmail?

Of note from a quick comparison... Fastmail is faster and more responsive. Which means a lot! Proton has second-order lag whenever I click a new message, folder etc. Noticbly less responsive than gmail and fastmail.

I'm on mailbox.org . Been using them for 5+ years. I like it a lot! I use it for everything besides "cloud storage" (use Mega instead). Great for email, XMPP, etc.

Set up the DKIM with your DNS and you'll be fine with your own domain. Aliasing is great, too. There webmail / portal is okay (I use desktop / iOS instead). Help pages are really good.

Getting off of Gmail might help a little, but I feel like it wouldn't help much. If most other people are using Gmail, they will have your email that way.

What are you using in place of Google Maps?

I migrated from Gmail to mailbox.org about a year ago, but Google Maps is the one Google app I can't seem to replace.

I switched to Fastmail when Google tried to force old Google Apps for Domains users into the expensive business plan. I’d been thinking about doing that for privacy reasons anyway but had been procrastinating on the theory that it’d be a hassle.

In actuality it took about 20 minutes and was painless. They have a robust import process, it works better for iOS / macOS integration. Zero problems since then, lots of little features which are better, and their spam filters are both better in absolute terms (fewer false positives and negatives) and explainable when you want to know why something got the score it did.

Beginning of September I received a notice from Google, saying that the free service of managing my custom domain is halted and that I would have to buy a plan, in order to continue to use their service for my custom domain.

It has been several years I was from time to time looking to Google alternative. But the amount of work and hassle to find an hosting service or self hosting this service was always a blocker.

Laziness at finest.

So when they started to blackmail me that I must use my credit card in order to use their previously free service. I decided to kick my ass.

I was already a ProtonMail user for another experiment with this service. After half an hour setting up everything in godaddy following proton mail how-to I finally migrated my own domain to ProtonMail, happily paying for their services.

The only thing is that as far as I didn’t pay a penny to google, I’m unable to connect to my account and backup 10years of mail. Thank you google.

Funny thing is that I can still connect to my account console mgt and succeeded to save all my keystore from chrome use. I’m still able to use chrome with the same account, except my email is not anymore managed by google but proton.

I'm running a mail server at home (on a small low-power server). Getting it right for incoming mails was easy (I have the chance that my ISP doesn't block anything, so I can have port 25 open), for outgoing mails it's another story... but after setting up DKIM, SPF and DMARC (yes all of them were needed, especially for hotmail), deliverability is very good.

As a backup, I created an address at Infomaniak, a Swiss hosting company, they give free e-mail (without ads -- their business model is rather selling other services like e-mail on custom domains, hosting, cloud services, etc.) with 20 GB storage (see https://www.infomaniak.com/en/free-email). At the time I did it, they were requiring a Swiss mobile number (to limit the number of accounts people can get), not sure if now they accept numbers from other countries or not. In any case, it works great, both with webmail and standard SMTP/IMAP.

I moved a handful of my domains MX records to Fastmail so that family members had a super simple UI and good UX experience. It isn't free but in some regards neither is Gmail. Either way it is very affordable. The one concern I have seen mentioned is that their headquarters is in AU and they have some very dystopian government policies but I have no idea if that has ever impacted anyone. Fastmail handle DKIM signing of your emails. I've not had any delivery issues with them as of yet after several years. If using your own domains it is easy to set up a canary alias for each vendor to limit cross-marketing and cross-market tracking. They also allow creating aliases on several of their domains but finding the alias you want may be harder.

I've switched email to Runbox after trying out Fastmail, protonmail, mailbox.org. So far so good. Reasons I chose Runbox over the rest

- they let me try all the features during the trial period unlike others whose free trial period is very restricted (I actually paid other providers to try things like using my own domain, sending mail out to external mailboxes)

- Runbox was cheaper

- liked their stance on privacy better than say fastmail

- good customer support in English

- can easily use email clients like mutt and mu own PGP keys without doing any weird stuff like uploading them to a server or using a proprietary protocol for encryption

In 2022, I highly recommend Runbox. But use your own domain so that if they decide to do mean things in the future you can just lift and shift elsewhere.

I switched to FastMail last Feb and am very happy. For personal email, I use the cheapest plan with 2GB storage and set the Trash folder to delete mail after 365 days. So far I'm only using about 13% of the 2GB quota, even including Trash. For business email I use the next level up to enable a custom domain.

I set Gmail to forward everything to the new Fastmail email address and set a vacation message explaining that I've changed email addresses. Very painless.

In some HN discussions people said Fastmail's spam filtering is not as good as Gmail. That may be true - I dunno - but for me it has been a non-issue.

The thing I really like is it is soooo much faster than Gmail.

I switched to Fastmail a few years ago. Took about a day to go through all of my accounts and update the email addresses. I was really, really glad that I had Bitwarden to use as a list of every online account I've ever created.

I've been happy with it ever since. In every conceivable way my experience with Fastmail is better than Gmail. I pay $50 a year for it.

The only Google product I interact with these days is Youtube. There simply is no alternative to that, unfortunately. (I'm a consumer, not a creator, so no: that alternative video site you're about to recommend to me will not work.)

I've mostly removed Google from my life at this point.

The first email provider I switched to was Protonmail. I set up my own domain for easier portability in the future soon after that switch as well, which turned out to come in handy.

About half a year ago I switched again, this time to Mailbox.org. The only reason I made this switch, was due to Protonmail not supporting IMAP directly, but requiring their bridge application on desktop and their own mail app on mobile. With Mailbox.org I can use whichever IMAP/SMTP client I want now everywhere.

I've been running my own mail server for a while now and nothing bad happened so far.

Spam detection with rspamd is surprisingly good.

If you like tinkering you might consider it as well.

I used this guide to do it: https://workaround.org/ispmail

But instead of mysql I use sqlite which is easier to work with.

I also built a small app to help me manage the database more easily: https://github.com/confuzeus/mailiness

I used to use Squirrelmail and later HMailServer for a while. Both were good but I got tired of maintaining the infrastructure so I relented and switched to gmail for a long while. Finally I decided that something I use all the time is worth paying for so I started using Proton Mail and I love it. I migrated all of my mail without any issues. I like their emphasis on security, I wish email in general was more secure than it is.

I’ve been using ProtonMail with a custom domain and I love it !!

The web app is the best desktop email interface I’ve used and the iOS app is the best mobile email interface I’ve used

I am using cloudflare free email forwarding (https://www.cloudflare.com/apps/email-forwarding) and I also moved my domain to Cloudflare as it was cheaper then Namecheap.

Ive set it up so mail from my domain is forwarded to my free gmail account.

I have almost moved on from Gmail (Gmail + Gsuite). I have been using Hey for almost 2 years now and I prefer it over Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/Protonmail.

And I am in the process of moving my Custom Domains to Fastmail, the only thing that irks me is their mobile app refusing to open without an active internet connection.

I had Gmail for 15 years and switched to Hey in 2020. Email isn’t something I have to manage anymore, and the design is really nice. It’s not hacker-friendly as it has no API and isn’t accessible via an email standard (IMAP, etc.), and it’s $100/year, so isn’t for everyone.

The one thing stopping me doing this is finding my own domain name that I want to use for email.

You’d think with the number of domain names I own I’d have one I liked

https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems

I have tried alternatives but ultimately went back to Gmail. The low maintenance is important to me. I do however limit other Google services to Chrome.

For personal use? I use ProtonMail, but it's not free.

Buy a domain and use Fastmail. Don't delete gmail, just stop using it. Check it every year or so for a good laugh at all the spam.

I like protonmail. It’s come a long way. Plans are much better now, and you get end to end encryption on the same platform.

I also switched to Proton for business and personal and I'd never go back. I just wish they had a native desktop app.

mail.zoho.com. Super cheap with a custom domain.

I then just imap it into gmail. My main concern isn't privacy. It's gmail suspending me for some stupid reason and leaving me locked out of my life.

I just run Mailcow on my own domain. Works great.

I use Yandex and live.com.