HACKER Q&A
📣 AHOHA

What email do you use?


What email do HN prefer to use? Is it gmail, outlook, or something more tailored to privacy? Or do you host your own? What open source email server do you use if that’s the case?

Just wondering what’s out there, or maybe some new email providers maybe they are interesting to know.

Bonus, what client do you use too, regardless desktop or mobile clients?

And what’s the cons/pros for any of the above from your experience?

My 2cents: hosting own email is tiresome nowadays, your emails are mostly will be flagged as spam by most big email providers.


  👤 __d Accepted Answer ✓
Provider: fastmail

Client: Mail.app (macOS/iOS)

I was a very happy user of mh-e (an emacs mail client) for decades, but as more and more email became HTML, and email itself became more of an official notification mechanism, it became unviable.

Mail.app is pretty awful from macOS 11 (10.14 and earlier was ok): searching is almost totally broken, and the UI is getting steadily worse. I'm actively looking for an alternative.


👤 pwg
> Or do you host your own?

Yes.

> What open source email server do you use if that’s the case?

Postfix: http://www.postfix.org/

> Bonus, what client do you use too, regardless desktop or mobile clients?

Desktop: mutt http://www.mutt.org/

Mobile: K9 https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.fsck.k9/

> And what’s the cons/pros for any of the above from your experience?

I've had the same email address for going on about 23-24 years now. It has operated over at least 3-4 different internet services over those years, and I've never had to worry about "someone else" shutting down their service and losing my address, nor worry about "changing my email" anytime a service changes.


👤 csilverman
I use my own email address (web host's mail server; I don't run my own).

Used Gmail for a while, but I trust Google less and less. The thought that some automated process could simply lock my account for an imagined infraction—and once that happens, it's over; you'll never actually deal with anyone at Google—was a pretty major impetus for me to fully switch away from Gmail.