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Where is everyone hosting their email these days?
This is more focused towards those that use custom domains for their email. My current plan is up at Zoho for my team in a month, and even though I've used them for the past few years its been hit-or-miss (especially when using third-party apps or programs).
Who do you use? Who do you not trust? Who would you never go back to?
Sidenote: I hope this might eventually kick off a ~privacy group, one day.
I use ProtonMail. I've used them for several years, and they're clearly positioning to be the Private Google Suite of services.
I have used Hey.com, too. I liked the screening feature for all new email. It really keeps your inbox clean.
I used to use proton mail for a small personal domain.
I ended up switching because it seemed like they were more focused on creating new apps (calendar, drive, etc) than improving what they already had. A lot of the stuff seemed unpolished and buggy, including parts of the email client.
I think they ended up bundling in those other services and raising prices, even though I only wanted email.
When I tried to leave I couldn’t export the emails for my custom domain. They had a stand-alone tool that claimed it could export, but I tried multiple times and it always eroded out part way through.
Any emails that failed to export are now gone. They can’t be viewed from protons free tier. It’s been a few years so I’m not even sure if they are still there.
I switched to Tutanota and then Fastmail. I have been happy with Fastmail for the last few years.
I switched to Fastmail this year as well. I’m very happy for the change from Gmail. I tried Tutanota, Mailbox, Proton, HEY, and others, but Fastmail really was the only one that I liked and worked with a shared Google Calendar (I have a shared calendar with my girlfriend) in a way that allowed me to make events on the Google Calendar directly from Fastmail’s app.
I love the masked mails functionality as well.
My family is on Fastmail, it’s been around three years now. Fast, reliable, good iOS apps.
I’d add that I moved my company domain to Hey.com too, with workflows and screening it’s great for small teams.
After I degoogled, I signed up with Fastmail because I wanted calendar. It’s been pretty good for 5/month/user.
I don’t have any privacy guarantees, but at least the company isn’t in the advertising business, so at least that’s an improvement.
I'll second the Fastmail endorsement. I've been a happy customer since (had to check my billing history) 2015.
I switched from "Google Apps Bring Your Own Domain" or whatever they call it currently. the custom domain support is the killer feature for me, I have
myname.comregistered plus DNS MX records which allows me to give outanything@myname.comemail addresses, and have them all routed to a single inbox. I have a few vanity/project domains with this setup as well, I like that Fastmail doesn't try to charge me extra based on how many domains I receive email for.each website I sign up for gets a unique address. if one of them sells or leaks my address and it ends up on a spam list, I know which website did it, and I can add an email filtering rule that completely drops any mail to that address in the future.
(it's possible to try this with plus addressing as well, but because it's allowed by the email address RFC, spammers can just remove the plus-address portion when they compile their lists of addresses)
Yes, and their private email addresses service is also one of the primary reasons why I use them as well.
Hey, I just did this exact same thing recently (from Gmail to Fastmail with my own custom domain), and everything's going good, including the unique addresses per website. But I have a question if you don't mind:
How are you handling the emails sent to your old Gmail address?
For now I've just set up email forwarding in Gmail to a specific inbox in my custom domain, and I even have a rule that puts those messages in a separate folder as they come.
It works fine, but I'm wondering if there's even any point in separating them to another folder, as I still need to check all of them just in case it's important. Maybe there's a more practical way of doing this?
If you have any advice on how to handle that I'd love to hear it!
if I remember correctly, I did more or less the same thing you did - set up Gmail to forward to
gmail@myname.com, then a Fastmail filter to send those to a "forwarded from Gmail" folder.one useful thing, in the Fastmail web UI there's a per-folder option for "hide if no unread messages". so you can have that folder only show up if there's a message from someone still sending to your Gmail address.
Thanks!
Yeah that's exactly what I'm doing, including that option.
It was also bothering me a bit that I still have to log into Gmail from time to time to avoid having those emails piling up unread in the inbox. But I just realised I can easily configure the rule on Gmail side to mark them as read and archive them as soon as they're forwarded to Fastmail, and I can still respond from my Gmail address in Fastmail too. So all should be good.
Thanks again!
The masked email and infinite aliases are great for taking control and figuring out who leaked my email. I've noticed that spam is way down and when I get a company misbehaving, I just turn the alias back off. So happy that I missed you FastMail from Gmail.
I use their <anything>@<user>.mydomain.com variant instead of plus-addresses because it’s so easy to remove it in spam list.
The nicest thing is that you can easily change your from address when needed as long as it’s in the limits of your setup.
Another Fastmail user here. My requirements for mail aren't too crazy, but proper support for IMAP clients is non-negotiable, which fails Google right away (though they offer IMAP, it has issues). FastMail's IMAP support is excellent and it supports IMAP push so it works well for mobile clients too.
I've been using ProtonMail for the past two years and like it. My email usage is pretty simple but they do have support for custom domains and I've never had any issues. ProtonMail is more privacy focused with servers being hosted outside the US and supporting end-to-end zero access encryption.
I've been using https://purelymail.com/ for about a year now for my custom domains. Price is excellent - less than $10/year for my usage.
It's a small operation - one guy. But it's excellent both in terms of support, delivery, and transparency of maintenance and outages.
I also use https://mxroute.com/ for some other custom domains. I've used them longer; they are famous/infamous for having a rather "frank" founder when it comes to public communications, but they are very responsive and have excellent delivery and uptime. They have sales during Black Friday and other holidays which can get you into some excellent pricing.
Both services assume you know how mail services operate; they will not hand-hold you. From someone who used to host his own mail servers, they handle all of the stuff I don't want to deal with and let me configure almost everything I want on my own.
I use MXRoute as well. I believe this sale for $10/yr will work until the end of day today: https://accounts.mxroute.com/?cmd=cart&action=add&id=198
Thank you for sharing. Just bought it.
I also use purelymail. I also have nothing but positives to say about it. It is simple, effective, and fair.
Wow, I'm kind of regretting not knowing that purelymail existed back when I was looking to make the switch from google. I don't actually need much space, the most important thing for me is custom domains and multiple users (I like to keep my internet identities as separate as possible), and while I've reconciled myself to paying Fastmail more than I'd like, I've always wondered if there were better options.
Gonna have to check this out for sure.
I think I might switch over to purelymail after checking out their page. I don't mind proton but it seems like they're way too focused on building an entire ecosystem when I just want my email, plus I'm forced to use their email client which kinda sucks for me. Thanks for bringing it up.
Spinning up new accounts on MX Route has not been good for my habit of hoarding domain names. I've accumulated so many novelty addresses backed by them over the years.
I use https://www.fastmail.com for personal email. I have a custom domain was a refugee from Google when they started their shenanigans with the legacy Google Apps for Domains a few years back. Kudos to Fastmail for making the transition very easy.
I access it using their app (which is pretty decent) on phone / tablet devices. The only criticism of the Fastmail app is that I don't believe it has an offline mode. On desktop, any IMAP client works. I've used Thunderbird and emClient to great success.
I also use www.mxroute.com for some low volume "service" accounts. It works quite well, although you should have some familiarity on basic web sysadmin stuff for the setup. Their documentation is very good, but they are very clear (refreshingly direct) that some technical knowledge for setup is needed.
Privacy Guides is a fantastic resource for recommendations on things like this (and tons of other subjects). They recommend Proton, Mailbox.org, Skiff Mail, and Tutanota (though all with their own caveats):
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/
I want to make the switch over to ProtonMail but I’m waiting until they have a contact syncing solution. I absolutely cannot maintain two parallel address books, one inside the Proton bubble and one for my phone and other services.
Much like a few other folks, I have been using Zoho for a few years. As i was degoogling, i took a looooong time to test zoho, and they kept being so reliable and inexpensive that it was somewhat of a no-brainer. That being said, besides Zoho, my other top choice would have been FastMail. The main reason i went with Zoho was price honestly. I pay a little over $1 per user per month while for Fastmail its like $5 per user per month...it isn't much if i were the only user, but i have a family with several users that i pay, so it adds up. But, email is one of those services that is so essential for my family, that i happliy pay to ensure that it is reliable. So, again, i highly recommend Zoho, and others highly recommend FastMail.
To tha point that @Akir made about reliability ouside the core email platform, this is interesting to research. My family and i do not use anything beyond Zoho's email, calendar, and contacts products. For my family, its because they really dont need it...for me, i'm the type who likes a servcie or provider or a toool to do one thing, and one thing right...so if i want Docs, Projects, etc....i will use another provider. Also, at the prices I'm paying Zoho, and as good as they have been with email, i can NOT imagine they are equally as good with so many of their other platforms. So, it does not surpirise me if they might be poor quality in their other stuff - though i have no experience to confirm either way.
Also, i use Zoho's web mail client only about one third of the time when checking email, and its meh ok. It strikes me as trying to provide too many bells and whistles. The rest of the time i'm checking mail from either Thunderbird on laptop or mobile mail client....and its fine. So, for me, all the bells and whistles of the web client are not as useful for me. My offspring, however, does like the web client, but maybe its a generational thing.
Assuming reliability does not change...among the scenarios that would trigger me to move away from Zoho woulkd be cost...and if they start getting close to the pricing of FastMail, then i would likely move there.
Just to extend on what I meant about unreliability with Zoho, it’s really more about their “extended” business products. We have an application we built with Zoho Creator, for instance, which is very important for business operations, but Zoho Creator is under constant heavy development because it has such a large scope; we have had tons of tiny little issues with it as a result. As a paying customer they’re pretty good with support usually. They’ll even do limited diagnosis of the code that I have built on top of it.
In the meanwhile they have a subscription management service (imagine something that would help a business like Loot Crate) that has been working on some critical features for a number of years that still have not been implemented outside of Beta.
Aaaah, i understand what you mean; gotcha. 👍
I've also been using Zoho for my business for a long while now and been pretty happy overall, though I also don't use many of the fancy products they offer. Probably my most used thing outside of mail is the invoice tool, which is pretty straight forward and handy.
The only quip I've had is that a few years ago they stripped a couple of features which used to be free, but it's nothing too upsetting.
I switched from Gmail to Fastmail and couldn’t be happier.
I thought about Proton mail, but I wanted to be able to use the iOS Mail app for autofilling codes and Fastmail works there.
I spent a week or so changing all of me emails to a variation of website@username.fastmail.com so that I can tell which website leaked my emails when spam comes and just block it and create like website2@username.fastmail.com.
I also updated all my passwords with iCloud Keychain generated ones so I feel relatively secure on the web now.
One thing that blew my mind is how hard some places make it to change your email. I had to call or email some companies, and others I found won’t let you change at all.
Occasionally something comes through my Gmail inbox and I update it. Well worth the $50 a year.
mailbox.org. It's been a couple of years now, no complaints.
I've been using them too. They're cheap, reliable, and their domain name is easy to remember, which is good when I have to give my email to people.
Same here. I sometimes send out emails to a large number of students, in which case daum (a Korean provider) and Outlook will sometimes block my message. In that case I found that I need to resend the email to those students individually and then all is fine.
One thing I love about mailbox.org is the video conferencing they provide. Being able to encrypt all incoming mail is also great :)
I'm using iCloud Mail, since I pay for iCloud+ for storage. It's fine. Not great, not terrible. I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird on Fedora Linux on my PCs, setup isn't hard. My main gripe with iCloud Mail would be its spam filters: sometimes some security code or activation email end up in the spam folder, but it's not a big deal. Other than that, it's good. I really don't want to pay another service for mail on my custom domain, so this has been great, actually.
Same here. As paying iCloud+ user I have the ability to use a custom domain for my email, which was the main selling point that made me switch from Gmail. I have no reason to look into other paid email providers, since everything works well and I can use whichever client I like.
Zoho’s email service is actually pretty good. Their web client is the only one I’ve seen that even tries to do everything Google does. The company I work for uses them and they have been incredibly reliable. That being said, their reliability outside of Mail is a bit of a mixed bag.
Zoho has been great. I've had both my catch-all and main with them for a few years now without any issues.
I evaluated this a year or two ago when Google had plans of discontinuing their free legacy workspace accounts, and Zoho was where I was going to go. But they reverse course on that, and decided to continue to host non-commercial legacy accounts for free, so I've stayed with Google. And if I were a business looking for a host, that's probably where I'd end up going anyway.
My own private shared (virtual)server running openBSD.
I’m pretty deep in the google cloud ecosystem (like thousands of dollars a month in expenses). It just makes sense to be on gmail for everything.
Something I wanted to add which is somewhat related to this is to teach your family about what you're doing and how things works. Last year my father died, he was the type of guy who would self host a lot of things including the family website as well as family photos. Luckily he didn't self host our email domains or else that would've been another thing to worry about (he used g suite). There was about 3/4 of a year from when he received a diagnosis until he died which was luckily plenty of time to transfer everything we needed over to hard drives we were familiar with and knew how to access. Although I think I'm technologically inclined, I don't know shit about linux hosting and if my father had died suddenly, there is no doubt it my mind that a lot of precious family photos would've been lost.
In my own home. I don't think I need to convince anyone this is a good idea, if you have the technical know-how then you probably already considered it, but I figured not commenting for that reason would underrepresent this option of truly owning your own data
Personally would not recommend for anyone unless you're a well seasoned IT pro and enjoy this sort of administration. I tried self hosting for a while and it took a lot of work upfront just to not be blacklisted and no matter what I tried my spam handling was either way too aggressive or way too passive. I was constantly paranoid that I'd be targeted for hacks or that mail was getting blocked both coming and going. Too stressful for me.
Interesting perspective. I don't feel that sort of target painted on my back, in fact because it's just me and friends nobody is going to care and spend a lot of effort. And if they do, good luck guessing the randomly generated ssh key or imap password or so. I feel much safer than I would with hosted email where lots of employees have access as well as the data hosting provider, besides the higher risk of a data leak due to the much higher value
Or you're just interested in experimenting and don't use it for important things like the bank account recovery email address or so. Can't hurt to just gain experience and self host that part :)
Personally, I think the difficulty in self-hosting e-mail is somewhat overblown. If you really want to do it, you absolutely can, and I'd like to see more people take the approach. There's actually not that much stuff you need to set up, and there's some off-the-shelf solutions that are supposed to help do a lot of the work for you. That said, there's a lot of little things that are important but easy to miss / screw up, and I think a big chunk of the difficulty comes from setting up DNS records (which you may have to do manually), and which can be a pain to debug, especially when you have to wait for the TTL when you make a change.
It's definitely harder to do than you might think going in, and it's probably a good idea to not rely on it for anything important until you're sure you have it figured out... But if you're into the idea of hosting your own email it's pretty cool, and after the initial setup it should pretty much just work.
I use https://forwardemail.net to forward my custom domain to a google account which has gmail and nothing else, this account is configured to send all mail from the custom domain. Then I also have a google account using my custom domain email address that does not have gmail enabled. The gmail-enabled account's calendar is shared to the custom domain account's calendar so events created from email are populated on the calendar.
This not only allows me to skip paying for gsuite, but also allows me to change email providers any time I want without impacting my google account with my custom domain (where people are sharing docs and photos).
This and all the other privacy-related topics probably will prompt the creation of a ~tech.privacy group one day.
For email I use posteo.net
For everything else (storage, contacts, calendar, pp, etc.) I use disroot.org
I host my own SMTP server on a VPS. Probably not what I’d recommend doing for most people, but I like it. I have a LUKS partition for encryption at rest, running NixOS using Simple NixOS Mailserver with some additional configuration to services like
fail2ban,nginx, andpostfix. I’ve been meaning to set up a backup service likeborgbut haven’t gotten around to it. I also have a Graphana dashboard that I intend to feed information into eventually, but also haven’t bothered yet.Use Restic over Borg and then you can do an encrypted backup to practically any cloud host or service, such as B2, S3, etc.
I'm currently hosting with Fastmail. It's pricey but reliable, and I love how smooth and easy to navigate their webmail is. Spam filtering is decent, and I like a bunch of their extra features (1Password temporary email integration, particularly).
I used to host email for my custom domains at Tuffmail, and I feel like it was more barebones of an experience than I wanted, though also the best option I could afford at the time. Didn't realize they'd closed down in 2021 until I went looking to see what their service was offering these days.
Norwegian based company called Runbox with all their servers in Norway too, ensuring high privacy. My wife just moved to ProtonMail, so I'm interested to see how that goes.
I've been with Runbox for many years as well. I keep wondering about moving but the price seems OK and privacy is great, so I haven't really had a reason to need to.
Runbox has some cool things:
This comes at the cost of waiting between 30 seconds and 10 minutes for every email. Two-factor login code valid for five minutes? Haha have fun, at least one in maybe ten times it'll have expired by the time it arrives, and the other nine times you've got to wait long enough to get annoyed but not long enough to seriously go do something else. Bugged the heck out of me.
I contacted Runbox support, got a reply from the owner of runbox who claimed that up to 5 minutes is normal and I shouldn't complain, and I should contact them again if it takes more than 5 minutes. (The heck that's normal. In the 80s maybe, compared to snail mail!) Well, they asked the right person! I ran a bash oneliner across my thunderbird data and produced a bunch of emails that were delayed by more than 5 minutes in the past 3 months. They said they'd look into it and never replied again. I opened a new ticket with the new info a few months later, which was promptly closed with "use original ticket please, we'll let you know there if we have any updates".
Most email services deliver within 30 seconds, not after a minimum of 30 seconds. My own email server at home is particularly pleasing, often popping a notification on Thunderbird before the sign up page even reloaded to say I should have gotten an email. (But I don't expect that from a commercial service as that's unnecessary and indicates overprovisioning. Within 30 seconds is perfectly fine. We are now with an email provider that does that.)
I had similar issues and really didn't like their webmail interface. Switched to Migadu and have been pretty happy with their service.
I understand your frustration, but email is not a good form for (time-limited) 2FA.
While email nowadays is relatively fast, delays may occur as the email-protocol has never been designed for instance messaging.
Tell that to github, it wasn't me who forced this new login requirement upon myself
I understand that it may, but similar to how the train may be delayed, that doesn't mean it's normal if it's the case literally every time. I'm sure my own email server isn't <1s all the time, either, but that's not what I'm talking about
I won't say anything different to people who've already contributed to this thread, but just to make an additional data point, I use Fastmail.
I had been using Gandi's mail service that came with my domain for free, but about a year or so ago I decided to use a unique email address for every service I sign up for and that coincided with the time Fastmail introduced their Masked Emails feature. I also use 1Password as a password manager, so their integration made Fastmail a nobrainer for me, which was already a service I admired for their longevity and their focus on doing one thing and doing well. I couldn't be more happier with them.
I also tried PurelyMail and wanted to make it work, but it had two big downsides. After talking with its owner, who seemed like a super nice guy, I found out that alias support was not going to be available anytime soon. The service did have a workaround for it but it was just a hassle I didn't want to deal with. The second thing is that the service is literally run by a single guy. No one else works at the company. Email is important -- too important to leave it at the hands of a single person.
So considering the downsides of PurelyMail and upsides of Fastmail, the choice was easy for me.
I solved the email aliasing issue by using Simplelogin. That way I never have to worry whether or not the email host I choose has alias support. I then generate aliases on the fly with bitwarden whenever I need a new account. And if I ever need to move email hosts I just tell simplelogin to point all my aliases to the new email.
Yeah, that's another way to handle email aliases. I tried AnonAddy while I was still using Gandi but I just didn't like the friction. Fastmail's integration with 1Password makes it super easy, which is what I want.
Skiff.com has a generous free tier, along with other apps like docs and calendar.
I've been using ProtonMail for some years now. I also use Anonaddy to forward my email encrypted. Works well for me and my use case.
I've been using the free email hosting that came with Gandi.net domains, but soon they're dropping the service so I'm looking for alternatives.
Does anyone have feedback about Apple iCloud custom domain? Since I already pay them for storage it's tempting to switch to that.
I use it- already pay for + for my family and I don't trust myself to run my own mail server.
The downside is the web client is very feature-limited. It's close to the iPad app in functionality, which means that unlike the Mac app you cant like, batch download emails for example.
It supports IMAP though as far as I can tell. So you can connect Thunderbird to it.
Yeah, any SMTP/IMAP client will work. I just... haven't found one I like.
EDIT: I will say, the spam filter is overzealous. So take that into consideration.
I signed up for my custom domain with GoDaddy, and then subscribed to Microsoft Outlook through GoDaddy for my email service. I have no idea where my emails are actually hosted, but I know I have a copy of them downloaded to the Outlook client on my computer.
Fastmail for me. So glad I switched off of Gmail. It was definitely worth the pain of transition and price.
Now I use a custom domain so I can switch providers much more easily.
Only issue I've run into, is like, 1 out of 1000 companies will have trouble emailing me for some reason. A particular financial institution for some reason cannot reliably get emails through to me on fastmail (using fastmail.com OR custom domain) yet they can email me at Gmail fine. They're the only one with the problem, so I'm convinced their system for validating emails and/or email security is screwy.
I use free-tier Protonmail for a slightly more anonymous / special-use-case secondary email account
I've been happy with Migadu. Hard to beat $19 a year for 5GB of space and reliable service.
Posteo has been really solid for me. 1€ / month is a pretty great value