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What do you use for email?
I've recently decided to change email providers and so I had to change quite a few things. I went from encrypted mail (Tutanota) with their own client to a plain mail / standards-compliant mail provider (Migadu) after looking at many providers. (I'll probably make a blog post about it in the near future.)
So I'm just wondering.
What email provider do you use?
What clients do you use?
How do you treat your email?
Anything else you want to share in relation with this?
Slighty off topic, but something I always recommend is to use a custom domain with your email provider of choice underneath it.
The most difficult part of changing emails is inevitably all the people/accounts who think they're sending emails to you, but are in fact not, and you have no way to notify all of them.
If you have your own domain name, then it's simple - once you change email providers, just swap what it points to and bam, you don't have to go through to every account and person and tell them your new address. Seemless and painless.
I generally agree with this, but I have one caution: make sure you actually control your custom domain.
I co-founded a non-profit and used its domain in my email address, but mostly stopped participating after losing an election to its board (and simultaneously my self-confidence). A few years later, the non-profit died. At some point in that process, my email address stopped working, which caused trouble with many of my online accounts, some which I have still not resolved after several years.
I never used my personal domain names for email, but if I had I would have lost control of some of those too. I had my homepage's domain name registered with GoDaddy, but because that non-profit email address was my primary email address, GoDaddy could not notify me via email about my expiring domains. Domain name squatters immediately grabbed my homepage's domain and I still haven't gotten it back.
Ironically my gmail address kept working through all of that drama, and if I hadn't used custom domains I would have been fine.
I can certainly agree with that. It's also something Migadu recommends / requires. Moving the rest of my email has been painful.
I'm thinking of doing this, but one thing is on the back of my mind. What happens, if I forget to renew my domain (or the price just gets insane) and it expires? Then I'm possibly locked out of my accounts and people can't contact me.
Prepay for the domain as many years in advance as possible. Enable auto renewal. Add some extra cash to the registrar balance. Pick a tld that doesn't auto expire domains, but has a locked grace period (this is most of them). Use gandi.net as registrar. Turn reminders on.
If after all this you still have renewal problems, it's on you ;)
Thanks for the tips! :) I bought a domain from namecheap for fun, that I haven't really used. Do you still recommend gandi over them?
I do, but namecheap is a good registrar, so i wouldn't bother switching unless you have the opportunity to do so.
What do you consider good about a registrar that charges $8.88 for a .com registration (great, reasonable markup over wholesale) and then $12.98 for renewals? GoDaddy pioneered this scam, there's no economic justification for it but it seems normal now because GD and NC are the only registrars a lot of people are aware of.
Note also that NC has raised renewal prices multiple times and no doubt will continue to.
IMO as long as there are reliable registrars that offer the same services without a renewal price scam, we should support their business practices. Plus it's cheaper that way.
4 dollars a year seems like a whole lot of nothing to be so upset about. I don't use namecheap, but as far as I'm aware, they're good guys in a sea of mostly shit.
Raising prices is common across all industries. It's also not always up to the registrar; the organization that runs the TLD also dictates prices. Gandi emailed me this morning about .me raising prices by 10% this year.
I didn't mean to make you feel defensive. My issue is with NameCheap and similar, not with you.
The .com wholesale price is $7.85 and the overhead of running a registrar (once the code is written) is minimal. That's why there are plenty of good options that charge $8-9/year.
It's not so much about the $4 (although it's an impressive ripoff expressed as a percentage of the fair price) as about their overall business practices. NC also used to charge for private registration before there were regulation changes that made it simpler for everyone to stop doing that. Now it's free. That's because it never cost them anything.
Those are just a couple of examples of the business mentality of companies like NameCheap and GoDaddy.
Yes, it's common in business to screw consumers in order to create profit margins beyond what the market dictates.
But registrars are the gateway to online presence and I want neophytes to be aware that they don't need to go with registrars that will overcharge them, upsell them overpriced products they don't need, and otherwise take advantage of their ignorance.
So I respond in threads where NC and GD get recommended.
Do you have any recommended alternatives?
For the record, I use Dynadot and Porkbun.
Gandi.
Either of those are a good choice in my experience.
I hear cloudflare started offering registrations at cost if you're already a customer.
Namecheap is great. I also like Porkbun.com. You can use tld-list.com to find pricing for a bunch of registrars — but I typically stick to these two. If renewals go on sale and you’re going to have the domain for a long time, it’s always great to cash in for a decade.
You don’t have to worry if you have a .com etc — but if your domain is something fun like .party or even .xyz in some cases, be warned that some sites will throw an error when you try to register or in the odd case, it’ll let you register but not login with the email.
I have a (third level) .name domain for that, and an e-mail alias is a feature of it.
This has saved me from explaining my new e-mail address a few times already. The downside is that sometimes my e-mails get stuck in a spambox (esp. on GMail). But this can be mitigated, I’m sure.
I use Fastmail, mainly due to the low cost, the ability to use a custom domain (figured I might as well since I already have a website), and better privacy than something like gmail. My university email is through gmail, but I only use it for uni-related stuff, so I don’t care too much about that. I usually just use the web client for Fastmail on PC and the apple mail app on my phone. I don’t get too many emails from real people, although I do use it occasionally to correspond with a few of my older relatives. I’m not sure how normal this is, but I always archive emails instead of sending them to the trash; I figure I might as well since I have the storage space available. I also have notifications enabled on my phone for every email I get; I’m always really careful where I plug in my email address, so I don’t get much junk mail.
What email provider do you use?
mailbox.org
What clients do you use?
aerc on desktop, k-9 mail on Android. I've also used Claws-Mail on desktop, though that started acting up on a previous setup, so I have only used aerc for a while now. I've also applied an in-development patch to make threads work better, which is useful when you're subscribed to the Gemini mailing list and the discussion of internationalization comes up again and the thread goes over a hundred or so messages, again.
How do you treat your email?
I have some sieve rules to organize mail as they come in into their own folders. All mailing lists (currently one) are mapped into their own folders, and some specific topics like "Invoices" are mapped into their own folders.
For stuff that has an online archive (various mailing lists, e-mail notifications) I just completely delete every now and then, while stuff that are email only (direct mails from humans) go to an archive folder.
Anything else you want to share in relation with this?
I have catch-all emails with two domains, and I am in the process of making more use of the catch-all part by slowly changing all my accounts to have mails specific to the sites they're under.
Get catch-all mail addresses. You'll find a use for them eventually™
Funny to see this come up here haha I've also started wondering how to make aerc more thread-friendly because of this.
The patch I use is at https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc/patches/14709. It seems to require server-side support (Gmail in particular is noted as not working), and it makes loading noticeably slower (in my case, anyway), but I don't recall any stability issues arising from it.
I can't recall if I had to modify it to apply cleanly. If it doesn't apply to and work with the git master branch, let me know and I'll try sending the version I use. (If you decide to use it, that is)
Do you use any particular tool to make the sieve rules?
No. It was hard finding something that can even work with it in the first place (aside from the web interface). I'm currently using sieve-connect and editing the rules by hand. I also keep these links bookmarked should I need them:
I use the GMail webclient for personal and business both, and it works just fine. I've used it since it was available only by invite, and I can't see what would lead me to changing it.
I do the same. I tried to change it but always come back. It’s so convenient. The reason I’d like to change is that if Google’s algorithm wrongly decides I did something bad and locks me out, there’s pretty much nothing I can do. That’s scary.
That's why I pay for a GSuite account. It's like insurance.
I can relate to being locked out. One of my old gmail is permanently locked because it had an old phone number.. I might actually try to contact the person who has the phone number now to make it work.
Under what circumstances would that even happen? This is the first time I’ve heard of this being a serious problem, so you’ve got my interest.
It’s the same reason why I am changing away from gmail for my normal email. There’s reports of app developers getting banned without google communicating any reason and without the ability to do anything about it
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-users-locked-out-after-years-2020-10
That is terrifying.
Same. Man, Google was cool company back in the day. Back when their motto was still "don't be evil."
What email provider do you use? Fastmail, formerly Gmail.
What clients do you use? macOS Mail, iOS Mail.
How do you treat your email? If it's in the inbox, it needs to be dealt with (bills paid, messages responded to, etc.) Once I'm done, I archive it immediately.
edit: I use my own domain, and set it up so any email to my domain is directed to my inbox.
Fastmail
On PC, I use the webmail client, and on phone, I use the iOS fastmail client (only because you can do wildcard from: addresses, otherwise I much prefer iOS mail).
The one thing I hate about the iOS Fastmail client is that swiping is not configurable, and is opposite how iOS mail seems to default (swipe in one direction is delete, instead of archive like in iOS).
I treat it as a loose Todo list, important action items are kept in inbox, everything else gets archived. Some project-specific things go into tags, but most just into the general archive bucket.
What email provider do you use?
Migadu!
What clients do you use?
Migadu Webmail, Thunderbird, and K-9 Mail for Android
How do you treat your email?
Like everyone else, but I keep my Inbox clean and empty on most days, and frequently do backups to local folders using Thunderbird. I'm on Migadu's cheapest "Micro" tier, so it all works out.
Anything else you want to share in relation with this?
I went from GMail -> Protonmail -> Disroot -> Migadu. Migadu is by far my favorite. I love the flexibility the Admin panel provides. I am sad they removed their free tier, but tbh, I'm more sad they offered it in the first place since it was always questionable whether it was sustainable (which it clearly wasn't).
Why did you move from ProtonMail to Migadu?
Not OP, but I currently use ProtonMail and have been considering moving away from it to Migadu or something similar too. The primarily reasons being that ProtonMail has a pretty awful web interface, and having to constantly run their IMAP/SMTP bridge so that I can access it with Thunderbird is also pretty annoying/inconvenient. Fully encrypted email sounds cool on paper, but the reality is that it's honestly not worth the headache, at least for me.
Someone mentioned elsewhere in the thread that the ProtonMail beta web interface is much improved, not sure if you saw that.
Yeah, I gave the beta interface a spin a short while ago when someone else I know who uses ProtonMail mentioned it. It's better than it was, but it's still kinda shit, IMO.
Yeah, according to themselves, the free tiers used up as much as 80% of the infrastructure, it's kinda insane to think about.
I’m on Gmail at the moment, but the upcoming Google Photos changes have pushed me to look elsewhere at least a little more seriously. I’ve taken a quick look at Migadu’s website and unless I’m missing something I’m not quite sure what it is they do? Would you say it’s a direct replacement for Gmail/ProtonMail or is there some more work or setup required? Just over £14 a year, with a student discount on top of that, seems quite nice and I quite like the idea of using a separate address for each site (as long as I can view them all in the same inbox).
Looking a bit more it looks like I need a domain, am I right there? A few people in this thread have mentioned NameCheap and gandi.net, what do you use?
They host your email on the domain(s) you want. They offer a webmail and admin interface to setup aliases, mailboxes, etc.
There's definitely more work required because they require a domain and have no first-party clients. However, they guide you through the DNS records setup required, the webmail is good enough and setting up outside clients is as easy as any IMAP+SMTP setup can be.
There is more setup required, and you do need to already have domains to use because Migadu does NOT provide
@migadu.comaddresses or anything. This worked for me because I already had domains I use for my personal sites.I use Migadu with two domains: one on Namecheap, and one on Porkbun (I prefer Porkbun these days). As another user mentioned, they guide you through the DNS setup. I encountered headaches here, but mostly due to Namecheap's unclear instructions on the matter. Porkbun was easy. Ping me if you decide to try out Migadu and go with either of these domain providers and run into trouble.
You can't do this with Migadu Webmail at least since they currently use Rainloop, which only lets you view a single e-mail address inbox at a time.(EDIT: See @lionirdeadman 's comment below) There is a features to add accounts to quickly hop between inboxes, but in my experience it's very buggy. Stay tuned however, because Migadu contracted Drew DeVault's sourcehut team to write new webmail software to replace Rainloop (repo).You can do this actually. You just need to setup aliases instead of a mailbox for each. Setting up a mailbox for each would be such a nightmare.
Thanks. I'll edit my post. Can this be done across multiple domains, e.g., view emails to all aliases (john@dog.com, mary@cat.com) across different domains in a single inbox?
No, the alias only goes on the same domain unfortunately. You could set-up forwarding though, I think.
I guess I'm a dying breed, but I host my own email, and that of some others, with several domains. I offer Roundcube for a webmail interface. I use Thunderbird, not because I think it's super amazing, but just because it gets the job done and is open source.
I seem to remember a Tildes post a while back about self-hosting email and I would love to see more posts about self-hosting (email, or any other services). This is a great way to resist the centralization of the internet around big, anti-democratic, corporations. And while hosting your own email server is famously not a push-button task, a great thing about it is that other self-hosters are often very happy to help you get off the ground.
I haven't used it myself, but I've heard good things about https://mailinabox.email/ .
I haven't used that either, but I've also heard good things about it. My only concern would be that an email server admin really needs to know what the moving parts are and how to configure them, or otherwise there will be headaches when something goes wrong.
But that said, one of the best things I've heard about mailinabox is that it's just a bunch of scripts that you can inspect yourself and learn from. You can even use it as a guide to setting up your own server rather than simply using mailinabox.
I've been using Zoho for about a year and a half or so now. I've got a few domains set up -- two domains (.com and .party) are catch-alls for site signups and stuff. Then I have a personal domain that I use through good ol' Apple Mail. Not the best email client, but it's fine.
I'm still in the ol' Inbox Zero mode. If I have a lot of email, it gets triaged, then I deal with it.
But yeah, I think everybody should have a catch-all domain for email. Its fantastic. If anybody sells off my email or lets it get out, I just burn that incoming address and switch it up on the site. As a result, I never get any spam.
I do exactly the same. Zoho is really great, for the basic version it’s just about $12 per year and you get custom domains, enough storage, catch-all, good IMAP/SMTP support, the web interface is also usable and they have server-side rules. The spam filtering works really well for me, even with all the catch-all stuff.
A while ago I stopped thinking about privacy focused providers (not about privacy in general) such as mailbox.org, tutanota and so on since every mail eventually ends up at Google or some other provider as well, unfortunately. If I need to encrypt it, I’d use something like GPG or s/mime.
yeah, we're definitely in the same boat. Zoho has been great and it doesn't get enough love. I don't get these other services with silly restrictions like no IMAP, email limits, etc for paying customers.
Zoho offers a lot of stuff that I've never looked into, but I should. I only use the email and calendar.
What email provider do you use?: I use FastMail, as many others here, with my custom domains on top of it.
What clients do you use?: On desktop, Thunderbird and aerc. On my mobile phone, the native SailfishOS email app.
How do you treat your email?: Hourly backups done by
getmailand a local server, lots of sieves, git contributions (I find contributing by email to be much simpler than the "fancy" web UIs), and a few e-mail based automation pipelines I developed. I use and rely on e-mail a lot.Anything else you want to share in relation with this?: I have 4 domains registered in FastMail. I don't pay for 4 of them, only one. In other words, I have one mail box for which I pay, and FastMail allows me to register more than one domain to this mailbox. I find this awesome.
I also talked to them about using their service for mailing lists and small projects' automated e-mails, and they replied that a small load could go through them without issue, unlike most email providers!
Their tech support's also very efficient. I remember when I first bought my account, I had a few issues with CalDav / CardDav autodiscovery, so I opened a support ticket, and they didn't wait for me to beg to get some actual answer and instead directly transferred me to a higher technical level tech support right away, which allowed me to solve my issues in two hours or so.
Do you have any more details on your git email contributions? Is that just giving feedback on PRs? Or are you writing actual code here?
Also would be interested in hearing about your automation pipelines. I got burned by IFTTT's change to their free tier and want to own my automations from now on.
Well, I submit patches through e-mail, so actual code.
How it's done is explained here, and this person explain why they prefer the e-mail patch flow to systems like PRs. I do, too.
For automation, I created a timer script which regularly polls my inbox for emails whose destination address matches something like
bot+...@, I use the...as task type, and the message subject/content as task data.It's pushed in some amqp broker, from which some workers are triggered on said task.
My automations are mostly creating drafts, adding stuff to my notebook, and such.
Edit: note that I'm trying to find a way to have a zero-dependency queue system here instead of having to manage an entire AMQP server.
I've been thinking about using linux fifos but it sounds hacky, so I'm still searching.
Oh that's very interesting, never thought about working with git over email. I would like to try that some time. It seems like a more thought-out flow, making you think about your changes before pushing.
Interesting, and so I'm guessing you're using something like
getmailto poll your inbox? I have an old flip phone that runs an ancient version of Android, and this seems like it might be a good interface to push/pull info. I had tried Dropbox originally, but that went very poorly on the poorly specced phone.I would be interested to hear if you end up finding something besides an AMQP server (or if you have any more details on that setup). I currently run a mac mini that is more or less my hub for everything, but if the AMQP server is light enough, could handle this sort of thing.
No. While I do use
getmailfor regularly automatically backing up my e-mails in a safe place, I don't use it for automation.For that, I wrote a small python imapssl script
If you're trying to have a brokerless MQ system, you could look into https://zeromq.org/
I haven't myself used it, mostly because the things I use AMQP/MQTT for want some amount of "mailbox" featureset, and I don't think you can do that with ZMQ.
Sadly, 0MQ would require quite a lot of work on my side, as it's not available on janet or guile, the languages I use for automation. I'd need to make a bindings lib, and I'm really not into intensive coding these days, so I probably won't be bothered with it for a while.
What email provider do you use?
Gmail for everything, tutanota for the important things.
What clients do you use?
Web client.
How do you treat your email?
Almost empty inbox. Archive the important things.
Anything else you want to share in relation with this?
I want to have a domain for my email, but it seems expensive here in Brazil. I already have a link for my website hosted on github (crdpa.net, google domains), but it seems that for email i need to pay not only for the domain, but for my email provider so i can upgrade from the basic free plan, so i won't do it.
BRL (Brazil currency) is worth nothing and those things are almost always in USD.
I've gone from AOL -> gmail -> zoho mail -> email bundled w/ my webhost -> ProtonMail -> iCloud
From Zoho to ProtonMail I had a big privacy/security obsession, but also throughout that time my email needs fell off the face of a cliff. A month or so ago I realized iCloud is "good enough" and moved to that.
Outlook for work, Mail app for Mac/iPhone, and usually the browser on Windows (since I only use it for gaming these days)
At work it's critical and it's a great way to archive ideas, conversations, etc. I may need a year or two down the road. It's meticulously organized by folder (although admittedly, my inbox is usually cluttered until I get around to sorting). But personal email...it's just this disposable crap I don't care about. It's pretty much exclusively used for resetting logins, automatic notifications, and order confirmations. I haven't held any lengthy conversations over my personal email in at least 5 years now.
It's weird seeing my personal rise and fall of email in my life. It used to be the most important bit of web technology for me, but now I've got Teams, Discord, Facebook Messenger, and the occasional SMS.
I've been using Hey, after having degoogled and moved to ProtonMail for a few years. ProtonMail is nice, but its a bit heavy for what I need from email, and the mobile apps just still aren't quite there. They are functional (usually) but slow and clunky and crashy, even on a few major flagship phones I had.
Hey does a pretty serious overhaul of mail management and I happen to like the way they handle everything. When I was still on gmail, I used Inbox a lot, and Hey feels kinda sorta similar in a way.
Hey still does some nice stuff like blocking trackers by default. It's no ProtonMail but I think its a good middle ground. I still have my PM email for if I absolutely need it, but 95% of my emails are just receipts anyway, and Hey specifically has mechanisms for managing those kinds of emails, saving important snippets from them for later (like tracking codes) and whatnot. Plus it also has a nice newsletter reader system too.
I hadn't seen Hey before, interesting! The price point is too high for me for personal email, but I love that they have a page dedicated to accessibility... Many of the bigger providers don't have nearly as much info on what they're doing for accessibility.
I really wish I could use Hey, I'm not going to lie. The workflow seems really nice to me but I can't swallow the price and even if I did, I've committed myself to only pay for open source services. :(
I use Runbox. I went with it because I liked that it came with 100 aliases and allows sub-accounts, so I can pay for my fiancee's account directly from my account.
It's a web client only, and I use FairEmail on Android. The FairEmail app is really awesome. There's a learning curve, but it's well worth it.
I treat different emails differently. I filter by email alias and by sender, so I have email folders /addresses for bills, ads, social media, etc. This way I can skim the subjects and bulk delete from folders while the important stuff is all together and I don't miss it.
Zohomail
Just web based or app based on my phone.
Best way to communicate over the Internet even today.
I love Zoho mail because how well organized the interface is. The prices are very reasonable to host your domain with them at $1 a month. Plus if you are small business owner there are ton of fantastic pieces of software that integrate into it. For example I use their invoicing software which is free for me because I have so few clients.
What email provider do you use?
I went hotmail -> gmail -> protonmail -> tutanota -> migadu. Quite the trip. I used hotmail when I was a kid since that's all I knew then gmail because I was in love with Google at the time. Then protonmail when privacy became a concern for me and didn't really like how they handled encryption so I went for tutanota and now I'm on migadu because I've decided to give up on encryption and use my own domains (which is possible on tutanota but shh)
What clients do you use?
I'm currently using Migadu's webmail (Rainloop), Geary and I'm not sure on android, I might try pEp's k-9 fork, ltt.rs if there was JMAP support in Migadu or maybe just AOSP's email client, I'm not sure.
How do you treat your email?
I used to filter it heavily but I think I'll start using it in a more basic manner and handle as it comes and archive when done. Search mostly removes the need for folders, I feel for now.
Anything else you want to share in relation with this?
I really wish encryption was plausible with email but there's no interop manner to do it, really. OpenPGP's UX is just bad and I think pEp could work nicely but it lacks specification for other implementations to exist AFAICT.
I really also wish JMAP was more popular, it feels like a major improvement compared to IMAP.
I feel this. In the '00s, Google felt like the one business that was able to reconcile being for-profit while also being a champion of ethics, open software, and the open internet. A more grounded, dialectical analysis probably could've steered me straight (businesses are going to act in furtherance of their interests, which can often be in contradiction with lofty ideals like an "open internet.")
I think the clear social harms of companies like Facebook and Google are making this optimistic capitalist neo-futurism seem woefully naive to the public at large. The last bastion of this wave of neo-futurist optimism seems to be in Tesla and SpaceX coming to save humanity from a climate crisis through green tech and options to colonize other planets, though this is probably a better subject for another context.
Honestly, for me it was more 2010s and just wanted gratis services while not considering the implications. I was young and naive and jumped on a lot of things just because they were free.
For work: Gmail (custom domain) and Mimestream. I don’t get a choice on provider at work, and Mimestream is really well done.
For personal use: Fastmail (custom domain) and the web client on desktop, their iOS app on mobile. I’ve been really really happy with Fastmail since switching away from Gmail in late 2019. I love the aliases feature that lets me use semi-anonymous addresses.
Private hosting from an admin I trust.
Laptops: Long-term user of KMail and I actually make use of many of its advanced features – powerful and user-friendly. On very rare occasions when I need to be on Windows (once a year for work) I have Thunderbird.
Phone: FairEmail. I actually use the paid version, but the gratis version is very much usable (both are FOSS). On my phone I typically use e-mail rarely and very rarely to answer/write.
Web (as backup): Nextcloud Mail on my own Nextcloud server, RoundCube provided by my host.
I treat it as mail. I know some people treat it as their task manager; and others as an IM. But I try to check e-mail so I sit down and take an hour to go through it all, answer what I can, create tasks for what needs further work; and then go on with my actual day. I am not saying this works out like this in practice every time though ;)
For starters, I have my view set up so it shows messages threaded and in chronological order, whereby the newest messages are at the bottom (i.e. as you actually read).
Typically, if a message includes something actionable for me (other than a quick-ish reply) I would create a task by simply pressing a button (or key-combo) in KMail, which would store the task name and e-mail attached in my task manager (Zanshin).
I am a heavy user of filters and have the server move e-mail to ~40 folders (e.g. bugs, finances, automated e-mails, acceptable promotions, several mailing lists).
Even after I read a message, I keep it for later reference. I keep messages from as way back as 2007. After I unsubscribe from a mailing list, I archive its folder and store it as a tarball on my disk, if I ever need it again (actually proved extremely useful a few occasions!), then I delete it from my mail client and server.
For spam filtering, I use Bogofilter locally in KMail. During the many years of use, it can filter things extremely reliably for me for several different languages.
Similarly, for automatic e-mails such as bug trackers, acceptable promotions, and similar notifications, I have a local filter that removes any e-mail that is not marked as important and is older than 120 days.
Oh, and I think this should be pretty clear: Private discussions go on my private e-mail, and business discussions go on my work e-mail.
I have passive e-mail notifications turned on my laptops only for the inbox and a select few folders. On my phone I have active e-mail notifications turned on only for my inbox, and even then only from people who I have added to my address book.
If your e-mail provider supports Sieve filters, using them to set up server-side filtering is great, as all your clients will find the e-mail in that folder right away.
What is or is not spam I find to be very personal, so I think investing a bit into training the Bogofilter locally pays off pretty soon in my experience. Sure, GMail will be more efficient at the beginning, but eventually a personalised local filter surpasses it with lower positive and negative errors.
I have a question for folks about aliases/catch-alls, if you use them: how do you use them?
I'm considering switching over to emails on my custom domain (Zoho emails looks like a good option to try), and I would like to start using aliases for privacy/spam control/organizing emails into folders. But I'm a little at a loss for how to organize things. Make different aliases for categories of things, like "medical" and "financial"? Have the main email where everything ends up be an address I give to no one? Make a new email address for every account everywhere, to avoid overlap? (Difficult on plans that limit number of aliases, but then I guess catch-all might suffice for some that can be all directed to a single folder.) Have a separate catch-all domain entirely? Etc, haha~
I’m not familiar with the catch-all concept, but I have a few aliases, of which I only use one for my private use and another one for a specific NGO. The NGO mail gets into a separate folder, which as I am not that involved anymore I do not get notifications about, and just read at my leisure.
I don’t use it myself, but my brother makes ample use of the plus notation (howto here) so assuming his actual e-mail address is
name@example.com, he would usename+spam@example.comfor logins to things he expects spam from,name+finances@example.comfor financial stuff and then create filters to either move the messages that come to these addresses to their respective folders or trash them in the+spam@case.Worth mentioning that plus notation is not supported by all providers so it could be problematic when switching.
This is what I've been planning on/slowly doing, and with a catch-all it's as easy as just writing what you want when you're signing up to a new site. The only downside I can think is that, if you haven't gotten used to the specific pattern you're making addresses, there is a big chance you just forget what you used as the address for an account. I've been recording the email I used next to that specific account's entry (whenever a site uses an username instead of email when logging in) on my password manager, which seems like the best way to handle it that I know of.
This can be useful for throwaway/psuedo-anonymous accounts if the separate domain is not publicly related to you.
I've thought of this before, but this might be a little weird to do. (At least with my setup) I can only "reply" through a single address, which can get weird for someone if they get a response from a different address they sent a mail to. Also I don't know how that would go well with various spam-prevention measures.
Also, sometimes having a me@ email address just "looks good", y'know.
Good point! Thanks for that tip; I hadn't even thought about accounts that had usernames.
I'm not yet sure if I'll go for a catch-all with individual addresses for each account, or some aliases that group categories. Some pros and cons...
A fellow MetaARPA member!