I’ve been wanting to move on from gmail for a while now, thought about self hosting but I’m afraid I won’t have the time or ability to keep it running well for a long period of time. Which service would you guys recommend? I’m not an avid email user, I basically just sign up to websites and send support emails once in a while.
you can also have your own domain name in protonmail.
Same with Totanota
I totally recommend tutanota. I use the free.
Can I ask how you deal with it? Free tutanota lacks even the most basic features i.e. offline mode/search. I switched to proton after a month, it was infuriating
I just use it for ordering stuff and for registering to newsletters. It’s fine, but yeah sometimes you want to find older emails and it’s a pain in the ass to do that, because of the search function.
Proton Mail
Proton just keeps getting better, it seems like they’re trying to create a suite to compete with Microsoft.
Email, cloud storage, VPN, calendar and recently password manager.
I do wish their VPN client for Linux was a priority sooner (they’re working on it now). Also, I can’t get email notifications on my degoogled phone because it uses Firebase for push notifications.
Other than that, I love Proton. I pay for Proton Unlimited, I’m happy to support their growth for a great product range.
Could I ask how you find Proton’s search capabilities versus Gmail?
I use their mail bridge to my PC, and then whatever client you want. I use Evolution.
I honestly don’t use the search function. Our work emails are through gmail so that’s what I primarily use, my personal email doesn’t really have too much going on there so I don’t really need to do any advanced searching, filters, etc
I really enjoy https://mailbox.org, their custom software can be… esoteric at times, but the company and privacy commitments are top notch, and it has PGP built throughout natively, including an option to automatically PGP encrypt all plaintext emails you receive. I joined it originally as a cheaper alternative to Protonmail but these days I really prefer it.
Also, you can give it out email aliases for work or to other people without giving away that you’re actually a conspiracy nut and privacy enjoyer. Much better when it’s @mailbox rather than @tutanota or @protonmail
Or you can also not care what other people think. I think
proton.mesounds pretty cool. I’m a physicist too so it kinda makes sense. Tutanota allows quite a few short domains;tuta.iosounds a bit funny but it’s short enough to not be strange.When I am forced to give my email for electronic receipts in shops though…it’s a full on
{shop_name}@handle.anonaddy.me. No issues or weird looks so far.
Unless you’re a seasoned sysadmin, hosting your own mail server is going to be more trouble that it’s worth. It’s a lot of work, and when that was a common thing (companies having their own mail servers) usually they had dedicated admin teams (when they bothered hiring more than one admin, that is) to run it. It’s a lot of work.
I migrated my domain over to Protonmail a couple of years back, and it’s the best money I’ve spent in a long time.
I’m a proton unlimited subscriber and it comes with proton vpn and simplelogin premium on top of the 500GB email inbox. I’m very satisfied with it. Signing up for lots of things with email aliases from simplelogin is very convenient and useful for cleaning your inbox of spam
Not sure how many people know this but there is an i2p mail service too that can work with clearnet and inside i2p. The cleanet is @i2pmail.org and the i2p mail is @mail.i2p .
I have not tried it out in years but just wanted to make others aware in case it fits your use case.
Check out Posteo.
I’m surprised no one’s posted about Skiff.
After reading comments from their CEO on the protonmail subreddit I’m surprised anyone would use it in the first place. Also it’s only E2EE with other skiff emails. They don’t use PGP so their email encryption doesn’t interoperate with other providers.
I don’t use it as my default provider. Obviously, for some messaging, I use Proton. But if you need a FOSS provider, that will be used for registration in some services and password recovery, this is a very good option! They don’t use this information for commercial purposes, that’s already better than Gmail or Outlook.
+1 on Skiff. E2EE intra- and inbound. Great service, greater support. Free custom domains setup (& catchall aliasing!!!). Comes with a Drive, Pages, and Calendar suite.
Do they provide SMTP? So that I can use it in a Wordpress instance?
No SMTP or IMAP as it’s an E2EE service and unlike Proton they don’t (yet anyway) have a “bridge” service. You get to use your own domain, a handful of aliases, and a generous amount of storage all on the free plan with higher limits on the paid plans.
Anyone looking for standard mail protocol support and gobs of storage for free/cheap and who are cool with a very non-sexy 90s web UI, would do well to check out the European provider mail.ee . They’ve been reliable for me over the past year or so though I’m not exactly a high-volume customer.
I switched to disroot and am so far super happy with it. especially because it comes with a lot of nice features like file transfer and cloud storage. its also free.
I’m considering moving to disroot as well.
its also free.
That it is, but please consider donating as it’s also non-profit :)
I recommend Proton Mail if you just want a simple, no fuss email service. It’s free with some paid options, but the paid options are super unecessary and pretty much useless if you just use email to sign up and send support emails. Proton Mail also blocks trackers and cleans links in your emails.
If you want access to some underlying knobs and buttons, but without running your own email server, then Migadu might be interesting.
I use Migadu but you need your own domain for that and also it is paid.
I also switched to Migadu recently, because Mailbox.org removed support for own domains from their cheapest package. Good experience (so far) with both.
fastmail
Proton has a great free tier that may work well for you. I’ve used them for a while now and it’s been great. They have what is probably the most feature-complete private email service out there (unless I’m forgetting something). The main nitpick I have with them is how little they focus on Linux, but that applies more for their other services than email.
I can recommend StartMail. It’s from the same company that develops StartPage
