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.
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
Check out Posteo.
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
Yep @mailbox.org sounds a bit more professional.
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.
I tried it but the design just wasn’t mine. I switched to protonmail then and it’s a great value for the money. Vpn, password manager, files, mail, calender(, contacts)
I’m a Protonmail user (on a paid plan) and like it. The bridge application works decently well on Linux with my desktop mail client. Their 24 month billing plan makes it $3.5/month.
And, you can pay in BTC.
I use Proton with a custom domain. No need to manage another server at home, I get to have a nice professional email for personal use and I can spin up burner addresses on demand.
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
Same here but I’m using Firefox Relay instead of simple login. Will check that one out though.
I’ve made the switch from relay to proton pass aliases. It’s great but with relay you can block spam which is not sth that you’ll get with proton pass
Yeah the spam filtering with relay is pretty good. Thanks for the tip!
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.
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.
Another vote for tuta here. Very nice service and having my email @ be tuta.io is very satisfying
Skiff doesn’t work with IMAP, so Outlook, Thunderbird, K-9-Mail and other Clients won’t work
Neither does Tutanota, I have (cheapest) paid plan and their client is shit.
I use StartMail, they support IMAP
yeah true 👍. i just responded to what OP asked, “sign up websites” and send basic emails
Ah, yes, my bad, I didn’t read the entire post. In that case all options should be fine, I also have a skiff-mail but I’m not that sure about their privacy policy.
If you want access to some underlying knobs and buttons, but without running your own email server, then Migadu might be interesting.
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 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
I can recommend StartMail. It’s from the same company that develops StartPage
