Ask HN: Email Provider for Main Account?
Which email provider would you recommend for your main account? (Banking, government + other important stuff)
With Gmail, I am concerned that I could get arbitrarily locked out of my account with no recourse. Also, I wouldn't mind moving away from Google in general to support a more decentralized internet. If it is based outside of the US, even better. But these considerations are secondary.
So I am looking for something secure, reliable, and usable (good search, not getting overrun with spam) that I could use for the next few decades. Privacy is only important insofar as reasonable security is concerned (vague, I know, but my point is that practicality is more important).
What do you use and what have been the pros and cons?
I have paid for Fastmail for over a decade and there have been no cons I can think of.
I use my own domain and turned on wildcards so each service gets a different email address to try and spam.
I have my own domain (that I share with relatives), and use mailbox.org for hosting it.
I chose them after a rather lengthy search.
Reasons for choosing them(pros)
- multiple "payment accounts" can share the same domain (securely), which was my primary reason for choosing them.
I.e. I cannot access my brother's mail in any way, even if we share the same domain, because he is his own admin.
- you can pay extra for more space (i.e. additional storage on a per gigabyte basis)
- extra "domains" and "aliases" for the mailboxes are possible and free (for a given number dependent on your subscription level)
- German company (i.e. EU company, which I care a lot about).
- They seem like an old-fashioned unix company that respect privacy, so my risk of being data harvested or used for ai training seems miniscule
- They seem to be financially stable and (if I remember correctly) around 40 employees which is a reasonable size
- They have a full online office suit (which I do not use)
Reasons not to (cons)
- you pay per mailbox, not per domain
- their business plans starts to expensive for my taste (so my business domain is at another hoster) as the business is basically revenueless currently. Shouldn't be a problem, if the business is "real".
I want to stress, that I am only a customer, no partner or affiliate or receive any benefit of writing this.
Register your own domain, forward it to wherever, if you get locked out reroute to a secondary service for the recovery. Gmail is fine.
Fastmail. You pay for the service, so you are the customer.
Been using it for years with my own domain. Rock solid and good support, with no cons that I can think of. Fastmail will sell you a domain but I register mine with CloudFlare.
I use a custom domain with iCloud+. That works for me because I'm very much in the Apple ecosystem, but I can easily move somewhere else whenever it's no longer the best option for me, and I did just that when I moved from Proton to iCloud. I've set this up for my wife as well. It can be as simple or as hard as you want it to be, but above all, I'd strongly encourage you to use a domain you own. Email has become our de facto identity, and we should be in control of it.
What if you lapse domain renewal for some reason and someone buys it? Some serious accident or life event? I do the same but i use icloud as main one.
you can prepay many domains for up to 10 years.
I suspect Google and Microsoft control the world’s spam filters, and given their history of anticompetitive behavior, moving to another provider might hurt your deliverability. I recommend Google Workspace with a custom domain
I'm pretty happy with Fastmail. Web mail and calendaring UI is really nice, search works well and is super fast. Company is headquartered in Australia, but I think they have significant infrastructure in the US.
Others have said something similar, but I'll put my thoughts for completeness:
* Get your own domain so you can move it if necessary;
* Download all your email regularly ... don't rely on the host storage;
* The above is as a backup ... if you get locked out of a host you can point your domain somewhere else, but you risk losing existing data;
I work almost exclusively locally, downloading everything, but still have the webmail interface for when it's more convenient.
I have had good experiences with Proton. I pay for the business tier so that I can manage multiple domains… but that’s not your average setup.
Literally my only complaint is that the new-ish vanilla SMTP service does not play well with systems like DMA or Postfix, so I have issues using it for cron emails on my servers.
Everything else has worked pretty much perfectly since I migrated over.
Edit: I echo other commenters though, get your own domain regardless of where you host it. That way you can always pack up your toys and go somewhere else if required
Fastmail these days with a custom domain.
I was on protonmail for years. But I found the integrations were not compatible with my ideal workflow. Their iPhone app also crashed all the time for me and you can’t use regular mail clients. For PCs you can use the bridge with a client but I found nothing like that for the phone.
WRT proton I think it was overkill for my use case. If I need complete secrecy I can use GPG over email.
I find Fastmail to be cheaper, faster, and more compatible for every day use. I also really like the email alias feature which I use all the time. Fastmail and a standalone VPN was significantly cheaper than protons offerings as well.
At the end of the day as long as you use a custom domain it doesn’t really matter where you go. Even Gmail works fine here. To me it just matters where you will compromise on usability for secrecy.