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 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.
I've been with Google Workspace for a few years now but I feel like it might be time to move.
> - multiple "payment accounts" can share the same domain (securely), which was my primary reason for choosing them.
That's a cool feature
I use my own domain and turned on wildcards so each service gets a different email address to try and spam.
I ended up switching to Migadu however, as nowadays I need to have multiple domains, and multiple people might need to have accounts on some of them.
- Pros of your own domain: migrating to a new provider is really easy (don’t need to change your email address everywhere), your email provider can’t kick you out and make you lose everything
- Cons of your own domain: if you forget to renew it, you lose your email, but it’s pretty hard to forget to renew it IMO
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.
Entire extended family doing the same now and never had a single issue.
And if you have email accounts spread across multiple providers, check out the email client I am currently building:
https://marcoapp.io
Supports anything that supports IMAP/SMTP, but crucially is cross-platform (desktop + mobile apps).
The only con I see is: there is no way to add separate 'mailboxes' to it. I can register multiple addresses, but it's still one account, thus one mailbox.
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.
If you forget, or don't have money, or whatever reason else for not renewing the domain, you will lose access to many of your accounts more than likely.
A well-run, reputable domain registrar will give you plenty of warnings when a domain is coming up for renewal. And when the domain expires there is usually [1] a period afterwards when it can be retrieved before anyone else can buy it.
Set the domain to auto-renew, make sure the registrar has your payment details, set calendar reminders. Its not difficult.
The alternative is gmail or similar, where you can lose access to your email, and perhaps the root of your digital "identity", at the whim of some hair-trigger algorithm [2] and be left unable to even communicate with the provider to get it fixed.
So get a domain from a decent registrar. Pay several years in advance. Keep your payment and contact details up to date.
[1] based on my experience of Cloudflare and other registrars
[2] plenty of examples of this on HN and elsewhere
Domains are cheap, $10 a year, and you can set up auto renew, or renew them for years in advance.
Most registrars also send you alerts (e.g. the registrar I use, Porkbun, sends alerts at 60, 30, 5 days before expiry)
Migrating to a new email service is a colossal task if you don’t use your own domain which you can just point at the new one, and if your email service decides to kick you out, you lose access to all the same accounts as if your domain expired.
My domain expiring is totally within my control. My email provider kicking me out is not.
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
Use gmail then setup a tool like imapsync to sync all your mail to another mailbox.
There's nothing weird about pm.me
> I tried using my own domain at a bank once and they started questioning whether it was a fake email or something.
So just say "Yes, that is my actual email" and the issue is solved.
* 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.