I recommend Fastmail. I've been paying customer for 5+ years, parked custom domain and set up forwarding on Gmail. 0 problems except maybe 2 short downtimes that I can think of
Same, migrated away from GMail about 5 years ago, had the same account since around 2004 when it was still invite-only. I got scared after a friend's experience getting their Google account locked after setting up AdSense for a side project.
Chose Fastmail over Proton just due to the convenience of search, I appreciate that Proton is more privacy conscious with the full encryption but I can only manage my emails if I can search them, I'm not well organised but can remember the right keywords to find anything in the tens of thousands emails I have from all these years.
Proton's full encryption is only if you email to another Proton user. Other email providers would not be able to decrypt the message for the user to read. While readers of this board might not need the distinction to be made, the vast majority of the population definitely does though. I have had multiple conversations with people that did not consider their Proton mail sent to a Gmail user wasn't fully encrypted.
Encryption is hard to get right on multiple levels. The biggest hurdle however will always be end users.
Seconded, not because of the AI stuff, but because they're much better than Gmail. The UI loads instantly, is much more responsive, featureful, things just make sense, support is really quick and knowledgeable when you email them, just fantastic all around.
I considered fastmail. Their integration with android contacts is terrible,you have to maintain contacts separately.
I can do that,but it doesn't work for non technical users of my family.
Android does not support CalDAV or CardDAV, which are used to sync calendars and contacts. However, a workaround is installing a CalDAV or CardDAV sync adapter.
We have tested and recommend DAVx⁵, which is approximately $5. Once you have added your account in DAVx⁵, you can set up calendars or contacts in the app of your choice, and the changes will sync with Fastmail.
I don’t have any complains with contact management on iOS with Fastmail. Apple’s CardDAV and CalDAV implementations are way better than they used to be. What issues are you seeing?
Ditto. I started migrating 3 years ago, and now almost nothing reaches my Gmail any more. Weaning off Google is hard, but this felt like the most significant step.
Same here. Also no "TRY OUR AI NOW" button, no Copilot popups, no feeding all emails into LLM training, no ads (!!!) in the inbox(!!!). Just great value.
I was a free user ~20 years ago and still use them today! It's exactly what I need out of email, with everything included in the one price tier. I tried ProtonMail and some others like iCloud but found no equivalent.
Any tips for getting family members to use your new email? I've also been on Fastmail for ~5 years, but can't get anyone I know personally to use the new email!
Auto-reply from the old email that says, "This email address will stop working in {n} days. Please update your address book with <new email address>" Ideally only reply to those in your address book so spammers do not get the new address so easily.
Also CC your new email address from the old one in an email to everyone you care about with "I have updated my email address to <new email address>" so it's easier for them to add it.
For me, it is working excellent, I almost never check the spam directory for false positives, and it happens maybe once a month for me to receive a spam message in my inbox. I think it is comparable to Gmail, maybe a bit better.
I switched to Fastmail and I desperately want to integrate ChatGPT to intelligently schedule meetings. I spend a tremendous amount of time going back and forth with people manually inputting when I am free. I’d pay more for this integration!
I also use ChatGPT (copy and paste) to rewrite long emails for clarity. I’d love if it had pre-written drafts that I could approve or edit and send…
I love Fastmail otherwise though. I don’t want to switch away, and I don’t want them to force it down anyone’s throat. I just want an option to integrate or a feature I could turn on (even a paid premium tier). My response to another person explains what the problem is - I think it is a pretty common issue.
im sure you could get procmail to do this, have fastmail forward to a self-hosted mail server with procmail and then have it go nuts. You can send mail from your own server using fastmail's servers with an API key.
I get 3-5 email requests a day for meetings. Those meetings are at various locations (so options like Calendly which are more focused on people doing meetings from a single location don’t work). I need to reply with times that I am available. Often they get back to me and say they aren’t available at those times so how about these times. We iterate until we find a time that works.
All of this is manual right now. I’ve spoken to a lot of colleagues in my industry who have the same pain points. A lot of time is wasted on this.
Something intelligent could take into account where I am going to be right before the time I offer and make sure there is enough time for transit in between. It could warn me if I have a few meetings back to back and might need a break.
I love Fastmail and don’t regret ditching the Gmail backend at all, but I do wish I could have something intelligent like this integrated.
Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean but isn't this just... a shared calendar? You have a work calendar which is public and other people can open to view your availability, and propose meeting times. And vice-versa you can see their calendar.
Modulo your problem with travel times (but calendars have location info, so hacking something where the travel time between two consecutive locations is accounted for should not be too difficult). So I don't quite understand where "AI" fits into this.
What about them? Gmail 'beat' them years ago thanks to a generous amount of storage on the free tier, hype marketing at launch, and a vastly superior spam filter.
Given how bad the spam filtering has gotten, the way they give spam notifications from Google Calendar a free pass, the current mess that is "Priority Inbox", I have my doubts they can be trusted to correctly filter my new "AI Inbox" to catch what really matters.
This lets high-stakes items — like a bill due tomorrow or a dentist reminder — rise to the top.
I really hope it hadn't just been trained on US content because their so called decades old capability to have flight reservations appear in Google Calendar and Wallet sourced from GMail has never worked for me.
It's a surprisingly hard problem. I filter / rank my own emails this way and the prompt has grown to like 2,000 words and it's all very specific to exactly what's important to me. The latest Gemini Flash works well but older mini models struggle.
probably not far off it, and to be honest, that's actually better than 99% of spam filtering that exists.
I think it's more likely a "confidence" between 0-1, and then you can customise what is an acceptable threshold per account. Business accounts needing confidence 0.7 and free accounts needing confidence 0.6.
That's how I'd think about it at least. Boolean is slightly too lossy.
I'd just wish they'd give me some sort of N8N/IFTTT-like capabilities a bit more powerful than the filtering/tagging stuff they have right now. I'd be happy to use AI as one of the blocks within custom flows for decision making/draft-building.
Instead I get blanket features I cannot control (and probably cannot turn off?). They just don't end up being useful most of the time, and get shoved in everyone's faces regardless of them actually using/requesting them.
Thank god i started hosting my own mail (and other stuff) like 2 years ago. Everything just seems to get more annoying and less userfriendly.
As the email client i use Thunderbird on Linux and Fairmail on Android. I have really been enjoying the minimal UI of fairmail.
Should someone trust me (a random stranger) more than google, send me an email to grisu@grisu.app or visit my website (grisu.app) for more information. I will give free emails with pretty much no storage limit for as long as i can.
> Thank god i started hosting my own mail (and other stuff)
Same thing here. If you can at all (have access to a "quality" IPv4 with open ports), self-hosting your email is the best thing you can do for your privacy and convenience. No spyware analyzing emails and contacts, no annoying webmail interface (use any IMAP client), no constant reminders to provide a phone number or recovery email, no annoying 2FA requests, no "suspicious logins" reminders if you use a VPN, unlimited mailboxes, attachments, and aliases.
Once you start hosting your email then moving away entirely from Google is pretty easy.
I used to host my own email, but eventually moved to Fastmail. I have to communicate with a number of professionals that work for companies using fairly aggressive third party archiving and filtering solutions (for example, Proofpoint). Keeping my email server on long-term clean IPs in ranges where one other customer didn’t ruin the entire range became a real hassle.
Several such of the larger providers in that space won’t allowlist single IPs if you can’t prove administrative control of the subnet. Alas, I don’t have my own network allocation.
Part of me misses self-hosting. Part of me is glad that I don’t have to manage that anymore, given the growing number of other services, hosts, and network space I manage.
A compromise that may be acceptable is to relay outgoing mail through a commercial provider like AWS or Mailgun. The vast majority of my email is inbound, so even using a relay for better deliverability wouldn't affect my privacy much.
Not like having a portable number, but I was able to do it kinda okay with DuckDuckGo @duck mail forwarding, at least for newsletters and other semi-spammy emails.
It is used to remove trackers from emails, but then I was able to just change the forwarding from gmail to another provider and that was it.
As a limitation, it doesn't allow to respond to emails from the same @duck email.
I like gemini but is it worth sacrificing an ever shrinking reading space of gmail? Which is the most important part of any email UI? Not sure from the post that an opt-out will be provided for disinterested users?
Though you have to be careful if you do it for privacy reasons, because it is hands right in the honey.
When you own such providers, you are easily pressured by the police or intelligence service.
Refuse to comply, and they will investigate your other businesses.
Accept, and investigators are way more chill when dealing with you, because they see you as an ally.
It's illusion that owners in Lithuania (or as they say, "Switzerland") would refuse to collaborate, lose everything they have, and accept to go to jail for you to protect one person storing pictures of kids, or someone planning a terrorist attack.
Though now with this Gemini scanning all the emails, Google can now reliably flag content at scale "to protect children / fight terrorists / flag illegal content".
Before, they had to do broad keyword match and this ancient picture database matching.
It can’t do what I really want it to do: delete the crap emails even when I tell it what I consider crap. Instead it tells me how to filter them and delete them myself; that I can do without Gemini.
You should explain why it is comical to you. I want to know what is funny about the reaction so I can laugh too. I saw some privacy concerns and some UI/UX issues, but I didn't find them very funny.
The one thing I'll want is what we'll never get which is just making it easier to delete e-mails in bulk. And less crap spam filtering. And less sharing my e-mails with third parties.
Maybe this is a nuance that makes it “better” but I’m 99% sure that Google login means if so visit a site that supports it, Google will share my email with that site even if I don’t explicitly speaking login. Maybe there’s a workaround these businesses are using to get it? But either way my inbox is littered with emails I didn’t sign up for,
the only minuses of these services, is that because they are not trusted, they are rejected by some websites, and they are flagged as spam :/
For example fastmail.com is considered as a fake account registration provider, because of the masked email feature, that allows you many times to register to a free trial.
It's the only reason I stay with Gmail, despite their terrible practices
I have been using Mailfence and Zoho (paid plans as well as free plans) for almost a decade. Never had any issues. Support is actually reachable and good. (no affiliation). IMAP works only on paid plans
> The one thing I'll want is what we'll never
> get which is just making it easier to delete
> e-mails in bulk.
This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".
"Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.
But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too".
Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries.
Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.
> This already "exists", go to a label, tick the top checkbox above all the rows, then "Select all 5,192 conversations in 'ThisLabel'", then "Delete".
Also works with any search.
> "Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.
I've found it to work fairly reliably with that much or more, if you leave the tab open and just wait. It seems to do an initial UI update with those ~5k or so, then continue deleting in the background. Feels like it's done entirely in the frontend, where it deletes a batch, grabs the next, delete, grab next, delete, etc etc etc.
There was a rebuttal to a recent news or rumor that emails in Gmail are being used for training. Google claimed that it’s not doing that. But these things can change any moment with enough marketing and subterfuge.
It won't be sustainable in the long term, but it doesn't need to be. It's about throwing everything at the wall now and hoping some of it sticks before the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs take off. Then just like Google Search you'll start to notice the more intensive AI features are randomly missing.
so glad I got off gmail years ago once I saw stories of people's lives being completely cut off due to "suspicious CC activity". Fastmail is the way to go
If you don't want crappy e-mail service, you need to pay monthly for it. If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer.
I'm just so tired of people endlessly complaining about things they have never paid for. Let the ad-model carry those who genuinely cannot afford the services they need, it's revolutionary in that regard. But most of you here have the money, so start paying.
One thing I think it's still always valid to complain about is when your time is stolen. It's precious, and you can never get it back. If the unpaid experience slows you down unnecessarily, I think it's okay to be frustrated.
The truly infuriating experiences are like cable tv, where the paid experience is terrible, too.
Google does know how to do the paid version well. YouTube Premium is a great example. Massive music library and no ads, ever. It's astounding how much better the experience is.
Offtopic: Oh boy, I recently had a "joy" to watch a cable TV. 5-minute ad breaks every 10 minutes or event more often – it is even much worse than Youtube with ads.
Chose Fastmail over Proton just due to the convenience of search, I appreciate that Proton is more privacy conscious with the full encryption but I can only manage my emails if I can search them, I'm not well organised but can remember the right keywords to find anything in the tens of thousands emails I have from all these years.
Encryption is hard to get right on multiple levels. The biggest hurdle however will always be end users.
It'll do bi-directional sync between Android contacts/calendar and Fastmail (or any other CardDav/CalDav server)
Also available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279881-Se...
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279941-Se...
You can either use their "Device profile" or do it manually.
Also CC your new email address from the old one in an email to everyone you care about with "I have updated my email address to <new email address>" so it's easier for them to add it.
I've been a customer for 4-5 years, ever since I saw a hn post about them, and I have zero complaints.
It's dirt cheap ($10 per year for unlimited amount of users).
They allow wildcard addresses and I've set up my own "trash mail" so I can register an account at e.g. LinkedIn with linkedin@my-domain.com.
I've set up 4 different domains and 3 accounts and all of this for $10 a year.
Sorry if this reads like an ad, but I think it's super cool to offer such a great service for a fair price.
But, they allow you to write your own sieve scripts so you can really customize the experience a lot.
Don't think of them as another proton mail, they're much more a DIY mail provider.
I don't get spam on either. Gmail account is from year one, fastmail account predates that (~27 years old), so they both receive plenty.
I also use ChatGPT (copy and paste) to rewrite long emails for clarity. I’d love if it had pre-written drafts that I could approve or edit and send…
Good news. You have options, basically everywhere.
Feels like everyone else relying on US tech giants is having AI forced down their gullets.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
All of this is manual right now. I’ve spoken to a lot of colleagues in my industry who have the same pain points. A lot of time is wasted on this.
Something intelligent could take into account where I am going to be right before the time I offer and make sure there is enough time for transit in between. It could warn me if I have a few meetings back to back and might need a break.
I love Fastmail and don’t regret ditching the Gmail backend at all, but I do wish I could have something intelligent like this integrated.
Modulo your problem with travel times (but calendars have location info, so hacking something where the travel time between two consecutive locations is accounted for should not be too difficult). So I don't quite understand where "AI" fits into this.
I highly doubt AI had anything to do with that, and it was more to do with the Gmail service being in use for over 2 decades.
I assume Google just wants to rebrand Bayesian analysis as “AI” so it can claim it’s been doing that for decades.
Not one part of that was down to AI.
This lets high-stakes items — like a bill due tomorrow or a dentist reminder — rise to the top.
I really hope it hadn't just been trained on US content because their so called decades old capability to have flight reservations appear in Google Calendar and Wallet sourced from GMail has never worked for me.
I think it's more likely a "confidence" between 0-1, and then you can customise what is an acceptable threshold per account. Business accounts needing confidence 0.7 and free accounts needing confidence 0.6.
That's how I'd think about it at least. Boolean is slightly too lossy.
AI can never work without a dataset to train on and it will always need to read your email to make a decision.
This is why Google products have a massive privacy prompt before you start using Gemini.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968411
Instead I get blanket features I cannot control (and probably cannot turn off?). They just don't end up being useful most of the time, and get shoved in everyone's faces regardless of them actually using/requesting them.
As the email client i use Thunderbird on Linux and Fairmail on Android. I have really been enjoying the minimal UI of fairmail.
Should someone trust me (a random stranger) more than google, send me an email to grisu@grisu.app or visit my website (grisu.app) for more information. I will give free emails with pretty much no storage limit for as long as i can.
Same thing here. If you can at all (have access to a "quality" IPv4 with open ports), self-hosting your email is the best thing you can do for your privacy and convenience. No spyware analyzing emails and contacts, no annoying webmail interface (use any IMAP client), no constant reminders to provide a phone number or recovery email, no annoying 2FA requests, no "suspicious logins" reminders if you use a VPN, unlimited mailboxes, attachments, and aliases.
Once you start hosting your email then moving away entirely from Google is pretty easy.
Several such of the larger providers in that space won’t allowlist single IPs if you can’t prove administrative control of the subnet. Alas, I don’t have my own network allocation.
Part of me misses self-hosting. Part of me is glad that I don’t have to manage that anymore, given the growing number of other services, hosts, and network space I manage.
Who asked for help anyway? Gmail should be Gmail, continuity is not innovation.
It is quite easy to setup and give you much control, I do it myself:
https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker
Documentation is very very clear
It is used to remove trackers from emails, but then I was able to just change the forwarding from gmail to another provider and that was it.
As a limitation, it doesn't allow to respond to emails from the same @duck email.
When you own such providers, you are easily pressured by the police or intelligence service.
Refuse to comply, and they will investigate your other businesses.
Accept, and investigators are way more chill when dealing with you, because they see you as an ally.
It's illusion that owners in Lithuania (or as they say, "Switzerland") would refuse to collaborate, lose everything they have, and accept to go to jail for you to protect one person storing pictures of kids, or someone planning a terrorist attack.
Though now with this Gemini scanning all the emails, Google can now reliably flag content at scale "to protect children / fight terrorists / flag illegal content".
Before, they had to do broad keyword match and this ancient picture database matching.
In Switzerland, law enforcement can't just ask for data without a court order. And companies don't give it willingly, either.
(no affiliation, just a happy family plan customer paid far into the future)
For example fastmail.com is considered as a fake account registration provider, because of the masked email feature, that allows you many times to register to a free trial.
It's the only reason I stay with Gmail, despite their terrible practices
"Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.
But you can do this by setting up a local IMAP client and doing mass-deletes that way. Perhaps the easiest on e.g. *nix systems is to use isync (the "mbsync" command) to "sync" between two folders locally and remotely, with a rule saying "anything deleted locally, delete it on the remote too".
Then just sync between an empty local folder and your remote target folder, and it'll slowly grind through it. You can also use a local GUI E-Mail client, but most of those become slow/unresponsive with a mass-delete operation, whereas you can spin up multiple "mbsync" commands with retries.
Beware that GMail has (or did, last I tried this) some sort of per-account I/O limit or similar, so if you're doing background operations like this you might find the web interface (even on an unrelated computer/network connection) becomes slow or unresponsive.
Also works with any search.
> "Exists" in scare quotes because their own interface is absolutely atrocious for doing this, as on e.g. a label with ~50k messages (I was mass-deleting some large mailing lists recently) there's maybe a 5-10% change the operation will eventually finish, and not just leave it at ~45k or whatever.
I've found it to work fairly reliably with that much or more, if you leave the tab open and just wait. It seems to do an initial UI update with those ~5k or so, then continue deleting in the background. Feels like it's done entirely in the frontend, where it deletes a batch, grabs the next, delete, grab next, delete, etc etc etc.
Interesting. For me, Google Mail spam filter is pretty much impeccable.
This message is not spam. I repeat, there's no spam in this email.
Lol
"Don't complain when you are using Gmail and your emails are being trained to develop Gemini."
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963761
I'm just so tired of people endlessly complaining about things they have never paid for. Let the ad-model carry those who genuinely cannot afford the services they need, it's revolutionary in that regard. But most of you here have the money, so start paying.
The truly infuriating experiences are like cable tv, where the paid experience is terrible, too.
Google does know how to do the paid version well. YouTube Premium is a great example. Massive music library and no ads, ever. It's astounding how much better the experience is.
Why wouldn't it?