What's a good alternative to Gmail?

I just opened my protonmail account for the first time in years and it's really nice! Lots of great UI stuff now!

Tutanota is a bit more privacy focused, really useful for burners, because by default it will burn the account if you don't use it for 6 months.

As far the UI, I kinda like it. Little more old school, doesn't have the toy look so many apps have nowadays. But to each their own.

Protonmails approach to requiring hCaptcha for everything, even their mobile apps, really turns me off. I can't complete them. And I need another email to get in using their weird and creepy accessibility cookie thing. Nah thanks. If I need a second email to access my email I might as well just use that second email.

Yes, that's still true. If you want to be able to use a third-party mail app, I would look at Fastmail or Mailbox.org. They don't have free plans though.

Phone app? Yes you have to use their own app. On a computer besides the browser version you can use Thunderbird and other applications if you download ProtonBridge.

Yup, and it’s kind if a pain since their mobile apps aren’t great. I’ve been using them for many years, and lately have been considering jumping ship.

Email encryption isn’t something I actually care about. If I wanted to send someone a super private message, I probably wouldn’t use email anyways since it’s just clunky, and it’s unlikely the other person is using proton mail too (which means the message wouldn’t be encrypted anyways). All I really want is to not have my email provider be scanning my messages to profit from my data.

But the effort to switch to something else is making me stay…

Proton is freemium. You can use the basic package but you only get 500 MB drive storage. Expanding that is cheap, which is how they draw you in.

They also offer package deals, like their VPN stuff.

The Proton free tier is pretty limited compared to Gmail, in particular for me, you're only allowed 1 label. The basic paid tier opens up a lot more. They definitely want you to upgrade to the paid tier.

How do they make money?

Buy selling a subscription that comes with more perks. For example, more storage for your email, custom email domain, etc.

Pre-paying for 2 years upfront is the most cost effective.

Your doubts are warranted, but with Protonmail and Tutanota there is no reason be suspicious. They are basically feemium products and their goal is to respect user's rights

Been using protonmail for my main email for three years, never had one issue. But I'm in Europe, maybe in the US it's different?

They also expand your storage every year, so it's not like it's stuck there forever. For reference, I've been on Proton for about 3 years now (paid plan) and I have a data storage cap of 540GB and I've never had to buy more. Also, I all my emails so far only consume 340MB - so even on the free plan I'd still have years to go before I reached even 5GB.

(Also, I'll admit I don't email much.)

It's quite expensive whereas you get the same product even better for 12€ a year with posteo.de

That’s what I do too, and any thing that I sign up for or use often I’ve swapped straight to proton

I'm willing to use that mindset when I'm downhill mountain biking but for email.. no way. You're crazy man.

Not OP, but I used Namecheap. Porkbun is also recommended I think. Setting it up is not dead-brain simple, but Proton does a very good job on explaining it step by step I believe.

IIRC Cloudflare is the only registrar that doesn't mark up from wholesale prices, or something like that. Basically makes them cheaper than most other registrars. I think the point is that they can then sell you their other (related) services more easily — the services that actually make them money.

I use Porkbun for my domain. you can get a .xyz domain for only $2 for 1 year, though after 1 year its like $8 per year.

I'm using namesilo and it was pretty straight forward to set up. I just got it a couple days ago and no issues so far!

I’m not sure I know what you mean by “target you”. Can you go into more detail about that?

Damn you just reminded me that I haven’t fed my Neopet in years. They don’t die, do they??

I thought I was cool because I recorded the ring from my flip phone and used it on every subsequent phone until I somehow lost the recording around the late aughts, but that beats me by miles.

Oh yeah?? Well I tattoo my messages onto my servant's scalps and send them out when their hair has grown, so...

What made you adamant on getting proton? Curious, cause I could mention some cheaper, but very competent email services.

No sync functionality on Android and no webdav or such, so no support for apps like FolderSync. Also, no client for Linux and macOS.

I agree, it's pretty functional. Only issue I've had with it is it's pretty slow, and if you need to upload a lot of files quickly your out of luck.

My boss had me take a couple hundred pictures with my cell, and I didn't want to waste my time trying to send via sms, so I uploaded then to my drive and shared them. It took 2 hours just to upload them.

SimpleLogin is integrated directly into Proton Pass and Proton Pass has the ability to save them as "Aliases". So that's been really neat. I've been finding myself using Proton Pass over Bitwarden lately due to how the Proton Pass app syncs the vault better on Android and how the Aliases feature works better with the in-page autofill that Proton Pass has.

Which ones? I mentioned more than 2 lol

Yep. It was a fun ooh look what I can do that I have exactly zero people to communicate with using those features.

In the same vein, not using Google is similarly silly. Most of my personal contacts use Gmail or o365 so they still get a copy of my email anyway. But at least this way my money isn't going to them and nobody's scanning my inbox to advertise to me (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞

Ive not used proton, but Tutanota sends a link to the receiver if they don’t use Tutanota themselves. They have to click the link and enter a predetermined password to read the content

Would using proton keep the ads away?

They have a similar integration with Bitwarden that I've used a bit. I ended up stopping though because I rely on a catch-all and just give out companyname@ or something generic like work@ or family@. Sure it's easy to guess but I haven't had any spam issues in the ~15 years I've been operating this way.

Nobody actually gets my Fastmail login address though. I picked a random string on one of their domains that's literally only used to sign in. A fun little added obscurity feature.

Yeah I suppose I could be missing email and not know (because it never got delivered) but I get everything I expect to receive and I haven't had anyone reach out asking why I haven't responded to an email I never received. It's good enough for me for now though.

LDAP support isn't something that's ever crossed my mind for mail, definitely a legit reason to stick with the Googs.

That's not strictly true. I don't know if it's part of the free plan but it's definitely a paid feature. With either their Simple Login or the built in hide my email alias, you can reply with your alias.

on Gmail, you can also send from your forwarded addresses

I imagine that only works if you also host the address you forward to with Google? Otherwise I can't see how Google can send email on behalf of a domain whose DNS servers it doesn't control. If that were possible spam would be a lot worse than it is.

Same, or maybe just throw a link up

me too please

I published the Markdown file to Fastmail at this link (it is a text file). As it was initially written just for myself, the format might not be very readable :)

FastMail user for 7+ years. Their spam filtering is good. I hardly get any and my email address is 20+ years old and have been used in public plenty.

@Myro@lemm.ee @sunbeam60@lemmy.one Thanks for the information both of you. I realised my Google Workspace subscription lapses in a week so I've signed up for a trial of Fastmail and really liking it so far. 😀

As my app posted the reply as a top comment, here it is again:

One important thing to take note of is: "Once your personal database has seen more than 200 spam and 200 non-spam emails, we automatically start using it to filter your incoming mail." This means, before you have received 200 spam emails (or marked them as such), the filter is going to perform significantly worse.

Personally, initially it was pretty bad compared to Gmail. However, it significantly improved over time. One thing that helps are masked emails (fantastic) - an email you can create, or is even created automatically for you, and then enter at dubious websites. If you get spam, you can simply block the whole email or fine tune it.

Yeah I usually mention that whenever I mention Zoho, guess I forgot it this time :)

I'm very happy with them, but every time I need to add a sending email alias I'm looking through 3+ places to find the right one where I can do that.

Richard Matthew Stallman, who started the GNU and founded the Free Software Foundation 🙃

That's not called an alias, it's called owning your own domain name so you can take it with you to any email service.

Email aliases mean something different (giving a website an address like thatwebsite@my.domain instead of realmailboxaddress@my.domain).

I currently still use Gmail, but I am looking to move away. I recently signed up for simplelogin.io and purchased a cheap domain name to use with it. I then went around changing my Gmail email address to a different email alias for each and every site I use. It's a lot of work and I found some sites you can't change the email address, they refuse to allow email aliases or you have to contact support to get them to change it. All a pain. For the majority though most are now on my own domain's email address and all point to my Gmail inbox. At least now when I do switch I have done the hard work and only need to update the email address in simplelogin. Since I use my own domain, I shouldn't lose access to the email account should I need to move it away from simplelogin.

What did you see in the fine print? I just picked it because it was recommended, I never read any of that

You usually can't fully self-host a mail server (like literally in your house) because most residential ISPs block port 25 to prevent spam/abuse. You can use a third party relay service like what Helm offered, but most people "self host" via a cloud provider or a web host.

Email will be retried over the course of like 72 hours. That's why the failed to send email from the host master is usually really delayed. That said your local ISP will likely block the port. You can however ask them for it. They might charge you.

If your email server is offline then mail won't be delivered. The sender's server will retry as other have noted, but how often and how many times varies. Hosting at home, even when possible, is not a great idea in my opinion.

There are endless options for hosting out there, I don't want to name names since I only really have experience with one.