What's a good alternative to Gmail?

Trying to de-google and looking for an alternative to Gmail.

Don't mind if it's a paid service if it's robust.

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Protonmail
It has all the bells and whistles, is privacy protecting, and is free to use
- I've heard of Proton, but I never knew you could get the whole suite and that they had the option to subscribe for 24 months, that's pretty neat.
- I do like Proton, and I needed something like it for a forwarding problem with Gmail.
  But it actually lacks one bell/whistle that Gmail offers. Both services work to receive mail for forwarding addresses, but, on Gmail, you can also send from your forwarded addresses. Proton will only send from a domain you own. So if you get mail forwarded from my.name@alumni.myuniversity.edu or treasurer@myclub.org, you won't be able to reply or send from those addresses on Proton. Judging by how long people have been asking for that ability, I doubt Proton intends to ever provide that.
  
  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.
  
  Ah, I should have said "from a domain you own or one of their own".
  The use case I'm talking about, which is the use of arbitrary domains, not Proton-provided ones and not domains you own and control.
  I see that Simple Login provides aliases from its own domains, but not a way to use an arbitrary domain.
  Proton's address support overview mentions organizational addresses, but clarifies in the same doc that this is referring to a business plan where that whole organization will be using Proton.
  Proton's switching guide discusses forwarding, and it only instructs the user to tell their contacts about the new Proton address, which defeats the purpose of forwarding addresses.
  Here is further discussion about the missing functionality.
  Meanwhile, Google lets you use up to 99 of your own email addresses from whatever domains they are.
  
  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.
  
  It only requires you to demonstrate you control the address.
  https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
  Proton, on the other hand, only supports you owning the whole domain, as their only verification is through DNS TXT records.

305 comments