I used to pay for Gmail, then I used Proton Mail about a year, and I’ve been using Fastmail for the last couple of years, which I recommend. I don’t know of anything that’s as feature-rich and easy to use as Fastmail. You may not be interested in all those fancy features, though.
I use MacOS/iOS Mail clients, but also Thunderbird as I’m trying to wean myself off of Apple’s ecosystem and onto Linux/FOSS.
+1 for fastmail… it’s one of those products that isn’t trying to trick you… you pay for it, and it’s just a solid product that tries to be the best at what it is…
it’ll let you have as many domains and aliases as you like, including wildcards for email (and lets you reply/send appropriately using any of those aliases)
it’ll let you pull all your calendars and push events into a single one of your choosing - it doesn’t have to be theirs
i could probably replicate some of what it does with my home server, but it’s really nice that i don’t have to
I really want to move my domain from Google to Proton, but family accounts at Proton are so dang expensive. Fastmail is far cheaper than Google, so that looks like it might be a really good option.
"Encrypted email" only works between encrypted providers. ProtonMail and Tutanota are both very inconvenient, and all I want is an email that's not scanned for marketing.
Since 2018, ProtonMail kept getting worse, especially with the recent AI stuff. Dodged bullet, IMO.
$6/month = Custom domains, and any amount of emails under those domains. I can send and receive from any domain xxx@yyy [dot] lynndotpy [dot] dev, for example.
CalDav and CardDav provider = Contacts, calendar, and reminders sync. Works perfectly on iOS too, if you like that.
It replaced my finnicky NextCloud for half the cost.
Except their desktop "app", which is total shit. It's just a webview in an electron framework. If I wanted to keep a webview, I'd just keep a tab open in my browser. Or a separate browser window if I wanted to keep it separate.
I've hosted my Mail with them for over a year, still have them as my backup. I wouldn't really recommend them, as they don't adhere to the standard protocols which infuriates me. As a result, you can only use a proper email client on PC with the back they call bridge, you cannot use a proper client on phones, forget syncing of calendar and contacts.
There is more, especially for the non-mail products.
To what standards protocols do you refer? (I'm honestly asking; I'm not very knowledgeable about email architectures.)
As a result, you can only use a proper email client on PC with the back they call bridge
I thought that is kind of required simply due to the nature of their email service being end-to-end encrypted and with the decryption key being stored locally only.
I would highly recommend it. It is cheap and includes almost a complete replacement for Google services (email, contacts, calendar, online drive, etc).
Please consider your privacy. Giving all you emails to Google (or other mainstream data harvesters) basically gives them deep info about your whole life (purchases, travel, communication....everything).
Having a custom domain let's you go to any provider you like if you want to switch.
I'm with mailbox too and generally it's been pretty solid. The only thing I dislike is that their 2fa implementation is weird, and maybe that I can't get a separate password to put in my server.
On the other hand you get a lot of solid email related things for good privacy and a pretty cheap price. They even host a thing for encrypted video calls and a document server for collaboration.
Can vouch for Posteo. I've been using them for years and I have no reason to switch anytime soon. They're privacy focused, the price is great, there's IMAP support and CalDAV too and a bunch of other things.
I self host, on a personal domain I registered in June 2000. Mostly followed a 13?-part tutorial at I think linuxbabe dot com, was the first one that seemed to genuinely be trying to help you set up a good environment, not just as a way to say “doesn’t this sound difficult? Impossible even? Coincidentally you can pay us to do this instead.” Except I put everything on its own VM instead of all on one. (Even a VM for just opendkim, which was maybe not necessary.)
Mostly iPhone mail app and/or Roundcube webmail.
Yes highly recommend it, for receiving email. Greylist blocks like 99.8% of spam. Sending works fine for me, because it’s an old domain with history. I don’t think brand new domains have the same experience.
Proton for personal email. Not immediately needing to escape but once my free email runs out of storage I plan to switch to something else because of the concerns raised by the incident with the French climate activist.
Mxroute with thunderbird as a client and mail on iOS for mobile.
Unlimited domains and rock solid. Just don’t expect lots of hand holding the company focuses on making email work you have to sort out your own details. That being said they have good documentation.
2nd Mxroute.
I got the black Friday deal a few years ago.
I love using the catchall to make emails on the fly for when I sign up for different services.
Proton, yes. There are some criticisms to make regarding them, but I think most are either blown out of proportion or a non issue for the majority of people.
Ionos.
Too lazy to selfhost. Also the implications of self hosting and securing email is too cumbersome to sleep well at night.
But I do self host non-important to my living at home.
Edit:
Inbox: Outlook. Tried eM-Client but it was worse than Outlook (around 2018 or 19)
Migadu. Yeah*. On the computer, I use mostly aerc (+notmuch), but hop on Thunderbird once in a while; on mobile I use K-9.
* If you are not looking for totally free options (though their cheapest plan is 20€/y and they give 50% discount to students), and if you don't care about email encryption (which you shouldn't).
Migadu has a very good Pros/Cons page, I highly recommend you take a look, even if you're not using or planning to use their service.
Same. Have multiple domains and mailboxes with them, really solid. The thing I love most is probably the catch all address (allows me to effortlessly create "one-shot" addresses) and the plus-addressing automatic folders (i.e. mails to foo+bar@domain.tld automatically go to folder "bar" in mailbox "foo").
It’s been years since I’ve used their service but back then they were notorious for tricking users into signing up for their premium service with dark patterns and making it very hard to cancel. Which is why I left them and have dissuaded anyone from ever using their services.