Ask HN: If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to email?

There are currently 20 replies here, and of those, 19 didn't read your question properly and just answered with a different email provider. I know there's a trend on HN of people commenting without reading linked articles but this is particularly bad. It's a short question on this page.

In answer to your question, this is a multifaceted problem that comes down to: what do I use email for and how else can that work.

I had already mostly switched from email to instant messaging (Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, Riot.im, etc.). These have some of their own problems but that's a different discussion so the remaining use-cases are:

- open source code mailing lists: Github issues, dependent on adoption but most seem to have moved here

- private company PM emails: many moved to Slack which I detest, or an issue tracker which is not so bad, or other dedicated PM software. There's usually not much individual choice here though unless you're running the company.

- newsletter updates: these typically come from services like MailChimp so using non-Google email to receive these is fine.

- account confirmation: highly dependent on adoption but SMS is becoming an alternative here often

- official correspondences: job applications, etc. There is no alternative. Possibly a space with room for disruption but it would be incredibly challenging.

Generally though, many options sub a federated technology with a lot of user choice (email) for a centralised walled garden. While I'd recommend Riot.im for the messaging part, my main comment here would be that it would be nicer to just have a built-in email client feature or plugin that alterted you in an obvious manner to the service you were communicating with (doing lookups on the To:/Cc:/Bcc: fields before you send. AND a not-just-for-geeks viable alternative to Gmail that could gain ground over time.

Fastmail is a great standards based Gmail alternative. They use Cryus Imap under the hood and give back to the community. It is both powerful and easy to use. They were the only ones to be able to accommodate my formally self hosted overly complicated email setup. For the truly esoteric needs, they support custom Sieve code. [1]

For business purposes Office 365 is great. It has the full power of Exchange under the hood. (I was recently able to setup forwarding only email addresses to external email addresses, without needing new licenses or setting up mailboxes.)

[0] - https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/12/12/why-we-contribute/

[1] - https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html

Email. Self-hosted. When email is sent, you check mx records of recipient, and if it is gmail, replace contents with unique link (with one-time username/password) to your self-hosted http(s) server, on which your actual message resides; blacklist google by user-agent / captcha if necessary, so your message won't be leaked by preview-bots.

Gmail has the best spam prevention. I'd love to hear arguments against this, but its why i stay.

How does it matter if most people are still using Gmail? Email is a very open and widespread protocol. I'd continue using email 100%.

Protonmail

Fastmail

the outrage with facebook? the ability to read your mail keeps gmail free.

If you were to ditch Gmail, what would be your alternative to the internet?

Because Google is a major presence on the internet...

This question doesn’t really make a lot of sense. What are you trying to achieve?

Oh, didn’t read your question carefully as well. IDK, there is no viable alternative as of now. Asynchronous, federated messaging system that replicates messages to every host in the chain (you have it in sender’s client, on recipient server and on recipients devices, all of them, provided its IMAP). I don’t know, I really think it is wrong to speak about email as about particular tech. It is bunch of protocols and technologies that form a _concept_. It is hardly possible to replace the concept. If you change everything, but keep the way people interact with it you will get same email simply delivered through different protocols. Like Fido. Almost the same thing but through different protocols. I think we’d better off advocating for people to pay for their email services than change the concept of email itself.

While not for everyone, I ditched Gmail for my own self-hosted server. I started gradually with low-profile accounts, and moved slowly towards more and more important things. It's a lot of fun, if you're into server stuff.

My main complaints with Gmail are, 1) snooping content and metadata; 2) resisting anonymity; and 3) nuking accounts without recourse.

For anonymizing identity and metadata, I use Tor. Which I access via nested VPN chains, just in case. To secure content, I use GnuPG. That is, Thunderbird with Enigmail and TorBirdy. I've found both vfemail.net and cock.li to be decent no-bullshit providers, and both have Tor onion mail servers.

Sure, some of your correspondents may use Gmail. But there won't be anything useful for Google to see.

I need GNUPG to encrypt messages from my friends when we brainstorm ideas and inventions. So I use Thunderbird with Engimail I have Yahoo and Gmail accounts and set up message filters.

I'd like to have a webmail address that does GNUPG on it, but the average user does not use encryption.

Also I dislike having to give out my cell phone to verify because I get junk calls when they sell my info.

Zoho Mail - https://www.zoho.com/mail

Lavabit: https://lavabit.com

It looks like you can run the server on your own hardware, but I have not tried this so YMMV. https://github.com/lavabit/magma

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail a few years ago and couldn’t be happier.

I much prefer to pay for a product than be the product.

I’m using Runbox. Better pricing for multiple accounts than Fastmail since the latter ditched their family plan. The webmail interface is a bit clunky but otherwise I’m very happy with it.

outlook.com or self hosted I guess

Posteo - https://posteo.de/en "Green, Secure, Ad-Free"

What do these things have to do with each other? Why would you need an "alternative to email" just because you stopped using Gmail?

[Zoho](https://www.zoho.com)

Office 365 Business - Outlook

KolabNow (Switzerland).

Read their webpage before brushing off. Underrated.

Protonmail

gmx.com