I've always relied on the comfort of having Google handle my mails, properly configure a mail server and keep it safe from hackers. OTOH I always felt a little uncomfortable sharing such private information with them, and those news about people who have their accounts banned for no reason and can't get them back gives me nightmares. Recent news made me think about this problem yet again.
I even do have my own domain and an unused mail account for it on a certain popular hosting service (they manage the mail server, I pay shared web hosting), but I'm not sure if trusting them instead of google is actually a win here. The possibility of someone hacking this host is probably higher than hacking gmail. At least I have a human to talk to if they decide to simply ban me.
I also thought about upgrading to a private server instance so I would have my own mail server, but maintaining a mail server seems like a hassle that would eat even more of my free time, and I'd probably forget an update and be hacked anyway or have my domain accidentally registered in the spam lists.
What is your opinion about this? Is there some magical solution where I can just throw some money and feel safe and not worry about having my information being read by third parties or parsed for whatever reason, or getting my account unilaterally banned, or having phone apps reading all my email, etc?
Thanks a lot.
Also I'm incredibly satisfied with their spam filter. I have some old addresses that get a lot of spam but Fastmails catches them all. I periodically check for false positives but never see any.
A lot of people are commenting on owning your own email and having backups. Perhaps a compromise solution would be to have Gmail handle my domain email? I won't get rid of the advertisement/parsing, but at least I would be able to migrate to something else if they ever for some reason block my account, and I would keep their top-level security and anti-spam services. I don't know...
I used to manually create them, then I learned of this and it's been a time saver.
foo+sitename@yourdomain.com
ln addition to everything mentioned by others I also love Fastmail app both iOS and Android.. It's around 1MB in size on iOS compared to over 100MB for Outlook or Google Inbox.
It's $50/year for mails to an unlimited number of aliases on all my domains to go into a single mailbox. Hooking up new domains is easy, as is configuring them to absorb arbitrary aliases. All quite reasonable, as far as I'm concerned.
While their offerings differ in the details, by and large they offer the same thigns as fastmail.
You can point your domain to it and use their web interface, or your preferred email app.
I wouldn't like to manage my own mail server either. While some people may be experienced at this, or enjoy the technical learning, email is just too important to me to trust myself with, so I prefer a 3rd party also.
Apart from that, in fact I have this long-term project to self-host all my stuff. So far I managed to do this only for my calendar (using Apple's CalDav server). E-Mail is my next goal but even if I have it running, I'll start transitioning slowly. After all I think it's not that much maintanance effort once it's setup as long as it's managed through Ansible or Docker.
Google mail is more feature-rich of course.
I'd like to point out to those fluffing about the price for fastmail - Google Apps For Business (aka: pay-for-gmail) runs $5/person/month, minimum. It does have additional services (eg: the office-apps), but AFAIK, even the business one doesn't promise that it won't look through your private info. Fastmail does make this promise.
There is certainly no way you can run your own email server for $50/yr (or even a few hundred per year), even if the hardware itself were free, and you were not counting the cost of the internet service (eg: using your own home internet), and you were willing to accept that you might fail to update some things, sometimes, etc. If you value your time at all. Even at say, minimum wage.
Not to mention the deliverability issues etc.
If you just love doing it, then, by all means, do it. Just don't imagine it is somehow less than $50/yr, or comparable in quality.
I do wish Fastmail had more competition, even if it cost a bit more, and (as the Fastmail folks here have said) the competition participated in open standards and contributed to open source. I think others are "in the works" particularly with (even more) security/privacy emphasis. But, IMHO, eg: protonmail does not currently directly compete. We'll see what pans out.
It sure does: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo...
Because there are no ads in the paid version, (and because they are dealing with hippa/soc2 etc.) They have no need to look at your data.
If you're talking about self-hosting at home, then probably true unless you're using something like a Raspberry Pi to run the server.
You can get web hosting including email at your own domain for somewhere around $50/year, though. I think I'm paying $26/year for hosting and $13/year for domain registration (or thereabouts, it's a trivial amount anyway) which comes with as many email addresses as I want at the domain, 10GB storage, and some amount of web traffic (50GB/mo maybe?) that's never been an issue.
(Not affiliated with Posteo, just a happy customer.)
If you want this, then I'd check out https://mailbox.org
See https://mailbox.org/en/how-to-use-mailbox-org-with-individua...
My anti-spam system is a relatively new install of SpamAssassin. All my incoming mail runs through that. It's about 80% effective. I've not had the time to teach it properly or tweak the bayes filtering so I'm sure it's not running as effectively as it could be.
I'd like to rent just an anti-spam gateway service that my MX records would point to and it does all the filtering and then sends good mail onto my private mail server, but the costs I've seen so far make it uneconomical for me.
If I was starting over, I'd pay for Office365 small business tier, which gives me cloud Exchange plus mobile sync support for mail/calendar/contacts/tasks. Most other providers can't supply an integrated service that works with Outlook.
This website https://www.privacytools.io/ is also very helpful, there's lot's of good alternatives for VPN clients, mailclients, browsers and more.
If most of the people you communicate with are also on gmail then your conversations are stored in plain text, just on their accounts.
You don't have any privavcy with email and should just treat it as almost public discourse.
A better alternative is to switch to a secure messaging app.
I wish I could bold this, but:
For a paid mailbox on professionally-managed systems that are likely to be able to stay around, expect to pay around $5/month probably annualized.
Fastmail Pro? $5. Office 365 Business Basic (Exchange/OneDrive)? $5. KolabNow? $4.50-5. Protonmail? €5-8. Heck, GSuite? Starts at $5. Most of the other paid options in here? Almost certainly in that same range, or there are noticeable drawbacks (e.g. no custom domains on Posteo). Hosting your own on a Digital Ocean droplet or other comparable small VM? Probably going to average out to around the same, plus your time administering.
It's probably possible to do this for less, particularly if you consider your time spent on dealing with any issues to be free of cost. For the rest of us, it seems that $5/month plus or minus a dollar or so is likely the consensus price out there and nobody's really managed to compete for less than that.
GMail does it free because for the vast majority of users people stay signed in so Google has a verified signed in user for ad targeting across Google's properties including their ad networks, and this likely includes on Android if someone clicks a link from the GMail app and opens in the default browser - boom, cookies set and linked to that identity.
One more provider I haven't seen mentioned here is Zoho.com/Zoho.eu
They're more business-oriented, and they offer a whole suite of collaboration tools. They're one of the only providers I've seen that support custom domains in their free tier offering (https://www.zoho.eu/workplace/pricing.html)
On the other hand, things like iRedMail[^1] or Mail-in-a-Box[^2] will do most of the magic part for you.
Plus you need to know a thing or two about linux administration, security, high availability (kinda, since short outages are tolerated by smtp), backups, spam, dealing with having your IP blacklisted and probably a few other things. Oh, and then there are the periodic updates, hacking attempts, vm reboots...
None of this is rocket science and it's probably fairly easy to get started, but it'll be hard to beat the security and reliability of a professionally managed service.
I was also a Fastmail customer and I can recommend them too. I actually had all of my email for the last 10 years in one mailbox (100K+) and Fastmail didn't even blink most of the time handling it.
Performing an action on every email such as setting everything to "Read" would take ~10 seconds but that's to be expected for the amount of work being done.
Currently I'm using G Suite for the additional services but I never had an issue with the two I mentioned above.
the OP wants "low-maintenance". that's fastmail, it just works.
I ran with protonmail too for a while, it's good, but costs about the same as FM. Unless all your friends are on proton it will go out decrypted anyhow, so not so much advantage. proton worked with the bridge to my regular email client. it worked, but clunky. My main gripe with proton is they only let you have one domain for the standard deal.
FM let's you have many. This is exactly what i want. Providing i keep within the overall limits I've paid for, i can't see why i can't have multiple domains with providers.
my owns servers often have email bounced back. outlook.com and yahoo are notoriously bad. Microsoft actually operate a whitelist you have to get on, which is nasty. gmail also bounces sometimes.
So these are for side projects. not for real work.
another big+ for FM is you can connect over port 80 via their proxy. my VPN blocks outgoing email which is a PITA, but it works with FM in this way. That was really nice to have working again.
I used to have a custom domain in the 90s (a four-letter .com), but an exprired debit card and a holiday meant I lost it.
I had another one mid-naughties, before gmail, but somehow forgot to renew that too --- I was hosting my own smtp server and using pine in those days, but I moved to gmail, partly when my server melted, partly because of the spam filtering (it beat spamassassinate), and later because their interface was fit for a more distributed client base (I have 4 computers powered on my desk at the moment, plus phone. Using pine via ssh on a phone is not fun)
I should have kept the domain and pointed it at gmail, however I didn't. And for 2000s me, the chances of not renewing a domain was higher than gmail breaking.
Worth checking out in your usecase, as it seems.
I would argue that non-technical users are safer using Virtualmin (I can't speak to the security history or features of any other panels) than doing it themselves, because it's easy to make security mistakes when doing it yourself if you don't have a lot of time to research all the options. If someone can invest the time to learn how to manage all of their own services, and can invest the time to build out all of the security features included in a default Virtualmin installation, then absolutely removing the GUI is removing one vector of potential attack; you should always turn off services you don't need. But, based on history, I can say with reasonable confidence that Virtualmin is probably not going to be the way an attacker gets in (it's probably going to be weak passwords, old software, poorly designed custom web apps, etc.).
Disclaimer: I work on Virtualmin.
> having phone apps reading all my email
That is bullshit. Those news articles simply misreported the fact that Google's API allows developers to ask your permission to access your mailbox. It's actually more secure, because the alternative with other providers would be to give your credentials directly.
I do wish they had better filtering options.
Self-hosting of Kolab is not very flexible and a lot of work. We use self-hosted SoGO now and are very happy.
The one thing I like about them is privacy.
E.g. the employees don't have access to your mail. Period. Their policy requires them to have your specific approval to access your account/mail.
Not entirely sure where my trust comes from, but they have a fair freemium offering, and feel reasonably confident in them from both a security and fairness perspective.
They're the best, and have much better security than other "secure" emails, like Fastmail.
Can you elaborate?
I've done some research, but not much. I should have researched more before speaking, so if I'm wrong, please let me know! I just want to have the most secure email. Anyway... here are a few things I've found. I'm no security engineer, so others may have more insight.
First thing is the location of the datacenters. Protonmail's servers are apparently under 1000 meters of solid rock in a bunker, and they claim it could even survive a nuclear attack. (And, they aren't in the US) (https://protonmail.com/security-details) Even if that's there for marketing purposes, it's kind of cool.
To compare, FastMail also has good security, but it's based in New Jersey, and I don't think it could survive a nuclear attack ':) (https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html)
That stuff is important, but unless something crazy happens, I doubt there is going to be any serious physical attacks on the servers. But, you never know.
ProtonMail is open source, and I know some of FastMail is too. Not sure if it all is or not.
ProtonMail has end-to-end encryption, and while FastMail has encryption, it's not 100%, and on the above /security.html link, it seems employees have access to some data, and full encryption is still a work in progress.
From the link: 'At this stage, some system log data (which could contain personal information) is temporarily stored on un-encrypted disks on individual servers, however we have an ongoing project to bring encryption to all system logging as well.'
Probably the biggest thing is when a company is forced to hand over data. ProtonMail keeps a Transparency Report, so the world knows about everything dealing with this. (https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/)
ProtonMail is under Swiss law, and FastMail is under AU law. They both claim to not answer to US claims, but FastMail does have servers in the US, so I'm not sure how that all works.
Anyway, you can read more on their sites from the links provided. Hopefully some of this was helpful.
I love the simple interface. They have apps both Android and iOS and they have a free version and paid version 12 euros per year.
They are hosted in Germany, have a strong stance re data protection, and have a very cheap basic plan. Plus multiple payment options, I think you can even send them money by post for complete anonymity.
Edit: You can use a custom domain
Mail (with optional custom domain), calendar, address book, storage and XMPP for 1€/month.
Outbound: https://www.cultofmac.com/103703/apple-may-be-invisibly-filt...
Inbound: https://www.macworld.com/article/2029570/silent-email-filter...
where email basically won't send at all. Rather inconvenient. Anyone else here encountered the same problem?
You did read the OP. Gmail is __exactly__ what is __not__ needed.
