They did threaten to force us to pay. I didn’t know what to do but I waited it out. The deadline kept slipping. IIRC, they finally offered to leave legacy accounts alone.
I do pay for a little extra storage but that’s it I think.
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Good to know. I am too impatient to have waited it out. I also think they were sending me things that said I would no longer be able to use those accounts. Was just easier in the long run to move it all. (BTW, was this a personal as opposed to business account? Google did say personal legacy accounts would be allowed but if the account was related to a domain, many of mine were, payment was required.)
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One advantage for Rackspace: they have 24/7 phone support.
Well it’s a personal account, not for business. But it has a domain. You may be right that they asked about that and I passed the litmus test.
No one has mentioned Proton Mail – who have a free app-based fully-encrypted service, along with paid services which integrate into IMAP clients.
Despite not using Proton’s excellently rated VPN (I’m on Nord) I am employing their paid mail – a couple of years back their IMAP utility Proton Bridge took my M1 Air down to a DFU rebuild – Proton’s engineering at that time not up to scratch. But recent versions of Bridge are now sound – while I use Gmail accounts for daily mail I keep Proton for the things that really matter – all official or corporative mail – and am very happy with them…
I like Zoho mail. They’re affordable and reliable. I’m very happy with their service (and they have a ton of other services should you need them)
GMail doesn’t support folders, only Labels (essentially tags combined with saved searches), which its IMAP implementation maps to virtual “folders” when accessed from IMAP clients.
This is functional, but it is just different enough from my mental model for organizing my email to be annoying.
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You’re right I forgot about that. It caused lots of confusion ages ago.
I leaned into Google’s “search, don’t sort” model years ago and never looked back. I still have probably 100 legacy folders from decades back but never use them anymore.
If it’s purely mail you’re after, then PurelyMail might be what you’re after.
Upsides: competent, very cheap (arguably best bang for buck out there).
Downside: US-based.
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Me, too. They have family plans as well, but for a single user, it’s $5 a month for an annual plan
What’s wrong is the “G:” it’s Google. I swore off Alphabet and all its minions at least a decade ago (before it was Alphabet, iirc). Too much data suckage, cross-indexed with tracking info, and sold to whomever they bleep well please.
I live free of Google search, Google AI, Android anything, and so on and so forth because they have shown, time and time again, that they are not to be trusted. They will always lie to law enforcement and consumers. A pox upon them!
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I suspect people are not providing that information because TedC only asked for recommendations, not sales spiels.
I also suspect that anyone using TidBits is familiar with the World-Wide Web and how to search it, or even just to guess company URLs from their names.
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I am not involved with any hosting provider.
My preference is for Fastmail. it is VERY fast, and you can use Sieve to absolutely fine tune your spam filters, which is increasingly helpful. I can ban Salesforce, for example, cutting my spam to one-quarter of what it was.
I also use Runbox, which is very slow since it’s in Norway, and has less sophisticated filters, but is generally 100% reliable and cheap, especially if you have a few domains or family members you can put onto sub-accounts.
Zoho is okay and reliable, but the filters, as far as I can tell, are the most primitive and least useful, they have a very wide offering so it’s sometimes hard to use their web interface just for mail, but they are cheap, too.
Keeping in mind my personal use case is entirely SMTP + IMAP. I think Fastmail has the fastest web interface by far, followed by Zoho, then Runbox, of these three. Runbox is probably the best managed for mail of the group, though, followed by Fastmail. Oh, Fastmail also provides one-off email addresses very easily, and lets you track them. That’s a good thing. They all give you aliases, I think. Not sure about Zoho.
Google - nope. I don’t want my mail to be more public than it already is. I agree with jbgurman. Everything ends up in AI, too. Oh, and on that note, sink explodes rubber palm trees because email links users views likes. ;)
Yea if I had more time and energy I might try to avoid Google more aggressively.
I’m going to add yet another recommendation for Fastmail.
For me, it’s exactly the way I want to interact with a service. It’s easy to get started, and easy to use. And if you want to use it simply, you can do it that way for years and years.
If your needs grow, and you want more sophistication and features, they are all sitting right there for you to use. It seems to have a lot of features under the hood, but I haven’t needed most of them.
Also, a good help set of documents. I’ve found the answers to all of my questions there, so I haven’t had to reach out for customer service. Others may be able to comment on that.
Highly recommend. Mostly, set it and forget it.
I signed up with Fastmail back when Jeremy and Rob were still running the show. I wanted to note that the company has always been good about supporting Apple products, even when none of the developers at that time used a Mac or iPhone. The company was quick to support push notifications on the iPhone. Setting up an account on a Mac or iOS device takes just a few clicks to download a profile and install it.
Awhile back when Fastmail introduced news plans which substantially increased its prices, I finally was motivated to check out what others were offering. It gave me a new appreciation for Fastmail’s service. It just made doing things like setting up the service to use with a custom domain really easy to do.
I’d say just sign up for the free trial and check it out.
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In the UK Mythic Beasts do good email hosting apart from having a great DNS service.
It’s not that hard to run Exim or Postfix + Dovecot on a virtual host. Staying on top of changes in the spam environment is a bit annoying though.
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Sadly Apple recently kiboshed the APIs that macOS Server used to get push certificates for pushing notifications to their apps, including Mail. So the closest thing to the first-class treatment on iOS from a self-hosted setup is now Sogo or Z-push, i.e. ActiveSync and all its polling inefficiencies. This is very sad. Other options are just to send pushes out of band to another app, i.e. Pushover, or use a third-party app with all the potential privacy implications of handing over your credentials, which may well be sufficient depending on your level of tolerance, but you still lose some nice Apple polish like security code autofill in Mail etc. Absent regulation (Apple have already dispatched an interoperability request under the DMA to the satisfaction of that sysadmin, but nobody else) I think iCloud/FastMail are de facto favoured for use with Apple devices for now, unfortunately.
I’ve been using Dovecot for years and run it also for 1000s of users. We’ve never required XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE. (Personally I’ve progressively downgraded from checking mail automatically every n minutes to manual checking). However in theory it is still possible to get push updates, using GitHub - freswa/dovecot-xaps-daemon and its dependencies (which include a licence key for OSX server!).
Nevertheless, as you say, periodic polling is less efficient than push, and is likely to drain batteries more.
Unfortunately, xaps-daemon relied on the reverse-engineered XAPPLEPUSHSERVICE extension and macOS Server renewal APIs. It will be rendered useless as soon as the current crop of APNS certificates expire, which will be a maximum of a year from their creation date.
And, yeah, I could certainly go back to manual polling, but I’m never going to do that. Instant gratification, whilst undeserved for email, is one of those things one does not give up so readily. I have never used email with a fetch interval of less than 30 seconds or more than 1 minute, so if I went the ActiveSync route, probably those would inform my choices; at least that would match an unoptimised desktop setup. But, there’s no getting away from the fact that, absent some out-of-band push channel (Pushover, or just use Azure-hosted mobile Outlook) it’s going to be a downgrade of the experience, sadly. :(