Email alternative to Gmail ?

[fordem]

I recognised this long ago and have bought and run my own hosting for years.  Storage is not free, data centres cost money, the land, buildings, security, fire suppression, the computers themselves and the power to run them not to mention their connection to the internet.

what ADSL line? if your ADSL goes down it won't matter who you have your email with.

Running your own hosting requires reliable comms, power & hosting equipment - no - let's make that redundant, rather than reliable - you get to decide how important your email is to whatever it is you're doing, because if anything along the chain goes down, you run the risk of losing emails.

I ran my own email server for about a decade, I now use hosted email - if my ADSL line goes down (I no longer have ADSL, I have redundant GPON from different providers) I can still retrieve email from my provider using my smartphone and the telco's 4G service.

I no longer have to worry about the UPS, the standby generator, or whether or not my mail server is up - I don't see myself going back to running my own server.

[Simon]

I don't own the server, I have a hosting account with a top UK hosting company, it's cheaper and they handle it. But I get what I pay for, performance and no funny limitations and conditions or hidden costs, it's mine to do with as I please.

[Zucca]

I use FastMail and can absolutely recommend it.

+1! Very happy too. For what you get it is very cheap...

[NiHaoMike]

Is there a free service that's more secure than Google and supports Thunderbird so that it can be set to move messages to local storage?

[Karel]

Is there a free service that's more secure than Google and supports Thunderbird so that it can be set to move messages to local storage?

https://protonmail.com/

[NiHaoMike]

https://protonmail.com/

Unless something changed, free accounts do not support Thunderbird.

[ve7xen]

Is there a free service that's more secure than Google and supports Thunderbird so that it can be set to move messages to local storage?

If you care about security and local storage, I would suggest you purchase a domain and pay someone to host it. Otherwise you are the product, in one way or another.

But to answer your question, I believe free-tier Zoho, Outlook and Yahoo! all (still?) support IMAP. Google is going to be just as secure as anything else, possibly moreso because Google knows what they are doing.

[Karel]

https://protonmail.com/

Unless something changed, free accounts do not support Thunderbird.

You are right, sorry for the mistake.
I'm a happy (non-free) protonmail user. I prefer to pay a couple of $ per year instead of
seeing ads and/or my userdata being sold to third parties.

[Simon]

Is there a free service that's more secure than Google and supports Thunderbird so that it can be set to move messages to local storage?

If you care about security and local storage, I would suggest you purchase a domain and pay someone to host it. Otherwise you are the product, in one way or another.

But to answer your question, I believe free-tier Zoho, Outlook and Yahoo! all (still?) support IMAP. Google is going to be just as secure as anything else, possibly moreso because Google knows what they are doing.

Exactly what I did and do for people.

[David Hess]

But to answer your question, I believe free-tier Zoho, Outlook and Yahoo! all (still?) support IMAP. Google is going to be just as secure as anything else, possibly moreso because Google knows what they are doing.

I have been searching for an alternative to Google since without warning or reason, they cancelled the email account that I used for security access to other services, which means I lost access to everything which required responding to an email.

[radar_macgyver]

See russian yandex.ru. This is a very powerful and reliable mail service of a major Russian player. The English-language interface is available.
ya.ru domain page have not news.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/yandex-said-it-caught-an-employee-selling-access-to-users-inboxes/

[Simon]

You will always be at risk. whoever you use you have to trust them unless you know enough about their systems to know that any tampering will be logged and flagged. I can walk straight into any of my customers accounts the same as my provider can. That is what ISO27001 covers I believe, logging of all activity so that these things can be traced and people held to account before they go on.

[madires]

I have been searching for an alternative to Google since without warning or reason, they cancelled the email account that I used for security access to other services, which means I lost access to everything which required responding to an email.

Yep, tying accounts to email addresses or mobile phone numbers is a fundamental mistake done by most services. If a cyber criminal gets hold of your email credentials it's easy to reset passwords to gain access to the services you use, while the other services tied to your mobile phone number can be fooled by SIM swapping (via social engineering). In both cases the services simply pass on the responsibility of authentication and authorization to your email provider and to your mobile network operator. The other big problem is what you've mentioned, i.e. terminated accounts. And 2FA doesn't really fix that either because it's often done in the same bad way. Hardware tokens are a good alternative, but it's cumbersome to register two or three for each service, if supported at all. When one token is stolen or simply breaks you'll need another registered one to be able to access your accounts.

[GodIsRealUnless DefinedInt]

I use protonmail, its on my desktop, my iPhone, Android phone, and tablet. PM is in Switzerland, being outside of US and EU jurisdiction.

There are a lot of secure email providers, for fee that will advertise privacy or security or both. The problem you will find is the country they are located in, which many do not take into consideration. The country's you find most of the alternatives in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Holland, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Spain. This means your email is at risk for privacy violations in the name of national security, you can be bulk hoovered in a sweep for one target and cross-shared amongst the governments of the aforementioned countries.

Whatever you do, anything and I do mean *anything* is better than the free email providers/data harvesters of obscene proportions.

As an aside I have had GMail since Beta, so it was hard for me to tear away from it. But I have moved all my real life and financial and personal to PM and I still use GMail for throwaway use cases now.

[David Hess]

If a cyber criminal gets hold of you email credentials its easy to reset passwords to gain access to the services you use, ...

In this case the cyber criminal was Google.

[Bassman59]

Is there a free service that's more secure than Google and supports Thunderbird so that it can be set to move messages to local storage?

If you care about security and local storage, I would suggest you purchase a domain and pay someone to host it. Otherwise you are the product, in one way or another.

This is the only answer that makes any sense.

Also, if you are a professional, registering a domain name with your company name or d.b.a. or whatever and using that looks better than having [email protected].

[Simon]

Yea, I do cringe when I see replies from Gmail, it looks like they cheaped out and can't be a very good business.

[MIS42N]

I bought a domain I think in 1999. The domain registrar provided a mail redirection service, it was part of the cost of registering the domain. I changed ISPs a few times, and was able each time to change the redirect to a mail address provided by the ISP. Consequently I've had the same email address for over 20 years.

About 12 years ago I started running my own mail server, it lives on top of a bookshelf. It does not need to be up 100%. The mail protocol is store and forward, if the destination is unreachable it is supposed to try again. I've set the MX records in DNS so my server is tried first, the redirection is used second. The redirection sends mail to a mail address provided by my ISP. This happens occasionally. Thunderbird can collect from the ISP and using IMAP put the mail into my server.

As far as I can remember, nobody has sent me email and it's got lost.

I can recommend getting your own domain. Changing email address is a total PITA. I guess hosting your own server is a steamroller approach to having an alternative to Gmail. However, it has given me very little trouble and the server draws 600Wh (about 30¢) a day. The server is also a file server (I guess you'd call it a NAS box), web server, DLNA server so the mail hosting is just another service.

[madires]

Be careful with email redirection. SPF causes a lot of fun, especially since you can't change the SPF settings of the original sender's domain.

[TomS_]

Yea, I do cringe when I see replies from Gmail, it looks like they cheaped out and can't be a very good business.

Whether or not someone is professional in their work doesnt seem to be related to how professional their online presence is, in my view. It can swing both ways.

With a couple of exceptions, so far all of the worst experiences I have had with trades people have been the ones who have the flashy modern looking websites. Maybe that is simply supposed to be a confidence trick. "Oh this business man is dressed sharp, he must be good at what he does". Or maybe he dresses that way to make you think that and really just scams you. Then again they can be very good at what they do and just like to dress nicely, or maybe they are still very good at what they do but look like they are in rags.

In the past I would have bought into the "only professional people with a professional presence will be any good", but not any more. 2 years of doing rennovations has completely flipped my perception of that.

[Simon]

It's more a case of when they have a website but still use something like Gmail that I cringe. Just look at what happened "to" Dave. Person contacted a company claiming to be Dave from a plausible Gmail address. Dave also uses Gmail, how could the company have known? and they handed over information that they would not have to others.

Although you can spoof the sender address having a proper email that has the same domain as your site does help with things.

[madires]

Yep! And if you set up DMARC for your domain it becomes even harder for the bad guys.

[perieanuo]

See russian yandex.ru. This is a very powerful and reliable mail service of a major Russian player. The English-language interface is available.
ya.ru domain page have not news.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/yandex-said-it-caught-an-employee-selling-access-to-users-inboxes/

yep, leave google for russian provider, I never see this as an option. maybe if you live in Moldavia you can be real attracted to this, they have the stocholm symptoms. let's get real and propose something serious. I use kaspersky but I can't swear for him too. the rule is, more poverty more risk. maybe protonmail worth to consider for example
[edit]
just tested protonmail on web, activate 2fa, installed on android, well, 'invalid credentials' caused by latin characters. latin characters, russian, extraterrestrial are ok, improves security. so for me protonmail is not really up to the task, the devs need to upscale their 'know-how database', not everyone like to tune some unfinished bussiness 

[ricard2k]

As a really secure alternative and without concerns about privacy, I use https://protonmail.com .

They save your emails encrypted, and only your password can decrypt them.

[AntiProtonBoy]

gmail really pissed me off yesterday. I decided to login to an old account. Correct password, etc. Google decided to lock me out. I tried the recovery process, giving all the correct information it needed, like previous passwords, secret question answers, etc, and still decided it couldn't verify I'm the account owner. So that was a big "fuck you" from their end. Their system is becoming increasingly user hostile, so I'm thinking of changing email hosts.