I use so many…it depends on the goal to be achieved. For “generic” use, the comfort of gmail’s SSI is hard to resist, but for actually sending and receiving emails I have found Rackspace and Private Email quite reliable and not expensive. For business, ZoHo and Freshwork (the latter, however, severely lacking in customer support).
Never bothered with self hosting an email server as, since the very beginning of my IT journey, friends showed me it is an ungrateful endeavour and totally not worth the effort.
Anyone here use a different email service to the usual? Curious to hear opinions (gmail and Outlook)
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an interesting topic and read-worthy replies.
Perhaps an in-depth analysis article (here or elsewhere) would be more definitive.
All my years of using email and I seem to have some voids in my knowledge.
This echos some of what @alama was saying in the initial part of his post above, but the use of a custom domain, regardless of the underlying email service, can be a liberating step.
For example, if you’ve relied on a @pm.me, @gmail.com, @outlook.com address for years, leaving that service is going to be a real pain, because your contacts, your services, everything you do online is tied to that address.
If you use a custom domain, you are now free to change email services as needed, or even self-host, without needing to update email addresses everywhere.
Self-hosting is a worthwhile option for anyone willing to invest the time to learn and maintain it. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is after simple, or set and forget, because keeping a server up-to-date, secure and healthy requires a degree of diligence.
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I’ve been using mailbox.org for a little over 8 years now, I think they had only just started back then. Must have been around the beginning of 2016. There’s nothing else for me!
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Domain names can be had for $10 a year or so, depending on the TLD, .com or .me or whatever, and which registrar is used. That’s not such a bad price for having your own personal or business domain name for an email address or whatever. Though I’ve had no experience with them personally, Namecheap offers custom domain email hosting with webmail access in addition to domain names, and the setup is reported to be easy as well as easy on the budget.
The only thing that might put me off that is that with web development I’ve always followed the principle of keeping where I register a domain name separate from where I host a website. This gives me flexibility so I don’t lose everything if something happens with a company.
Along these lines, there are a number of well known services that will let you host an email address with your own domain. Proton Mail does. Tutanota, Zoho, and Yandex do as well, among many others, although a lot of these require you already have a paid plan. So if you already were, say, a paying Proton customer then for $10 a year or so you could have an email address with your own domain name that would be hosted by Proton, taking advantage of their privacy features and Swiss location.
There are lots of options, but really it depends on personal needs and preferences. I have friends who feel email is a soon to be relic of days gone by. Naturally they’re not going to care much what email service they are using. I’ve also had friends who got an email address from their Internet provider because it seemed easy, and then moved to a different area where that provider didn’t offer service and ended up having to try to remember all the people and places where they used their old email address in order to inform them of the change. That’s a case where a custom domain would have been valuable.
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In my experience, email bundled with web-hosting is not a comparable service. The email here is useful perhaps for website purposes, for sending only, such as what your website contact form might use in the back-end.
I’d also flag that privacy and security of web-hosting provider based email is likely not on par with the likes of most providers, and certainly not options like Tuta and ProtonMail.
Agreed.
If I am not mistaken, both Tuta and ProtonMail had issues in the past with privacy so, regardless, if someone is looking to communicate privately, those should be automatically discarded as options.
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Protonmail allows payments with crypto which requires no personal information. Free accounts don’t require personal info. Using a proper VPN (shouldn’t be on the Internet without one) there is no information to turnover to anyone.
This is what happened with the request for info on the criminals using Protonmail that some people freaked out about.
Quite a few messages, which I am reading them all and taking all views and opinions in to account.
But since you mentioned VPN I am using one currently, VPN called Mullvad both on Mobile phone and PC.
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Mullvad is the only VPN provider that I know of that doesn’t require personal info (like an email address, etc.) to sign up with. Of course, if you pay them with a service that has your personal info then you have handed that over to them.
Crypto is widely accepted these days on the Web.
I don’t know why one seeking privacy would ever trust a VPN, anyway that has nothing to do with the reason why I posted that message.
I encourage everyone even vaguely considering Tuta, ProtonMail or any other “privacy oriented email service” to at least read the following articles to have some more data and, thus, take informed decisions.
Link 1
Link 2
I’ll leave only those two just to avoid derailing the thread and a personal recommendation: in matters of security “trust no one”.
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Because I trust my email provider and Internet Provider (that can directly link me to everywhere I go and everything I do on the web) less?
Your link1 is 10 yrs old.
Your link2 was detailed and explained in my previous link above about Protonmail.
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Are you an activist and you require to have completely encrypted emails? Are you a criminal and you want to cover your tracks? Then self-host. Otherwise, what privacy issues? They were legally forced to give that information away. Most people that want more privacy don’t need this level of privacy. They mostly just want to have their data theirs and not be spied on for marketing or statistical purposes without their consent.
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The problem in this conversation is that we all have different requirements and there is no one best path for all those issues. Even when we talk about “privacy” we don’t all mean the same things.
You have to decide which of these things are important to you:
- Anonymity
- Not having your emails mined by your email provider
- Your communications being encrypted end-to-end
- A free service
- Functionality to meet specific requirements - Aliases, calendar, contacts, etc, etc
- Hosting your own email domain
- Control over the whole solution
The reality is that there is no solution that will do all those things.
Self-hosting usually reduces anonymity. If you are planning to embark on a secret criminal endeavor you probably shouldn’t self-host. 
Exactly. It all depends on your priorities.
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And Tor email hidden services ?
- Mail2Tor
- or Torbox (only accessible in Tor)
These are 2 examples.
But it seems that emails must be encrypted using its own private encryption keys (we don’t know who the adminstrators are behind these services).
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I am using Namecheap since 3 years. I only uses their email service, with my own domain name. My domain is managed elsewhere, also my website. I never used their webmail portal ( all my 5 emails are accessed through Thunderbird/Betterbird).
I pay about 1$ per month and email. Never had an issue. Quite happy.
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