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US Email Providers - Other then Google, MS, Apple, ...

I need to change ISPs and need to find a new email provider. This time I want to move to my own domain which I purchased through Namecheap and I do not want to use another ISP’s email system nor do I want to use Google, or Microsoft since I am Linux (and Android too) based. I would like this to be US based or at least have a strong US presence so obvious choices like Proton Mail, Mailfence, and Mailbox.org are out. I would prefer it interoperate well with FOSS software too, I use Thunderbird and K-9 Mail for example. Also so want them to be trustworthy, have good security, and have good OpSec with respect to their their servers and service.

After looking I find three I am considering and they are quite different:

  • Fastmail. Long history. No PGP support but they do have their own domains one can use also.
  • Namecheap Private Email. Uses Ox App Suite, may support PGP, and quite new. I think you have to have your own domain (not sure).
  • Forward Email (forwardemail.net). A forwarder with IMAP support. You supply the webmail if you want webmail, but otherwise it should work fine with IMAP and normal clients.

So questions:

  • Any thoughts and experience, pros and cons with the above 3.
  • Other better ideas.

So thoughts? Thanks.

Greg ,
@Greg@lemmy.ca avatar

Why is US based one of your requirements?

furrowsofar OP ,

I believe in being as local as one can. One cannot always assume that those global data links will be up the way the world is going. Also if you think email security is bad in the US then how is it better to ship data half way around the world. Makes no sense to me. The US is not suppose to spy on US citizens in the US but every thing that passes a border is up for grabs as far as I know.

Powderhorn ,
@Powderhorn@beehaw.org avatar

The US is not suppose to spy on US citizens in the US

And yet …

Truck_kun , (edited )

I’m a recent fastmail user:

Pros: First off, they put me on a 30 day trial, so had a full 30 days to try out; I would suggest trying their trial as one of your first things.

I do love that I can make so many aliases for different email things.

I do love I can add an API key to my bitwarden account to auto-generate email masks for things: https://bitwarden.com/blog/use-bitwarden-to-generate-email-aliases-with-fastmail/

Offer’s a reasonably priced family plan for up to 6 users (50 GB per user - after using Gmail from day one, including non-email storage, my Gmail is only up to 35 GB), and they have annual plan options which give you a discount over monthly for a better deal.

Has a calendar feature, and notes, for which I am putting stuff I used to text to myself, or message to my wife on discord.

Use multiple of my own domains (purchases elsewhere), and just set the nameservers to FastMail, and they handle setting up everything for modern email like DKIM, DMARC, and stuff. Though you are not obligated to purchase a domain, they have many you can choose from. They allow you to use a ton of custom domains (where as some other providers allow like 3, 10, or 30, depending on your plan).

They have an import feature from your old mail accounts. I did not try it, as I decided to start fresh. I’m trying to move away from gmail incase they lock me out someday, but my account is in good standing, and I have access to everything there as storage; just proactively moving all my important accounts over to my own domains.

I’ll put this at the end as it is a pro or con depending on your outlook: I trust FastMail to not use my data like google, and am okay with our business relationship. Because of this, I am okay with my data not being so hard locked down that FastMail is able to restore access/help users getting locked out of their accounts. For a true End-to-End encrypted option, I question if that recovery would be possible (which can be a good thing, if your purpose is protecting your data, even from warrants/court orders/subpoenas); they may have recovery keys, but what if you lost those?

Con: Found out after my trial ended, that when I email my work, my emails go to Quarantine. Our work uses Microsoft Outlook, and they have a quarantine feature that keeps stuff from hitting even the spam folder; my work has phishing set to ‘aggressive’, which is what is quarantining my emails. Once i passed one email through quarantine, i’m recieiving them fine now. Also if the user adds the email to their contacts list.

After looking around, this appears to be an ongoing issue with microsoft from fastmail emails. You cant email email the recipient to inform them of the quarantined email, because all emails are quarantined. Not a deal breaker, as it’s microsoft’s doing, not FastMail, but still annoying, especially if you have to tell them to add you as a contact first. May get better after your domain builds some reputation with their servers, I don’t really know yet. More of a reason for me to avoid recommending Microsoft as an email provider; quarantine is great for protecting users, but unless you have an IT person regularly checking and approving quarantined emails, it is so easy to miss legitimate emails from clients. I’ve also seen an email from my gmail account in the quarantine system, so it can catch up even big email providers.

A lot of people recommend https://tuta.com/ as a more privacy conscious option, and if I did decide to leave FastMail, they are probably what I would switch to. They do have a free email. Tuta also has family options, which can be more generous storage wise depending on your plan, but their family option appears to just be pay the full price of your plan for each user to add them to your family plan, and Tuta (at least from their pricing page), only has monthly as an option, no discounts for commitments.

For fastmail, I pay $132/year ($11/month equivalent - actually $14/month if on a monthly plan) for 50 GB for 6 users (300 GB total), For Tuta it appears to be €3/user/month for 20GB, or €8/user/month for 500 GB (so for 2 users, you are either paying €6 or €16). Ultimately I found FastMail to be a better choice for me. If you switch to business, they do have a €6/user/month option for 50 GB /user, which would be €12/month, so comparable to FastMail’s family plan if you only have 2 users, but less comparable if you need more than 2 users. Due to tuta’s pricing structure, you could just get each user the plan they need (not sure if that requires separate accounts, or if can be done on a family plan, which does have domain sharing implications, but maybe everyone wants their own domains).

My recommendation would be to make a FastMail trial, make a free tuta account, and try both for a month, then make your decision.

furrowsofar OP ,

Yes… email filtering is a huge problem. Do you know if the issue was with your domain or whether it happens with Fastmail’s standard domains also?

Regarding Tuta… not IMAP/SMTP and not US, so no for me. Otherwise I agree.

Truck_kun ,

I only learned about quarantine the other day. Specifically I think it was me sending short messages that make sense when emailing yourself, like a photo with no body text, or just “test”.

Going through there, found my Gmail, my personal domain, and my @fastmail domain all going there until I approved one of them.

I had my personal domain on a lifetime mxroute account before this, but wasn’t using it. Made the move to fastmail to seriously move away from Google. I have my purchase ebooks backed up there, and they could close my account someday because of it, even if it’s a personal backup of purchased items and not sharing with others.

Also making a wasabi account and using rclone to sync my library, so can move away on that front too. though Wasabi has a perfectly usable web interface. i have my reasons for choosing them over backblaze.

furrowsofar OP ,

You mentioned mxroute. Someone else mentioned. Do you have any thoughts about them. You mentioned your moving to Fastmail instead.

Truck_kun ,

I specifically found their lifetime plan reasonable to park a more professional sounding email address long-term to attach to resumes and the like, but not enough storage on that plan as my primary email.

I honestly don’t have much experience with it, I just set it up to have to use with my domains, without having to pay a monthly fee.

Unfortunately, I have no input on their other plans

Truck_kun ,

I didn’t know about the tuta IMAP thing. Makes sense, unless they open it up for development from third party providers, but that is unlikely to ever happen. I can definitely see that as being a deal-breaker, and why I’ll probably stick with fastmail

Zier ,
@Zier@fedia.io avatar

Pay for hosting through Namecheap (lowest tier price) and use your domain there through cPanel in your hosting interface. Don't use their email only offering, it's more expensive. All you need to do is set up the domain and email addresses. You don't need to actually host a website. They have a web interface, but I use a client (Thunderbird).

key ,

MXRoute is about a decade old and based in Texas. It’s in that “unix philosophy” category of doing something well and stopping there so you won’t get them advertising their new crypto wallet or AI software on you. It’s mostly geared for more technical bring your own domain type of usage. If you’re wanting to use it more as a forwarder and want to store the history locally (or if you don’t email files) there’s a “lifetime” plan available.

furrowsofar OP ,

Thanks. Interesting. I will take a look.

Moonrise2473 ,

I like Zoho mail, decent prices for a lot of features

furrowsofar OP ,

I looked at them. From me that feels like trading a US software giant for an Indian one. So I would choose Google Workspace first. I agree though Zoho is interesting.

adespoton ,

Big question is: who’s storing the email, you or them? Your mail clients handle POP3 and IMAP as well as SMIME and GPG so the server doesn’t have to have any special features itself.

Since you want something your wife can manage, stay away from the forwarders. Whatever you choose, check Spamhaus and SURBL to see if the provider has a history of getting on their lists.

Make sure you select one that can stay in business providing email service, so you don’t have to worry about the company collapsing/being bought out/pushing ads/selling PII/bundling mail with some more lucrative service.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

No PGP support

Why would the mail provider need to support it? I mean, if they provide some sort of webmail client, maybe it doesn’t do PGP, but I sure wouldn’t be giving them my PGP keys anyway.

I haven’t used any of them, but I don’t think that you can go too far wrong here, since you have your own domain. Pick one, try it for non-critical stuff for a month or two, and if you don’t like it, switch. As long as you own the domain, you’re not locked in. If you do like it, then just start migrating.

The main differentiating factors I can think of are (a) service reliability, (b) risk that someone breaks in and dumps client mail, but it’s hard for me to evaluate the risk of that at a given place. And © how likely it is that other parties spam-block mail from them.

I’d look for TLS support for SMTP and IMAP; that may be the norm these days. The TLS situation for mail is a little unusual compared to most protocols, where on a new connection, some servers initially use the non-encrypted version and then upgrade via STARTTLS.

If you intend to leave your mail on their server rather than just using it as a temporary holding point until you fetch it, you might look into what their storage provided is.

I’d also see what the maximum size of any individual email that they permit is.

furrowsofar OP ,

I could be handy to read you mail on the web client. Depends on how secret you want your PGP key, how much you trust your provider. I would argue that in most cases it would be better for the provider to manage the keys then to have no one use PGP which is what we mostly have now.

skizzles ,

Edit: just realized you said US based. Tuta is not US based so that might not work for you. Sorry about that.

Tutanota (now just Tuta) allows you to use your domain. I use it, it doesn’t support external clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) but they do have Android, Linux, Windows (maybe Mac too) clients.

It’s also cheap.

I’ve been using it for a few years now, it works for me.

You can get a free account to check it out first and if you like it just upgrade to get the personal domain usage and increased storage limit.

corruptian ,
@corruptian@mastodon.cloud avatar

@furrowsofar

Run your own goddamn email server. Don't trust these big fat companies.

furrowsofar OP ,

Thanks. Like the sentiment. Yes I can do this but my wife cannot. So this option is out. It needs to be a solution that she can maintain alone if something happens to me. This concern gets a lot more real as one gets older.

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I would advise against this.

I am all about running things yourself, run most stuff myself, but email is just a nightmare these days with all the anti-spam stuff out there.

Go ask at !selfhosted. They’ll tell you the same thing. Lots of hassle, lots of potential pitfalls.

Estebiu ,
@Estebiu@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Email in itself is an outdated protocol. Even if you’re selfhosting it, and have the best opsec practices; if the other person uses gmail then you’re fucked anyway.

corruptian ,
@corruptian@mastodon.cloud avatar

@Estebiu

Then again, it's useful to filter out the gmail zombies.

corruptian ,
@corruptian@mastodon.cloud avatar

@Estebiu

Nah, SMTP is not outdated.

Everything since is irrelevant.

A bunch of hipsters inventing job security.

We can sell them to slavers in Brazil and be better off :)

tal , (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Not having mandatory security is a legit issue, but there isn’t a drop-in replacement that does, not in 2024. You’re gonna need widespread support, support for file transfer, federated operation, resistance to abuse, client software on many platforms, etc.

And email security is way down the list of things that I’d be concerned about. At least with email, you’ve got PGP-based security. If you’re worried about other people’s mail providers attacking mail you send them, that’s getting into “do you trust certificate authorities to grant certificates” territory, because most secure protocols are dependent upon trusting that.

Like, XMPP with OTR is maybe a real option for messaging, but that’s not email.

EDIT: Not to mention that XMPP doesn’t mandate security either.

furrowsofar OP ,

Security is getting better on the transport side.

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