I’m looking at possibly moving my email hosting from Hover to a dedicated host. The features I’m most interested in are:
Good spam filtering
IMAP support
Server side rules for sorting
A way to upload/sync contacts for whitelist based rule
I’m looking at ProtonMail, Fastmail, and Hushmail. I’m not paranoid about email contents but I’m still creeped out by Google, so Gmail is not a possibility.
Asking the community, what’s your experience with these providers? And, am I missing any that are worth investigating? Thanks!
If you pay for Google services (G-Suite) you are no longer the product.
However, if you do take the privacy and security of your email serious I suggest Protonmail.
I own several domains through Gandi.net, a French resistrar that’s inexpensive, is dedicated to protecting privacy, and which does free email redirects.
Although I am creeped out by Google and Yahoomail’s activities, for the last 17 years I’ve paid for Yahoo Mail Plus (or whatever it’s called, now that Verizon owns it), grandfathered in at $20/year (now $34.99/yr, I think) for muiltiple email accounts, temporary deleteable emails, and no ads. (That doesn’t mean they won’t analyze my traffic in order to build a dossier on me, though. Sigh.) I currently utilize 5 email accounts on Yahoo, and I often subscribe to iffy sites with a throwaway account, andif it starts getting spammed I just delete it and nothing sent to that address ever gets to me.
If money were no object I’d probably use Fastmail, which has had an excellent reputation for years, but it’s quite expensive if one wants to send/receive multiple email addresses there. If you only need one address I’d recommend looking at them.
I’d also do some searching on Reddit for discussions about email providers. One good place to start is
I’ve had a fastmail.fm account for many years; it’s easy to have fastmail handle your own domain’s email. And, as above, have also registered domains with Gandi.net.
Wow, sounds like fastmail has lots of happy customers here! I’m only interested in one email account (for now) so I’ll move them to front of line for more research.
You can have multiple email addresses (at several own and/or FastMail owned domains) with just one FastMail account, but in that case they will all share the same inbox and other folders (which suits my needs).
G-Suite Gmail allows you to create up to 45 alias email addresses
Together with their strong filtering you can take care of your your email stream and spam in great detail
Yes, but based on your real gmail address, correct? In many cases you may not want marketers (or others) to have that info.
It’s different with Yahoo - not only do I get a completely different Yahoo email alias that feeds into my account and from which I can send emails, the Pro account also lets you set up a separate disposable email addresses beginning with a selected ‘base name’ (let’s say ‘altacct20’) to which you then create multiple addresses with a hyphen (like altacct20-test, altacct20-jimbo, altacct20-registration), each of which you can individually delete any time.
None of these email addresses are in any way related to my official yahoo email address.
And, as I noted earlier, the pro accounts are ad-free.
Fastmail with domain at Hover for over 5 years. Very happy. Fastmail is fast and they are heavily focused on standards. Their spam filtering is quite good and they allow aliases and forwarders, etc.
The recipient wil not see your “real” email address when you use an alias.
Once an account is contaminated you can ditch it.
For example I created an alias for our move and remodel. Started it when asking for a quote for a storage “Pod” instantly they and affiliated companies started to spam me.
Its all sorted to a folder and marked as “read” and known abusers deleted. Once I am fed up enough with this BS I will ditch the alias.
I am paying for one account but have several domains that all forward there. I think they call them “aliases”. Also, their tech support is actually knowledgeable, which is a nice change from most other companies out there.
Fastmail/Hover here. According to my account, I’ve been paying for Fastmail since 2002. I think I had a free account for a while before that. I’ve been very happy with it.
Adding to the Hover/Fastmail pile. At least 5 years and couldn’t be happier. For USD$40/year or so, it’s good value if you can fit it into your budget.
Are they for domains you own? Are they Gmail addresses? How specifically does it work?
With the pro Yahoomail service, in addition to your email address you get unlimited (not sure how many simultaneously) alias addresses, one completely different from your own, and one entire series based on a made-up base (with your choice of add-ons, and the ability to ditch individual add-ons at will). So I have two permanent Yahoo addresses: (1) a permanent address, (2) a permanent alias, and (3-infinity) an endless stream of ditchable alias addresses with a base-name plus customizable addenda.
And of course, in addition to that, I can also forward any mail addresses from domains I own and read/write to/from those addresses as well.
