Are there any good free alternatives to Gmail or do all the good ones cost money?
I assume so since Gmail makes all its money selling YOU…
I've been moving over to Fastmail. Easy to use, tons of features, great price. 👍
Also quick tip regardless of which provider you end up on: Register a domain name for yourself and use it for your email address. This way if you want to change email providers again in the future or even host it yourself, you can take your domain name and addresses with you.
This dude compare quite a lot of email providers in term of privacy. I do not necessarily agree with all its critics but it is a useful resource:
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/email
I would recommend to buy your own domain in case you need to change again. That way, you're not trapped by your email provider and you can change in case you're not satisfied anymore
By any means, do you have a Riseup invitation code?
I'm using Infomaniak Mail and am fairly happy so far. They are based in Switzerland and I get custom domain + 5 user accounts for 1.50 EUR/month. I've tried other providers but coming from Gmail I like that their webmail displays email conversation like Google does whereas most other providers just run rainloop or roundcube where threading support isn't quite the same.
Their android app is open source too and can be installed from fdroid. It can be a bit sluggish sometimes though, but K9mail/Thunderbird works fine too.
Mailbox.org
Murena mail, Nextcloud mail, Tuta, Proton, aything is better as GMail, only Hotmail is worse.
So it's not hot anymore
Never was
aything is better as GMail, only Hotmail is worse
So yahoo mail?
Someone still use that?
It exists
A couple months ago, I would have said Proton. But....
Here we are.
I was looking at moving to Proton as this all went down. Those plans are on hold.
After reading through it, I am having trouble figuring out how to read his comments because I wonder if there is some different cultural references or simplification going on between the Swis exec and American readers.
It was absolutely a stupid comment and was then the response was handed badly, but I don't know that I read it as aligning with Fascism.
This is the best writeup I can find: https://archive.ph/2025.01.29-213655/https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
I switched to Proton about 6 months ago.
Wish I had waited. Ah well.
Domains are cheap, buy one and then you can jump between whatever services aren't caught up in the outrage of the moment.
Ding ding! After the Proton fiasco, I got a domain and have started moving my accounts to that email, which connects to Tuta
What’s up with Proton?
I never trusted them 100% so I never paid for their services and didn’t really follow up with their privacy and stuff. Just used their free services from time to time.
In bed with fascists
And not subtly like banks were back in WW2. Straight up endorsement.
Wants you in their slow web UIs. Requires a middleman application just to use IMAP—which requires payment. Paid plans are pretty expensive if all you need additionally is CalDAV/CardDAV many will offer for $2 or less a month instead of $5.
…& these are gripes before the right-leaning heel turn.
I've been using mailbox.org, and it's pretty great. It's cheap, it's private, and it works well.
I like the idea of e2ee email, but the way they all work it's pretty much a completely useless feature for most people, myself included, and I also like using Thunderbird. It's just not worth the trade off for something I'd basically never get any use out of anyway.
Posteo + Addy.io + Thunderbird
Buying your own domain.
You can then use whatever provider, or host your email service... but at least you don't need to change addresses when switching anymore.
How can I learn how to set this up?
The basic steps are:
I'm not going to write a full tutorial so if it sounds interesting I suggest you do more research. The email hosting is typically focused at businesses as they are most likely to be wanting to host email on a custom domain.
I've been using Tuta for damn near a decade, and it's been great for me.
I personally use Disroot along with Thunderbird 😁
This, just plain old mail.
Another one for Tuta, with addy.io as a proxy service. Nice integration with Bitwarden for making new accounts + it's simple to make rules based on the to address for easy filtering.
I've been meaning to check out Addy.io for a while now, because you're not the first person I've seen mentioning it in threads like this. Your comment was the straw that broke the camel's back and I've finally gone and checked it out. Thanks for including a link in your comment; it helped reduce the activation energy of setting it up
disroot and autistici have been providing decentralised communication services (like email) free of cost for many years. They are both run by activists and survive on donations, and they don't spy on you or get any money from your data. Also they run freedom-respecting software, so all their code is publicly auditable.
Perhaps an indirect answer, but I'm using a duck.com forwarder whenever i need to give any address, these days. On top of tracker filtering and random alias generator, once i change addresses I'll only have to update the forwarders destination.
tuta
Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:
What are people’s thoughts on using Apple email? I was thinking of switching from Gmail.
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