For standard email, fastmail.com is very very good. Plus they're working on JMAP, which may actually improve standard email for everyone.

If you're okay with a non-standard email account that you need to use their app for, hey.com has been a game changer for me. Being able to handle the flood of incoming messages that comes from having an email address for 35 years.

FastMail. Reasonable cost, acts like a utility. My email just works.

I’ve been a big fan of mailbox.org. Cheap, easy to use, just works. Been using it for years.

Seems like a perfect question for AI!

Oh, wait...

Is it:

Who is the best paid-email provider?

-or-

Who is the best-paid email provider?

-or-

Who is The Best Paid Email Provider (tm)?

Still looking for an email provider with customer support I can call 24/7. I'm willing to pay for peace of mind.

I would like to move my email to a good email provider with actual customer service.

Free email providers get paid by selling your data or stuffing your inbox with advertising.

Many free email providers also have terrible or non-existent customer service because that would raise their costs.

If you are happy with your email provider, who is your email provider and what is it about their service that makes you happy?

Best can be such a loaded word, especially in this case. What's best for one person might not be for someone else. Preferred is a better term.

As for my preferred email provider, that's Fastmail.

I chose Migadu because they seem to be genuinely helpful and are very affordable. I probably would have gone Proton but they don't support forwarding.

The downside is that downloading messages is fairly slow when you have 10-20k messages in your inbox. And the webmail is fairly primitive.

I never tried Fastmail.

I use easymail.ca. I'm not sure if they're the best but they're good enough.

Honest question: I find email to be almost useless now. I get a hundred emails across 3-4 personal accounts and I read almost none of them. I do scan them.. noise is high and signal is low, but not entirely possible to ignore completely.

I wanted to like hey.com for some of their enhanced email management tools but I didn’t like the platform in general.

I can’t believe no one lets me set “keep 30 days of this newsletter but delete the rest”. Setting filter rules per email in Gmail feels silly. With newsletters, value is inversely proportional to receive date.

What I’m getting at is.. best email provider and options for someone who is kinda, but not entirely, done with email..? Most email platforms still treat email as a first class communication platform, but for me, it definitely isn’t.

I only have experience with Proton. You must use their client or the web UI, or a "bridge" to standard IMAP. That's annoying.

But I know it's private, and I can generate email aliases to use for each service I sign up for.

I've been with Fastmail for almost 10 years now.

No fuss, just works, good price for what they deliver. Never had any issues.

Gmail. Best free and best paid.

Like someone else said best is subjective.

I prefer Fastmail.

They have a great web interface that knows how to properly deal with (catch all) aliases including using the proper address to reply.

They do DNS hosting.

They do WebDAV/Files hosting including being able to create unique shareable links to files and/or dirtree style websites or picture galleries. I've found it all very useful.

I also like their rules filtering which let's you do custom sieve code that I have found pretty handy.

Been with them for 12 years now and they've been consistently great. Before that I was hosting my own mail service using Cyrus IMAP (and since FM is the biggest contributor to the Cyrus suite, that's how I had learned of them).

Fastmail. They are cheap enough, and featureful. They allow you to use your own domain, and support IMAP and calendars.

I would like to say protonmail, which is cheaper and has a more secure email setup (which involves encrypting incoming emails as they come in) but because of this it doesn't support IMAP integration without an extra decryption daemon. Ultimately this extra security is useless anyways because the email protocol is weak to MITM (see lavabit situation).

Fastmail. Supports normal auth for IMAP instead of some complicated oAuth loop that breaks your software.

it is absolutely not hey.com's email services. terrible reinvention of their version of email delivery is stressful to navigate.

Proton for me. Privacy is a priority and it’s EU based plus zero knowledge.

Downsides are you need to use proton client or web UI.

The proton suite now also features other useful (and secure) apps like Drive, Password manager, etc. I’m not using those though.

I use Zoho, here in India. It was the most economical solution I could find. Outgoing international payments are also a bit of a hassle here. However, it has been nearly a year now and they've delivered a pleasant experience. I really like their UI (may be subjective). Their base packages offer almost the same features as Google Workspace (mail, contacts, calendar, storage, office suite, etc), but at a much lower price. I don't know much about their customer support since it has mostly been a fire and forget affair with no downtime (as far as I'm aware of) or any other technical issues.

It's ultimately subject to people's individual tastes. I don't have a strong opinion about it, except that I'm grateful for the existence of these smaller players. The two large comonopolies are so dreadful that the email ecosystem would be a dead place even for self hosters, if it weren't for these smaller players. Anything is better than the big two and well worth it, even if you have to shell out a reasonable monthly fee.