Why are they the best?
Why are they the best?
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)?
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?
As for my preferred email provider, that's Fastmail.
And if you breakdown all features you can easily (in theory) draw a multidimensional plot where youll see a group of winners at least.
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.
For Webmail, I have been meaning to try https://roundcube.net
You can try it out at https://www.pikapods.com/apps#email to see if this works for you.
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.
Almost no human emails.
But Fastmail has an "auto purge after x days" feature on folders, which comes pretty close in practice. You just need a rule that routes your mailing lists there. I use their email wildcards with my domain along with a convention of using a specific prefix to my address when signing up to mailing lists.
Combined with OR rules for other individual from: addresses and most of my lists show up in one place and delete after 30 days.
Anyways, take time, take it slow, but use Labels, Filters, and Rules. Set them up one at a time, and play around with them. For instance, I’ve set up to label all emails from `@amazon.*` under the label/filter `DELETE ’EM.` During my digital chore, I just go there and `Select All` and delete them. The emails may be relevant at the time, but they go stale after a few days. Another way is to set up, say, newsletters to Skip the Inbox, so you can read them later on the weekends or at the end of the day, etc.
I just updated my article to reflect this. I will continue to edit/update that article as life happens.
https://brajeshwar.com/2024/email/#a-well-maintained-email-l...
But I know it's private, and I can generate email aliases to use for each service I sign up for.
No fuss, just works, good price for what they deliver. Never had any issues.
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).
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).
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.
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.
mattl•9h ago
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.
eisenman•7h ago
mattl•7h ago
This made sense for me as two of my family are already using it.