Moving away from gmail (or other free webmail services)

dpandey

Adept
I have been using gmail for almost ten years and have been quite happy. However, as I have gotten older, the privacy issues have started to worry me. After some search, I bought a subscription to fastmail but their password recovery requires that I have another e-mail id, which kind of defeats the purpose (Gmail allows password recovery via cellphone.)

I was wondering if any of you have moved away from ad-supported webmail. If yes, how has the experience been?
 
Bought my own domain, happily used by the entire family, including the extended family. Side benefit name@surname.com for everyone, plus aliases.
How do you manage security? Like some script kiddies trying to force their way into your system? What server side software do you use for sending and retrieving the files? How much do you spend every year on the domain and server space?
 
How do you manage security? Like some script kiddies trying to force their way into your system? What server side software do you use for sending and retrieving the files? How much do you spend every year on the domain and server space?
Brand name email server used, security and 2fa in their contract.
Spend is more than most would be willing to, but we find it to be worth it. Approx costs will be 4-5k per mailbox when spread across a large family.
 
Bought my own domain, happily used by the entire family, including the extended family. Side benefit name@surname.com for everyone, plus aliases.
How do you manage security? Like some script kiddies trying to force their way into your system? What server side software do you use for sending and retrieving the files? How much do you spend every year on the domain and server space?
Right now I have the same setup. I registered my lastname.org. but i havnt setup any mail server or anything as of now but I am planning to do so. so right now godaddy simply forwards my mails to my gmail account. but I am planning to setup my mail/web etc servers on my own. coming to the costs. some 80 dollars for few domain names for 3 years. and I have to plan the server space which I am lazy at this point.
 
Bought my own domain, happily used by the entire family, including the extended family. Side benefit name@surname.com for everyone, plus aliases.


I have bought the domain name I want. I am looking for help with choosing a mail hosting service.

Who do you host with?

Fastmail ticks all boxes for me except password recovery.
 
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I have bought the domain name I want. I am looking for help with choosing a mail hosting service.

Who do you host with?

Fastmail ticks all boxes for me except password recovery.

None of the popular budget ones, more of a business email provider. How many people are you looking for?
 
Three years ago I was in same boat as OP. I wanted to stop using gmail and use something else. But I gave up and here's why.

Even if I was using my own mail server, people who were receiving my emails were still using gmail. Which kinda defeats the purpose since your mails are going to end up on Gmail anyway. I don't email my family, and all my friends and other people I use email for, use Gmail. So whats the point? Even big corporations these days use Gmail (for business) on their own domain. Check mail headers. Educational institutes/research groups use Gmail (since its free for them).

Here's what I suggest, if you want privacy, encrypt your emails. You can use Google's End to End chrome plugin, but it's still in beta. IIRC, Yahoo provides encryption OOB, but I am not sure. My suggestions:

Start here - http://superuser.com/questions/480270/how-can-i-use-encryption-with-gmail

Most desktop clients also support email encryption. Go with Thunderbird.

My current setup: Personal emails on Zoho. And rest on Gmail with Mailvelope. Running own mail server is PITA.
 
Running own mail server is PITA.
I was using my own setup but now i'm back to gmail again due to security issues. Nothing beats the 2 way authentication feature of gmail. For SEO i use email address on my own setup as google sometime gets sneaky
 
I was using my own setup but now i'm back to gmail again due to security issues. Nothing beats the 2 way authentication feature of gmail. For SEO i use email address on my own setup as google sometime gets sneaky
I was not talking about email-password security. You can have 2FA on custom email servers also.

Installing, maintaining, updating, adding security patches, keeping the server from hacking, saving the server not to be spambox etc takes lot of time. Email server maintenance is not an easy job. And sometimes your emails end up going to spam if you don't configure it properly. Who wants all that headache man. It was taking away my productive time.
 
Just my advice, move anywhere but not to the piece of shit and crap---Aol.
I'm still on yahoo since past 15yrs+ and very much happy.
Have gmail as well but will 1500+ spams every week so seldom use it.
 
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