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Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by josephg on Wednesday November 16, 2016 @10:42PM (#12974038)
Awesome - I moved across to fastmail a couple of days ago. I've been using a custom domain for email for awhile (josephg.com), merged with a gmail account. I'm very happy I set that up because moving to fastmail was a cinch - there's no forwarding to do, just a few DNS records to reconfigure. And with a custom domain I'll have that email address for life, no matter what happens to fastmail.

My gmail account (josephg@) gets a tremendous amount of email for other people. Earlier this year I was getting a lot of marketing trash from a particularly excited group of car dealerships in Illinois. Around the same time youtube suspiciously started advertising new cars to me. Its all way too creepy, and reading articles like this about people's gmail accounts getting locked out I'm very happy to reinforce my digital independence from google.

Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by PuffinBlue on Thursday November 17, 2016 @04:41AM (#12975927)
The only thing that has put me off Fastmail very recently, and indeed I moved to another provider (Runbox), is the loss of their Family plans.

Requiring three accounts now for instance would cost $150 a year minimum for the size I would have needed and unfortunately because I needed to rearrange my old grandfathered plan to re-organise accounts I'd have lost my previous plan.

Basically, Fastmail is good (very good), and you can still do admin type stuff by creating your master account first and creating your 'users' under it, but do look around if you are price conscious.

NOTE - I know you can't please everyone and that doesn't detract from the fact Fastmail was extremely stable, fast and had excellent customer support so don't take this as a 'Fastmail is bad' type post, because it isn't. Just look around and make sure you're getting the rid price/value for your needs.

Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by Doctor_Fegg on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:20AM (#12976769)
Fastmail killed their Family plan?

Damn. I was going to move to them at the end of this year when my VM (where I currently run my mail) is up for renewal. But if I now need to buy several Standard plans instead, and get several gigabytes of storage I don't need, then that's less appealing.

Runbox looks good. Any other suggested alternatives?

Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by PuffinBlue on Thursday November 17, 2016 @08:26AM (#12977198)
PloarisMail is pretty 'barebones' on the face of it but works well:

https://www.polarismail.com/

Zoho is actually very good too but they (like Gmail) enforce IMAP connection limits, so it you have a lot of folders etc or use mobile clients like K9 that open a connection per folder then you can get errors very regularly.

The above is true for Zoho on the free plans anyway, but it may be different for the paid ones. But the free ones have pretty much all you could need if you don't run into the high number of IMAP connections issues.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/

If you have enough accounts to make it worthwhile I think Rackspace is supposed to be very good, but last I looked you needed a minimum of 5 accounts (I only had 4) so it didn't work out:

https://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail

Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by Doctor_Fegg on Thursday November 17, 2016 @09:21AM (#12977625)
Really helpful. Thanks.
Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by jamessb on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:52AM (#12976992)
> Fastmail killed their Family plan?

They announced this on 18 August: https://blog.fastmail.com/2016/08/18/easier-user-management-...

Re:Don’t Mess with The Google by josephb on Thursday November 17, 2016 @04:36AM (#12975897)
> My gmail account (josephg@) gets a tremendous amount of email for other people.

Same with my josephb@. It's amazing how many companies start sending personal identifiable information to a random email address without validating it.

Doctors, real estate, universities, banks and the list goes on.