When you have your own domain, I suggest enabling a catch-all email. You can then make up a new email for every account ("[email protected]"), enabling you to track where spam comes from, disabling certain emails, etc.

migadu.com even offers reg-ex based catch-alls, pretty nifty.

https://www.migadu.com/en/benefits.html#anchor_catchalls

I want to elaborate a little further because I thought this might be unclear if you don't really know what a catch-all adress is:

A catch-all adress is an adress where all emails of your domain that you didn't explicictly make a email adress for will land.

So if you own foobar.eu and you made [email protected] your catch-all adress, you could just make up arbitray email adresses on the spot (e.g. [email protected]) and all mails that are sent to that adress will land in your catch-all adress.

There are multiple cool things about this: - you can just block that adress if it annoys you - if you ever get spam and it is adressed to [email protected] you know exactly who fucked with your data - you don't have to disclose your primary email adress to stranges, you can just make something up.

thanks for adding that clarity. much helpful !

I do this with FastMail and find it indispensable. However, most email applications don't seem to support sending via wildcard email addresses (i.e., if I receive an email at [email protected], I want to be able to respond as [email protected], not my personal email address).

FastMail's web interface lets me do this (as does its iOS client), but has anyone found any other (preferably macOS/iOS) apps that support this natively? I generally prefer native apps over web-based, and FastMail's iOS app leaves something to be desired.

Thunderbird will allow you to "Customize From address", where you type something into the "From" field and it attempts to send the message using your normal log in credentials. Works like a charm for me on Ubuntu, and I imagine it is available with the same features on Mac.

I recommend checking out add-on Virtual Identity for Thunderbird. It will use "To" address as "From" by default when writing reply, allows editing "From" directly in new mails and will remember what address to use with any recipient and.

Unfortunately, some mail providers (like Migadu.com) block sending mails with "From" anything other than primary user address, even through they "support" catch-all. I was especially disappointed as that stopped me from using IDN mail address. I successfully created mail account using Punycode and I was able to receive mails with national characters, but their filter stopped me from sending.

I know IDN mail address is risky, but it's something I wanted to test. My surname contains non-ASCII character.

They indicated in January that they are working on allowing customization "From" filter customization, but it is still now available and contact with them is very difficult (they are not replying to mails unless you repeat question a couple of times). To be fair, I'm not paying yet (I wanted to test IDN works and it did not, so I'm not very interested in paying when they offer free account anyway).

Thanks! I tried Thunderbird a couple of months ago and abandoned it because its UX seemed to not have really progressed in a number of years -- I hadn't used it since the Netscape Communicator days but it seemed... somewhat the same.

Although I realize these days a number of modern clients store copies of your email on their own servers for push notifications (or more nefarious) purposes, so maybe Thunderbird really still is the best option out there. Regardless, thanks for taking the time!

How has Migadu been for you? I've contacted the team a few times, but never received any responses or seen any action taken. I like the pricing since it would work out very well for personal emails where you need a bunch of mailboxes (not just aliases) but not getting even an auto reply or a ticket for mails is big cause for worry. As I mentioned in another comment here, it looks as if Migadu is run by two or three people who have day jobs and other things to take care of and that Migadu is just a hobby project.

Runbox is also probably a small team, but their responsiveness to mails is very good (usually a few hours or maybe a day or two at the most).

I don't like Fastmail and other providers who charge a lot per mailbox (a lower storage limit is not a big deal for me) when one needs many mailboxes with separate credentials (not aliases).

I've been doing this for years. At one point my first email provider removed the catch-all feature. Despite pleading with them, all they could suggest was adding each address as a real account or alias account. There's no way I'd remember them all! So I had to switch providers.

Does leaving Gmail matter if all you're doing is switching one third party with another? At least when Google is doing something wrong, it makes the news; with others you might never find out. (And for the people repeating the "if you're not paying, you're the product" - it's quite possible to pay Google, too.)

The only sure way would be to self-host but that has its own considerable headaches.

A key part of OP's advice was to get email at your own domain. Then you can switch email providers if it comes to light that the provider you're using is doing creepy shit with your email.

And speaking of Fastmail: I sincerely doubt they're reading your emails. They make money solely by providing email services to (for the most part) businesses. If it came out that they were reading emails A) it would probably be a violation of their contractual obligation to their customers, and B) their reputation would be permanently destroyed.

You can pay Google and still be the product (you’re certainly not their primary customer). And it’s quite possible for Google to do things which I don’t like (“something wrong”) and to simply not tell anyone.

This said, I personally used gmail for years (and still do for work), but these days I just want that business model out of my personal life.

If you are paying for your email service there is a much better chance of you being the customer instead of the product.

That’s similar to my setup. Migrating out of Gmail took good couple of months as their service is so bloody good and intuitive and for free. Over decade of categorized email history and incoming email filters...