I used Fastmail until they randomly deleted a large chunk of my emails and the support followup was abysmal (one email a day around 4am EST) with no ability to recover, explanation or apology on their part.

It was the push I needed to set up a Mailinabox instance. It was a breeze to install and has been working great since I spun it up four months ago.

As a recent convert from gmail to fastmail, this scares the hell out of me. How long did this go on before you pulled the plug?

I am not Australian/located in Australia so I would have about as much recourse with fastmail as I would with google (ie. none).

Emails were deleted August 23rd, across a wide variety of folders, all at the same millisecond (when I later pointed this out and how difficult it would be for me to do this accidentally, they did not comment).

Noticed on October 4th. I'd noticed some emails weren't turning up in searches but I chalked it up to my bad memory until there was one I knew for a fact should have been there. It was Oct 22nd by the time we got to any sort of conclusion, which was basically "there's nothing we can do for stuff that far back but I'll try to restore any recently deleted emails we can find". Getting details/logs/info from their support, even after they escalated to a higher level, was like pulling teeth.

They restored a bunch of things I'd actually deleted but they were all stuck in Draft mode, took till Oct 31st for them to sort-of fix that mess.

I set up the Mailinabox somewhere in that period. I still have my fastmail account because I wanted some overlap to test the MIAB before committing, and I'm getting ready to fully pull the plug before my next billing cycle.

It was a good lesson in setting up regular backups and not trusting any provider. I found Fastmail great to use until that experience, and I could see them being useful as a relay to send through trusted servers, but not worth my money to deal with the terrible support.

This is really unfortunate. I've been using Fastmail alongside Gmail and thought about switching over completely to the former at some point, just haven't come around to doing so yet. I'm glad you shared these details -- always good to know how organizations respond when things don't go as planned, as opposed to what's stated in their marketing materials.

Where are you hosting Mailinabox? I've always wanted to use it instead of gmail/fastmail but all I find are the generic use DigitalOcean, etc tutorials and I'm wondering what somebody actually using it has it set up with, what are the specs? Thanks in advance!

I had an extra Linode instance (Nanode 1GB: 1 CPU, 25GB Storage, 1GB RAM) laying around that I'd previously tried to manually set up a mailserver on. So I just reset it to the OS/version Mailinabox specifies, ran the install script and followed the rest of the instructions (https://mailinabox.email/guide.html)

It really doesn't need much, and the guide is very complete. Took me a Thursday evening plus some waiting for DNS propagation.

Not OP, but I use Mailbox.org. They have a neat feature where you can give them one or more PGP public keys and they encrypt the bodies of all plaintext emails to those keys. It's not perfect (you're still trusting them to not be compromised) but it means even if your account gets taken over, your email history remains private.

Microsoft Exchange Online. $4/month for Exchange push email to my iPhone/iPad/Apple Mail(our Outlook). 50 GB of mailbox storage.

Not blocked by anyone as it's a legit provider. Have been using it for years with my own domain.

tutanota here. It's pretty good and cheap - except missing ICS import/export for calendar which is annoying.

I use fastmail. I'm a happy customer.

Didn't Australia like pass a bill or something that compels corporations like Fastmail to give the government any and all encrypted communications if they ask?

This is one of those stories that had no relevance in actuality, yet gets brought up in nearly every single mention of Fastmail: The bill applied to a requirement for backdoors/the ability to decrypt data. Fastmail was never E2E encrypted in the first place (like Gmail, Outlook, and most other major mail providers), and hence, Fastmail was always required to comply with lawful requests for your data.

It’s always relevant because the world has a good idea how the Australia treats data privacy and security. Their elected officials are shooting their tech sector in the gut

It seems from another world when I see people paying with money for products. I don't know why, maybe because I'm very cheap, but I'd never do this when I can pay with my data.

Opensmtpd is very easy to set up.

Runbox.com

Mailbox.

Fastmail.