Ask HN: Best paid email provider with great support?
I do not have the time to set up and maintain my own email server.
I have too much of my information with one single email provider - yes, the most popular one. The support provided by this provider, even if it is a paid account, doesn't seem to be great.
So, I am looking to switch my primary email provider. I want someone who offers great support.
Which email provider is stable, will be around for another 10-20 years, and offers excellent support?
What do you use and why?
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10 comments
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I've used pobox.com since 1996. They forward inbound mail to somewhere else, and provide an outgoing SMTP server. So you can manage your email at Google or Apple or Microsoft or wherever, and change that whenever you like, while retaining the same public email address.
Fastmail, OTOH, provides a full IMAP+SMTP service, plus CalDAV and CardDAV. So it's a complete replacement for Google/iCloud/Outlook. It's a paid service, and they are very aware that if you're actually paying, you need decent support. You can use your own domain name too. They've been around since 1999.
Not email, but I can also recommend Fruux as a standalone CalDAV + CardDAV provider. It just works, at least for me. I think they've been in business since 2007.
Went down once in my usage; it was a major DdoS attack, and they have mitigated the issue. Standards compliant email and all bells and whistles.
ProtonMail tries to solve this problem but it has its drawbacks. If your email is end-to-end encrypted then you can't do server side search, to search through your email it has to be done on the client.
ProtonMail's help page on how to search when all your email is encrypted: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/search/
FastMail's blog post about why they don't do end-to-end encryption: https://fastmail.blog/advanced/why-we-dont-offer-pgp/