Fastmail is great and has been great for many years.

I use and am very happy with Protonmail (Switzerland, so not quite the EU)

And for documents, LibreOffice is quite good these days.

I was a big fan of Protonmail but there recent outages have been far from ideal. Might be worth considering other alternatives if 24/7 access to emails is a must

You mean the outages from like... last week/this week? That was the first outage in like years of service, and it was resolved pretty quickly, with good communication throughout and an apology. The discussion on Reddit is worth looking at[0].

What alternatives are out there without service degradation/outages?

Also not to undermine my own point (Protonmail is wonderfully stable for me) who is getting life or death emails these days? I could take whole days of downtime (hasn't ever happened) and probably be OK.

Why do we all pretend that we are all so important that we need services with bulletproof reliability and as many 9s as we can get?

Bit of a rant, but not directed at you so much Cxckers!

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/w0vcge/email_fr...

Personally, I don't rely on it 24/7 and just use it for my personal use but some people use it for business purposes and not having access to your emails for a day or two can be expensive down time.

But you are right, no service is bulletproof

Migadu or the company that put out this blog post, tutanota, are great if you lack the time to self host.

I've had good luck with Tutanota. It's based out of Germany, and one of the few big providers that doesn't require your phone number to sign up.

https://tutanota.com

Depends on what you consider a true alternative. Self-hosted open source is still and always has been available, but companies like Google have changed what people expect of software and so traditional email software (both clients and servers) is no longer viable unless people are willing to change their expectations to leave the large providers.

I asked myself the same question a while ago and wrote up the options then.[1] I used Runbox[2] for a while, but ended up switching to Soverin[3] and have been mostly happy with them. You certainly don’t get the spam filtering that the big companies have, but generally life is good.

[1] https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2018/02/18/dropping-g-suite/

[2] https://runbox.com/

[3] https://soverin.net/

As someone in a similar position, the biggest challenge is both Google and MS 365 offer waaay more than email.

Like, if I ditched MS 365, I would have to find alternatives for:

- Exchange (Email)

- Azure AD (Directory Service with SSO integration)

- SharePoint/ OneDrive (shared / personal file server)

- Teams (chat / conferencing)

- Intune (MDM)

For about 20 USD/user/month* .That's just the surface, I'm definitely forgetting about many other features. M365 is just too good for small business.

And even then, I would have to pay for some O365 subscriptions as many of my users rely heavily in Excel.

*That can be made cheaper by buying through a MS partner + yearly commitments.

Fastmail is good but more if you don't use it in bigger team (my opinion). Why don't you want to use exchange? Shouldn't be too bad as long as it's configured by MSFT?

Fastmail were US-only hosting, last time I looked.

Fastmail, protonmail.

Mailbox has been awesome to me

migadu

posteo.de