Ask HN: Alternative to Proton Mail?
So I wanted to get away from GMail because I don't want to depend on a service that could just go away at any moment. Now I need to get away from Proton because they can't keep the air conditioners in Franfurt running.
What are the alternatives people are trying? I would like to have:
a. A service that can run for a week without going down for hours at a time.
b. Custom domains. Ideally I would like all messages to a particular domain routed to my in-home server with an online web-mail interface for the last couple of months.
c. Don't barf on PGP or S/MIME.
d. IMAP or POP. If I can't just get simple message routing to/from my local server, I'll take IMAP (preferably) and POP (if I have to.)
e. A service that can run for a week without going down for hours at a time.
I guess I get what I deserve. The "S" in "ProtonMail" is for "Service Level Agreement."
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Fastmail offers EU data region - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223082 - August 2026 (296 comments)
https://cyberinsider.com/email/reviews/fastmail/
Thx for the info, though.
If you want to stay entirely outside of the reach of the US gov, stick with Proton and eat the outages. If you are willing to take on some more risk, try Fastmail. Consider the subject comms and whether higher risk comms should instead be in something like Signal.
In a more perfect world, a provider would anycast like Cloudflare as an SMTP MTA, encrypt your email with your public key as soon as ingested, and drop the encrypted blob into a globally distributed, permissioned object storage system for your mail client to retrieve and process (and either allow object storage to persist the object, or delete the object as soon as your mail client retrieves it). I don't know anyone who does that today though.
It does let you use IMAP on the free account, which is what drew me to them.