[Socketubs]

I'm using Fastmail instead of Gmail. Smartphone app is not really good but you can use any other smtp/imap client. For android you can synchronize your contacts with "CardDAV-Sync" (carddav is native for iOS).

Fastmail offer contacts and calendars too. Which have a really nice web interface.

I'm still looking for a Drive/Photos alternative. Any advice?

[benhardy]

+1 on Fastmail. Been using it for past 6 months with my own personal domains. Actually now like the UI better than Gmail. Such slick, very slide, wow.

Really liking the customizable options for wildcard addresses in particular. You wanna give out an email address for each place you sign up? You can write it as [e-mail] or [e-mail] or [e-mail] - which I find super handy because to my endless annoyance, most sites STILL don't deal with "+" in an email address.

Well worth the money IMO.

[corford]

Another +1 for Fastmail. Their IMAP migration tool worked flawlessly shifting multi GBs of emails when I made the switch last month (admittedly not from gmail but from a self-hosted Zarafa install).

Re: Drive/Photos alternative. For the Drive part, if you just need something in the cloud to backup files to (and optionally share them with other people) I highly recommend https://www.spideroak.com. Have been using them for years without issue and they're the only "cloud backup" provider I know of that takes security and privacy seriously.

[jstayton]

> I'm still looking for a Drive/Photos alternative. Any advice?

I haven't found any photo storage services that really sell the privacy-conscious angle. That said, I'd trust https://www.smugmug.com/ more than Google, Facebook, or anyone else.

For a vanilla, non-photo-specific storage service, there's https://spideroak.com/solutions/spideroak-one.

[dublinben]

You should try hosting your own photos with GNU Mediagoblin.

[jstayton]

Looks good as a self-hosted option.

[dhruvkar]

No, although I'm considering setting up owncloud (https://owncloud.org) to at least back up my Drive/Photos.

Resiliency/availability could be issues though. Ever looked into that?

[talles]

Here's their pricing by the way: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/pricing.html

[PaulHoule]

Fastmail is great.