[sanjeetsuhag]

I only see FastMail and ProtonMail mentioned on Hacker News, never in real life.

To those who made the switch away from free,conventional mail services like Gmail and Outlook, what was the appeal ? What's your case for making the switch ?

[samat]

I did switch after just another chilling story about person losing his gmail account because of some machine learning security system false positive. There is essentially 0 user support from google in such cases.

And paid custom domain in google suite costs exactly the same as fastmail.

Plus email is fastmails primary business and I am their real customer.

I loved their product and their support.

[iUsedToCode]

I had to send more than 500 emails / day. So i switched over to FastMail.

It works well, and i like having unlimited aliases that i can kill at any moment. But there's no way of disabling deleting messages. I wanted to be extra sure i wouldn't loose any messages and what support said was basically "just don't delete them and you are all set".

What is worse, they accept the default deleting of messages of some email clients. Gmail won't allow deleting from a POP email client, which is much saner in my view.

[throw7]

I made the switch years ago because I heard they used Cyrus on the backend and actively contribute back to the project.

I was also getting fed up with being the product and the poor imap support out there.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I use ProtonMail for the simple reason that there is less of a chance they are selling my data and building up a user profile of me for advertisers to target.

[GlenTheMachine]

I use FastMail for exactly that reason.

And, secondarily, because I set up a GMail account for both of my kids when they were born, and I would occasionally email things to those accounts that I wanted them to have a record of. Nothing earth-shattering, just stuff I thought they might like to read when they were older. Then, one day without warning, Google shut my daughter's account down, for being under-age. I had no ability to retrieve all of those emails, and there was literally no one I could contact. Google has NO customer support, because you aren't the customer. So I decided I would be willing to pay $30 a year just to know that I could get an actual person on the phone.