Ask HN: Paid Alternatives (for Gmail)?

[dotme]

I was one of the person whose account was accidently reseted by gMail. My account had 10K+ emails over the time period of last five years. I know they will restore it anyways, but still this incident has made me more concerned about having a secure e-mail (I know, no one can beat gmail in ease of use).

What I am looking for is some paid alternative to e-mail. I tried fastmail.fm, and its good enough. I am still not sure about their reliability.

I can afford upto $50 a year, with atleast 1 gb of storage. Reliability is the most important concern.

[dustyreagan]

I doubt a paid email service will be anymore reliable than Gmail. Your best bet is probably to look into a good backup strategy. For example, you could use Outlook or Mail to retrieve all of your Gmail locally while still keeping the original email on Gmail.

[ggordan]

Agreed. Any service can fail regardless whether it's paid or not. So the best way to keep your emails safe is backups.

[sixtofour]

Whatever solution your choose, you should have a regular backup process.

It's not that gmail could lose your emails. It's that email could lose your emails.

[dotme]

Backing up e-mail is something hard to think about. Atleast, for this thing the service provider should take the responsibility.

[michael_dorfman]

Reliability is the most important concern.

You really think there is someone out there with a better reliability record than Google on this front?

[yanw]

They had 99.99% uptime last year: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/01/destination-dia...

I'm on the paid Google apps and my account is intact (I'm not sure if any apps accounts were among those disrupted) but as far as I can tell if you're looking for a reliable web based email service Gmail is your best bet, you could periodically download emails if you want to feel safer.

[dotme]

Any Personal account option? I don't want to jump on Business Plan !

[yanw]

It's free for < 50 users.