[nsagent]

I've need a paying subscriber to Proton since 2018, but I recently canceled my subscription (which ends in November). I just got fed up with the constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings.

Any suggestions for mail hosting and VPN? I hear good things about Fastmail and mailbox.org (I see they very recently rebranded to just mailbox and revamped their offering).

Also, I've been a heavy user of the SimpleLogin alias service. Any suggestions for easily porting all those accounts to a new provider? Manually changing each and every account to a new email seems painful.

[0xbadcafebee]

Fastmail is fine. It's somewhat limited in its UX, but technically speaking, everything works, and it's snappy. Very few outages. I really like their integrations with calendars, contacts, and mail for 3rd party sites/services. Not a ton of features or deals re: custom domains or multiple users, but it's fine if it's just for yourself. edit They literally -JUST- turned on Offline support for their app and web interface, so my only real complaint is gone. Go with Fastmail.

For a VPN, what do you need it to do? For tinfoil hat privacy stuff, get a VPS in Estonia or something. If you just want a secure tunnel while working remote, get a WiFi access point with Wireguard and Dynamic DNS at your home (it's free plus you probably have more bandwidth).

[crossroadsguy]

Hey, what's the trick of keeping your VPS OS/etc updated and upgraded without having to nuke (or replace or copy to elsewhere and "paste" back) the current setup on that VPS? In all my self hosting attempts it works butter smooth until I try to update/upgrade my VPS OS or hell even the app I am using like a VPN, or a seedbox, a notes app etc etc. I mean it's been really painful. Sometimes I have used the VPS w/o updating for 3-4 years - no security/OS update - none. The moment I do that - bam! Everything broken or gone :(

[0xbadcafebee]

Two basic ways:

1) Use your VPS OS's native software upgrade mechanism

2) Build, test, and deploy immutable images

For 1), you configure your OS (Ubuntu LTS let's say) to do automatic unattended upgrades only for security updates (check documentation for instructions). They're designed to be backwards compatible so this is safe and automatic. May require you to periodically reboot the box. When that version of Ubuntu is eventually end-of-life, they usually provide a manual upgrade procedure to upgrade in-place to a newer version of Ubuntu. A couple manual steps over an hour or two and you're set until the new version goes EOL (many years for Ubuntu LTS).

For 2), you would build either a container or a disk image with your OS, preferred software, configs, etc. Build the image (Packer for disk image, Docker for container), write a simple test to run it and make sure it's working. Now you can install that new container or disk image onto your VPS, and you know it'll work. This is more work, but the resulting image is guaranteed to work the same way every time. So every time you upgrade, you just build a new image. If the new image doesn't work for some reason, just go back to the last image that did work. Set all this up on a CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, etc) and you can just keep using that setup forever, no need to get it set up on your laptop again if you reinstall your laptop OS.

For either of these, it helps to use only software that is packaged for your OS, rather than installing custom software. There will be less extra work to perform to get the software to work and configured, and upgrade steps will be smoother.

For 2), it also helps to use a VPS which has a Terraform provider (https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?category=infr...) so you can write code to automate updating your VPS's disk image (or restoring an old one).

[jwrallie]

But if you get a VPS your traffic will always be linked with a unique IP. VPNs have an advantage there.

[bigiain]

Most providers will hand you a new IP if you suspend then restart your instance. That at least spreads you pool of IPs across their AS (or some subset of it). For the price of a "reputable" VPN service, you could run 2 or 3 low end VPSes from different providers. A bit of Ansible, Python (or language of your choice), and perhaps some browser automation if the cheap VPN provider doesn't have a usable API - should allow you to automate provisioning VPN endpoints and rotating IP addresses.

That would at least move your needle around a lot, even if it isn't bringing along the haystack of all the other VPN customers sharing their endpoint IP addresses. You couldn't consider this sufficient protection against TLAs or Mossad. Or disgruntled Magic The Gathering players burnt by MtGox...

[akshitgaur2005]

> get a WiFi access point with Wireguard and Dynamic DNS at your home

Could you elaborate more on this?

[Fethbita]

Not the parent but you can set up Dynamic DNS at home and Wireguard in your router and later use the Wireguard connection to connect to your home network and have a safe tunnel.

It’s quite easy to do with openwrt routers.

[0xbadcafebee]

Yep! And TP-Link, Asus, GL.iNet, MicroTik, and other consumer routers also have Wireguard/OpenVPN servers and Dynamic DNS clients.

For the parent commenter: you set up an account at a Dynamic DNS service, and configure your router so when it's online, a dynamic DNS hostname will always point at your router's IP. Then you set up a Wireguard or OpenVPN server on your wifi AP. Then set up your phone, laptop, etc to connect to that server at the dynamic dns hostname. Now you have a VPN server running on your home wifi AP. Connect when you're away from home, and your traffic will go securely through your home ISP connection.

[aryonoco]

I moved from Proton to Fastmail (and Mullvad for VPN).

I was a a founding paying member of Proton Mail. I loved them and evangelised them for years. But after a decade, the quality of the offering, especially the mail and calendar, is almost a joke, and the company seems very distracted chasing the next big thing (the half baked password manager being one).

Comparing Fastmail’s UI and feature set with Proton, you quickly realise they are leagues apart.

And no Fastmail doesn’t provide e2e encryption. For that I use Signal, and for the few occasions where I need e2e encryption in email, I use PGP.

My only wish is that there was more client support for JMAP protocol. Even thunderbird doesn’t support it, and I can’t go back to IMAP because I like labels. Thankfully Fastmail’s own web interface is so good it is not a big issue.

[mdaniel]

> (the half baked password manager being one).

Or a very bizarre LLM offering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44657556

[TingPing]

I’d say they make one of the best password managers. Its probably their biggest success in recent years.

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

This 9-year-old issue me a bad taste for mailbox...

https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...

[crossroadsguy]

That's classic Mailbox. Deny there's a problem, or just don't ever respond. Hell, my tickets, when I face an issue, don't get responded to for weeks sometimes, and when it gets responded to, often it's a one-liner accompanied by closure of ticket :D

[idle_zealot]

I'm using Fastmail and Mullvad. Both seem to work pretty well and are reasonably priced. You could also host your own on VPSs if you're feeling adventurous.

[const_cast]

My experience is the apps are missing very fundamental features. Which would be fine... If you could use other clients. But you can't, except for email, kind of.

Like, the calendar on mobile doesnt even have a search function. What if I want to know when an event is happening? I just have to scroll and scroll until I find it? Come on now. Also no storage backup in proton drive??? What??? That's, like, 90% of the purpose of proton drive!

[paradox460]

The lock in is absurdly restrictive in some ways too. For example, they don't support sieve based forwarding. I wanted to forward parcel tracking emails to shop app, but can't set up an automated way to do it

[j-bos]

Yeah I was really disappointed they released their llm service before making an official proton drive linux client.

[esseph]

> constant bugginess and jankiness of their offerings

This is something I had not heard (also have been a paying user for a very long time).

I've never encountered a bug, to my knowledge. I did dislike that when they released photo storage they didn't have a proper search feature.

[throwway120385]

For me the jank is in their billing and the plans I can purchase. I can either have a Business Mail Essentials plan or a Business Password plan, but if i want both at the same time I have to buy a plan that's three times as expensive or drop my custom domain name.

[esseph]

I do dislike their billing options when it comes to feature / service selection.

[inferiorhuman]

  I've never encountered a bug

I've never hit any of the major bugs, but the iOS app is quite glitchy. The unread count never updates if the mailbox is externally modified (e.g. via the web app), sometimes it goes to zero or one. Sometimes my messages simply don't show up.

There was also that whole IMAP data loss issue. Unsure if that ever got resolved.

[esseph]

Android / Linux using the web apps / chrome ext here.

[teekert]

Same here, no bugs in Proton apps and I’m still a happy subscriber.

[nsagent]

Proton seems to have a lot of cheerleaders that come out of the woodwork when anyone complains. I'm happy that somehow their code is magically bug free for you, since you've somehow never encountered any bugs whatsoever in their code (despite their release notes mentioning literal bugs they've fixed).

I'm glad it works for you, but their offering is frequently buggy and broken for me.

[dotnet00]

It'd be useful if you pointed out bugs instead of just implying that anyone who doesn't share your experience is some sort of shill

[nsagent]

The person I was responding to literally said they were "a paying user for a very long time" and "never encountered a bug". No software is bug free. I can't think of a single software service I've used for as long as Proton (7 years now) where I haven't encountered a single issue over that time. I take their statement to be so incredibly unlikely as to be facetious or intentionally duplicitous.

So I responded in kind, because I've definitely seen company cheerleaders, and I'll have no part of it. I'm glad you all are happy with Proton. I'm not telling you to leave.

And if you really want to see complaints, you don't have to look far. Read the other comments on this thread. I don't have to spell everything out for you.

[esseph]

Idk what to tell you. Email is mostly a solved problem for most cases, and object storage is mostly the same. Password manager is one of the best I've found in any platform, at least for the individual-user use case.

The VPN has always just worked, too.

If you're using desktop apps for things, really can't help you there as I have no experience with any proton offerings for that piece.

[nsagent]

  Idk what to tell you. Email is mostly a solved problem for most cases

Idk what to tell you. Considering email is mostly a solved problem, Proton must be extra incompetent for inadvertently deleting people's emails due to multiple different bugs in their code that took them far too long to address (multiple years in some cases).

https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/t8vwhf/deleting... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33432296 https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/yjz3yu/proton_b... https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1j79x7j/has_the...

(The temerity of the customer service response on that last one, saying they have no clue about the bug being asked about is galling, but par for the course for them).

BTW, make flippant responses, get responses in kind. Normally I'd ignore this idiocy, but today was your lucky day. Anyway, it's clear you're just a troll and I've indulged you enough.

[esseph]

I would imagine this is the universal case, otherwise they would be out of business.

People that feel very satisfied or dissatisfied with something are most likely to comment. I've just been very satisfied.

[calvinmorrison]

Fastmail is a good product with technical chops, contributes to open source and cares generally about being good members of the international email space, standards etc.

Fastmails interface is very plain, and it works very fast and works well.

They support a plethora of ways to do mail and have many advanced users so their mail support is very good, maybe close to running your own mail server without having to deal with rbls and getting spamlisted

[Modified3019]

I moved to Fastmail a few years ago. No real complaints, and I’d definitely do it all over again.

That said, because I’ve not experienced any failure, I’ve not experienced how well Fastmail handles failure, which is the real measure of a company.

[cscharenberg]

I've been on Zoho for my (and my partner's) email for 4+ years and it has been great. Chose them because there is no per-domain charge, so I have like 12 domains on it.

The configurability is extensive in both web app and ios email app. Service has been fast and stable. They rarely change anything in the UI (no random tinkering is what I mean) so it is predictable and easy to use.

[raybb]

I love https://purelymail.com/ for the same reason. Unlimited domains and you can pay based on usage. I pay about 1 cent per day.

[shelled]

I wanted to use them. But they had a bug in SMS sending and it's been a few weeks (or more) and they have not fixed it or been able to fix it. Also, it was not clear whether they use the same setup for recovery/alert SMS (I asked, received no reply). I tried following up with their support for a few days (it's a one-person setup; recently a support person was hired who responds on Discord and is apparently swamped), but it didn't happen. I just tried now and the issue still exists. That seemed like not a good sign. Also - ownership has changed few months ago.

[raybb]

Ah crap the ownership change is new to me. At least the opening blog post seems like they're trying to do good by the customers.

https://news.purelymail.com/posts/updates/2025-03-06-a-new-c...

[skinner927]

Also been using zoho for at least 6 years. Cheap and reliable.

[elpalek]

I wouldn't trust Zoho. More than 10 years ago, they shadowbanned (can not be shared or publicly viewed) my documents because it criticized Chinese communist party.

[fuzztester]

what are the charges?

[skinner927]

Entry level is $12/year. Bring your own domain.

[newscracker]

For mail hosting, take a look at Posteo.de (no custom domains though), mailbox.org, runbox.com, mailfence, migadu, and cranemail. All these are cheaper and a lot more affordable than something like Fastmail. All of them support IMAP, using which you can move your email elsewhere (or easily backup/have local copies).

[crossroadsguy]

I am a Fastmail customer. Absolutely horrible customer support but pretty solid email. Do not even think about using the "suit" they offer alongside email.

The rebranding and "revamp" is limited to the logo and colour changes :D everything under the hood is still the same good old OX inferiority. Hell, you may never want to use their webmail either (my 99.9999% mail usage is via IMAP clients). They are fine other than that.

Fastmail is pretty good if their price and offerings are not an overkill for you. You should check Runbox as well - really good.

Simple Login alt: addy.io? Fastmail and Mailbox (auto-deletes in 30 days unless you "touch" it :D) also have disposable email as part of email offerings. Don't know about Runbox.

[RandomBacon]

Interesting. I've used their customer service a couple of times, and it's been okay for me. What was horrible that you experienced?

[crossroadsguy]

One of the times I wish there was a longer edit window on HN

> I am a Fastmail customer. Absolutely horrible customer support but pretty solid email. Do not even think about using the "suit" they offer alongside email.

I meant to type “Mailbox” (I find their support horrible) but mobile and typo/confusion. Anyway my fault.

Whenever I had something to ask - Fastmail has been stellar! I don’t use it because it’s too costly for me and offers resources I absolutely do not need.

(You might already have guessed I meant mailbox though as I mentioned Fastmail separately later, did you?)

What was horrible about mailbox support? Too many instances and examples and also I wouldn’t want to mention exact examples here as I have those in their forum and also on support tickets.

[dunefox]

https://tuta.com/

[newscracker]

The one thing I don’t like about both Proton and Tuta is that they don’t support IMAP. Users of these platforms would find it a bit more difficult to move their emails out of the system if they wish to.

[cedws]

See here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45229681

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

Similar case, I recently migrated from @mozmail to SimpleLogin and wondered if I made the right choice.

I heard using your own domains solves the migration issue but that makes your email pretty identifiable just by looking at your domain.

I wonder whats a suitable replacement candidate after Mozmail and Simple Login? One of the reasons I migrated away from Mozmail to Simple Login was that you can't initiate a email sending, which made it difficult to contact support if needed. Plus Mozmail are on Amazon SES.

[crossroadsguy]

You mean Firefox Replay right? It has been in beta for a long time (I mean anything other than the basic free plan). Did you get in via some invite or so?

https://relay.firefox.com right? Or there's another service?

> that makes your email pretty identifiable

Agreed. I have also stopped abusing the catch-all of my domains. It became a pain very soon. Not only privacy issues but I couldn't possibly block those emails/spam that were coming on usernames like sales and many more.

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

Yes I was using Firefox Relay.

> Did you get in via some invite or so?

I signed up normally. It's been a while so I don't remember the details but I didn't receive any invitation or early access etc.

[crossroadsguy]

I mean there's a Free Plan which is the only one available to be used and it has no "reply from alias" feature.

Then there's "Email Protection" which has reply from alias feature, doesn't show any billing. Two other plans with "billed monthly". But all three are still on "Join the Waitlist". Maybe it's not released in my geography yet.

https://i.postimg.cc/FsndSJm5/temp-Image-Vp5r-HT.avif

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

It's likely due to Firefox Relay being available at limited regions [1].

Here's what I see [2].

[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/which-countries-firefox...

[2]: https://postimg.cc/q6H9nDQf

[citizenpaul]

Fastmail has an open source API they call jmap. You could probably find or write something that could help convert to the fastmail masked email. I was able to setup an integration with a local llm to read my email and act on it in about an hour.

I like fastmail they seem to have a move slow and don't break things mentality that I like from my email.

[DanOpcode]

I recently moved from Gmail to Migadu and started to use my own domain instead. Works great so far

[chanux]

I've used Migadu since their free plan days. Even though I had trouble in the transition (partly due to my fault) it was handled decently and I stayed on. Been friction less since. I must also mention Edison e-mail, which makes such a great client!

[2cents5ewe27366]

I've been happy with Startmail, good customer service, they don't offer any of the non-email cloud services though.

[mulmen]

I use Fastmail and I’m mostly happy with it. Their design team is thoughtless so their web and mobile offerings are disappointing. The mail hosting itself seems to be excellent though.