Hi All,
I would like to choose a new email provider, where security and privacy of the email is one of my main concerns (nothing to hide, but want to keep my data private, differently than what happens with the major providers). I have read maaany posts and websites guides but I am still confused.
I am happy to pay a euro or so /month, so I had reduced my choice to Mailbox, Posteo, Mailfence. The problem is that each of them has some flows that don’t let me go ahead with them!
Mailbox: uses PGP, so not straightforward to send encrypted emails (unlike with tutanota) and to have encryption at rest. No mobile app. Alias reuse after 90 days
Posteo: no spam folder. ALias reuse after 24 months
Mailfence : has no encryption at rest , no mobile app. Not sure about alias reuse
Have you got any comments on the above providers and /or other suggestions (except for Tutanota and Protonmail)? thank you, appreciated!
I have my emails set up with Purelymail, they’re great if you don’t need the extra office suite tools and have a lot of custom domain addresses, but I’m also skeptical about the “single point of failure” setup as everything is run by one person and the entire service can go down with him. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t any other mail service that doesn’t charge extra for additional domains.
The single point of failure setup with Purelymail does indeed give me the occasional worry. But fortunately there are a lot of standard tools and processes for migrating email content from one server to another via IMAP and email archives. You can e.g. have a Thunderbird client running at all times, connected to your Purelymail server via IMAP, that will download an offline copy of everything you have in your Purelymail account(s). If Purelymail goes down tomorrow, you can find another provider that supports IMAP, update your DNS MX records, upload your Thunderbird archive to the new provider, and start using your new email provider as never even happened.
Email migrations from hosting provider to another have been among the easiest migrations I’ve ever had to work with. You only have to convince both parties to open up an IMAP server interface for you. ProtonMail can do this with Proton Bridge, but they also have a tool for importing raw .mbox files from Thunderbird.
After reading up on this some more it seems like he has plans in place to have his brother maintain the service if he can’t anymore, and even if he didn’t, the service should run until his aws subscription ends. Seems like not too big of an issue even for those who don’t use a client.
Yes, this is one of the wonderful benefits of federation. Thanks to IMAP, you can constantly keep an offline copy of all your emails. If Purelymail stops working for whatever reason, you can just sign up somewhere else, point your domain MX records to the new server and upload your emails there via IMAP or their own import tool. Migrating takes less than an hour, and even that is only because it takes a while for the DNS MX records to propagate.