[GTALUG] Google Gsuite Legacy domain replacement

[max]

Hi everyone,

I've been on this list for a while but so far not had anything to say. 

But I will also add that I would vouch for fastmail with caveats.  After "de googling" I went through a few paid email services. Tried and found lacking were: protonmail, tutanota and posteo. The latter is similar enough to other imap/smtp services (mailbox.org is another one iirc) if you use a client. Any of these might be suitable for a different use case and plenty of people like them. For my use here is my experience.

Fastmail pros:

- virtually unlimited aliases so you can provide a unique email anytime you feel like it

- use well known standard protocols rather than bespoke solutions with all the benefits and drawback these entail. Eg ical, contacts, pop3, imap, smtp.

- some webdav storage provided

- app passwords with various access rights

- workable web and mobile client system that allows complex filter rules, folders, multiple sending IDs, aliases, using external pop3/smtp accounts etc. This was something none of the others were close to able to handle. AFAIK there is no readytogo workable FLOSS only alternative to what gmail provides with regards to these. The only solution I could think of would be to have a pi orother server intercept messages on the way in and out to sort them and sort/averify according to rules. Too much work. 

- web client is nonobnoxious to look at with dark mode available (posteo insists on sticking to a lime green + white branding throughout)

- because they provide business oriented solutions it is possible to have fully seperate sub accounts which the owner can admin. I do not use this but would probably be suitable for a family. 

- as alex noted they play well with other services with no problems sending or receiving as far as I know. I had issues with tutanota in this regards, without bouncing or other notification on the sender side so it was a bit of a mess realizing long after the fact

Fastmail cons

- no effort to use, build or contribute FLOSS tools on front or back end (vs proton and tutanota most noteably)

- 2fa only by SMS, no TOTP (srsly)

- might be excessively nitpicky: I disabled images loading in mail. However when they send occasional update email I noticed there were images. Furthermore on inspection there were obvious trackers in the images. I opened a ticket with their support but ticket was closed because it turns out *their* trackers are used only to help them improve their services and they would never even think of doing anything creepy with the data... unlike what I'm sure all others would say? They suggested that I could unsubscribe from the email of course. But if I am paying for a service I want to receieve news about it. So I am annoyed that someone there seems to have gone to extra effort to circumvent their own user preferences. 

- it's a bit over my head but my impression is that at rest encryption and/or encryption in transit outside their own network is not as good as the others. But please verify if that's important to you. 

- lots of domains available for alias creation but most of them sound really stupid or sketchy

Hope some of that is useful to somebody!

Max

On Wed, Apr 13, 2022, at 2:53 PM, Alex Kink via talk wrote:
> He mentioned he has four users, hence the price.
> 
> I'm going to give a vote for Fastmail. It's a stellar service and company that has been in the business of providing good email for 20 something years.
> Pricing wise it's still $5USD/month or $50USD/year per user for reasonable size mailbox and custom domains.
> 
> Fastmail allows you to create aliases, so for kids I just have aliases that lead to me. These are at no cost.
> 
> One of the considerations in choosing a mail provider in 2022 is email deliverability, since this is mostly not a technical parameter but the sometimes arbitrary decision of a sysop at the receiving provider's end. On this front Fastmail has also been problem free for me (I have DKIM and SPF records set).
> 
>> On Apr 13, 2022, at 14:22, Kevin Cozens via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>> 
>> I think that must be a typo. Assuming with tax it isn't more than $10/month
>> that is only $120 per year, not $420.
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
> Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20220419/0c49d770/attachment.html>