https://proton.me/ is the direction I have recently chosen to migrate away from Gmail. They natively support PGP (for the super paranoid) and also has extra perks like VPN and their own version of Drive. Is it truly any more secure than Google? Who really knows, but I am tired of Google scraping thru my emails to fish out directed advertising. It would be one thing if the accounts were unpaid and this was just another way to generate revenue for the service, but with the amount of storage utilized, it was paid for (on multiple accounts). Proton provided a nice feature to import all the Gmail information including contacts and calendar. There was one oddity with importing into the calendar, thinking it had something to do with the way Google ties contact info into calendar (birthdays and such). There are many choices, even rolling your own mail server if you have the time.
Self-Hosted Main
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
For Example
- Service: Dropbox - Alternative: Nextcloud
- Service: Google Reader - Alternative: Tiny Tiny RSS
- Service: Blogger - Alternative: WordPress
We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
Useful Lists
- Awesome-Selfhosted List of Software
- Awesome-Sysadmin List of Software
I really like Zoho mail. It’s free to setup with your own domain email. I get 5 inboxes for free, which would be enough for a small business. They get 5GB of storage for free. They don’t allow mail clients to be used outside of their own mail clients which is good enough for me unless you pay a subscription. They have both a desktop and mobile app for their mail service.
So far, I’ve used it for personal business and it’s not getting spammed to death. I would love to start a business by providing IT applications, mail setup services and hardware services for existing local businesses.
Skiff
On-Prem Exchange Server. Way better than anything else.
I use postfix, dovecot and snappymail. Very happy.
I already had a well-configured postfix (DKIM, DMARC) for web applications, so adding dovecot was easy. It's also really powerful, you can define who gets mailboxes in scripts. I tried going with providers but I couldn't get this kind of power.
Self hosting with mailcow.
Alternatively proton.me
If you're not hosting yourself (don't), Zoho is my suggestion.
If you self host you are at the behest of your domain registrar.