I'm all for getting out of the cloud, but moving from one company, to multiple other companies seems to have achieved nothing but diversify and multiply the amount of terms you've had to agree to (they will all tell you the same thing in the end: if they block your account, or lose your data, it's your problem).
The only real solution is self-hosting[1], which is becoming a bit difficult with email these days.
[1] No, a rented server in some datacenter is not self-hosting, self-hosting is when you can walk into a room and point to the box that stores your mail.
I have wasted a lot of breath trying to convince people that the right way to go is to have one physical data center, and put all redundancy and edge networking in the cloud.
One of my fears is that as soon as you outsource hardware maintenance, then employees who were good at this sort of thing lose much of their value, either in their own head, or in the group consensus. They start to wander off to work for other companies, and you quickly lose critical mass. Once that happens, the quality of advice you get for architectural proposals degrades, and your number of stupid design mistakes notches up considerably.
These people also provide a lot of your 'informed consumer' qualities. They can explain why you shouldn't have to pay $1000 a month for a service.
I've seen this play out a couple of times. It's too slow to be called a train wreck. It's like watching erosion take out beautiful house. You can enjoy it for a while, but eventually it starts to sag and then fall apart. Slowly at first and then all at once.
yeah, I guess I've been elite since I was 14 years old and put my pentium 90 online as a server.. it's entirely doable, there are two million guides for doing lots of stuff more ambitious on a raspberry pi, and that'd even be plenty of power for many uses.
This is ultimately what I ended up doing, with one caveat: I have mailinabox running on a VPS in a local datacenter.
If my ISP wasn’t so aggressive with sending mail, I would’ve just self hosted on my own computer.
However, mailinabox also comes with nextcloud, and it works out of the box with exchange activesync, allowing me to basically mimic gmail’s syncing of calendar/contacts/etc.
I made the switch about a year ago, it took registering two domains (one for the actual mail server and one for <lastname>.com) and paying for the VPS, plus all the overhead of initial configuration, but it has been smooth sailing since. My email is happily firstname@lastname.com to the public and private@mailserver.tld for private stuff- it even supports the firstne+string@lastname.com.
At the end of the day, this is probably the best someone can reasonably do. Then it’s just ddg and Apple Maps.
The fact you were able to register your lastname as a dotcom is incredibly fortunate, especially if that was a recent registration. Mine has been a marketing agency since 1995.
I ran my own business email for a while in a DigitalOcean VPS, but it was a huge pain. I did it all by hand though, I should give mailinabox a try.
I've just set up a mail server with the same stack as mailinabox (with a few minor differences, since I didn't care for the web-screens, self-hosted DNS and the fact that my residential ISP offers a static IP service).
If you do give it a try, I would personally simplify the set-up. If you're comfortable with some downtime you can get away with running just Postfix, Dovecot (with some secondary services) and delegating to the OS for user management. All of them come with systemd services so it isn't too bad to manage.
I got lastnamefarm.com there are plenty of variations on that theme to go around. My last name is common enough that if I had thought to get it in 1993 I would have sold it by now anyway.
Is getting your mail sent from your own e-mail server past the GMail and Outlook spam filters trivial? I always hear about the aggressive spam filters that these providers have which makes it hard to set up your own server. Not saying it's not possible, but I am assuming it is somewhat difficult to set up and their is probably some maintenance that goes along with it. So much so that paying for a provider makes sense. As long as my subscription is the only revenue stream, I see no issue with using a "cloud service" to run email for my custom domain.
I'm willing to be the other services have similar situations where you might as well just pay someone to do it for you. $160 to not have to maintain a server room seems like a nice deal to me.
> they will all tell you the same thing in the end: if they block your account, or lose your data, it's your problem
Still there's a huge gap between "might do that according to the contract" and "does so on a regular basis and is well known to have no official way to appeal".
There's also a huge gap between the number of proton mail users and gmail accounts, percentage-wise, it'd be interesting to see how many percent of gmail/protonmail users has problems and. I'm sure we will see the most silly examples from gmail, we have to, because they have the most users, and so the greatest chance of hitting strange edge-cases.
And with edge-case, I don't meen technical ones only, but also customer-support ones.. If you've got support for many more people, then more people are going to have a bad experience, and even more likely that someone has a rare (in percent of total experiences) terrible one.
I'm the one entirely against any cloud stuff, I just don't buy the argument that other providers are necessarily better.
The bigger you are, the more interactions you do with your clients, the more likely that you will mess it up big-time for some of them.
Down to -1 now, I take that as a clear sign that someone does not want to think too much about just how bad our situation has become :) (or they're trying to sell a SaaS and therefore need me to be wrong), nice :)
It's amazing how this place is called "Hacker" News and downvotes opinions that are not mainstream enough or not corporate-friendly enough.
You are right that self-hosting means that your data sits on your devices, and this should be made possible to most users without having to pay 3rd party services, buy domains, pay for VPSes and learn to manage servers.
The only real solution is self-hosting[1], which is becoming a bit difficult with email these days.
[1] No, a rented server in some datacenter is not self-hosting, self-hosting is when you can walk into a room and point to the box that stores your mail.