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Ask HN: Alternative to Proton Mail?
So I wanted to get away from GMail because I don't want to depend on a service that could just go away at any moment. Now I need to get away from Proton because they can't keep the air conditioners in Franfurt running.
What are the alternatives people are trying? I would like to have:
a. A service that can run for a week without going down for hours at a time.
b. Custom domains. Ideally I would like all messages to a particular domain routed to my in-home server with an online web-mail interface for the last couple of months.
c. Don't barf on PGP or S/MIME.
d. IMAP or POP. If I can't just get simple message routing to/from my local server, I'll take IMAP (preferably) and POP (if I have to.)
e. A service that can run for a week without going down for hours at a time.
I guess I get what I deserve. The "S" in "ProtonMail" is for "Service Level Agreement."
- mkbkn 14d agoThere's Kagi Mail.
- 4lx87 14d agoiCloud. Great price. Great service. And Apple has better privacy safeguards and internal processes in place for protecting your email from their employees than FastMail or anyone besides maybe the encrypted mail providers like ProtonMail.
- OhMeadhbh 15d agoI would email a link to this post to Bart (Butler), but my email service isn't working at the moment.
- toomuchtodo 15d agoFastMail. They've working to support an EU region first class. Great uptime imho. Fastmail offers EU data region - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223082 - August 2026 (296 comments)
- OhMeadhbh 15d agoDo you know if they have multiple data centers and can fail-over when one barfs? I'm willing to pay a little extra for a SLA. Also, cyberinsider.com thinks Fastmail is in bed w/ the feds cause they have data centers in the states. Is that accurate? meh. I dunno. https://cyberinsider.com/email/reviews/fastmail/ https://cyberinsider.com/email/reviews/fastmail/ Thx for the info, though.
- atmosx 13d agoThey do have fallback, they keep backups in the US. So if you want backup / data EU sovereignty it’s not really going to cut it. I don’t remember them having an outage the last many years… nothing that affected me at least.
- toomuchtodo 15d ago"What is your threat model?" If you want to stay entirely outside of the reach of the US gov, stick with Proton and eat the outages. If you are willing to take on some more risk, try Fastmail. Consider the subject comms and whether higher risk comms should instead be in something like Signal.
- dlcarrier 15d agoI just recently signed up for Infomaniak (www.infomaniak.com) which I believe meets all those requirements, although I can't speak for their uptime, because I haven't used it long enough. It does let you use IMAP on the free account, which is what drew me to them.
- jcoulaud 15d ago[dead]