Choosing a email hosting service
I want to move away from Google as my email provider but I’m not sure what’s the best way to do it. One of the answer is to host my own mail server, but email is something too important to mess up. The next option is to chose a third party email provider. I want stability and ability to change my email provider without much consequence. As a first step to make it easy to swith providers, I’ve got my own domain and I intend to use a custom email address on domain as my primary email address. So even when I switch email providers I can continue to use my email address.
From quite some time I’ve been following the encrypted mail services Tutanota and Protonmail, I’ve account on both of them and I use Protonmail quite frequently. Protonmail is quite usable, it is quite stylish too, and it big enough to not to disappear overnight. My primary concern with Protonmail (and Tutanota) is that they are a “lock in”, as in it will be very hard to move out of their service once I start relying on them. They do not support POP or IMAP to use it with thunderbird and don’t have mechanisms to export my emails. Also as of now their end-to-end encryption depends on the other user using Protonmail (or Tutanota), which clearly shouldn’t be the answer. Ideally Protonmail’s should release a standard using which any provider can communicate with its end-to-end encryption scheme. On the basis of the standard plugin’s can be also be created for thunderbird and other email clients. Until the issue of interoperability is fixed I cannot use any of these encrypted mail services.
For other other unencrypted email services I’m trying out FastMail, I’ve signed up for a 30 day trial and have added my custom domain, will decide after that if I want to buy a subscription or not. Will let you know.
Edit August 2018:
Protonmail now provides an IMAP/SMTP bridge to use it with email clients. I have been using fastmail from last 2 years and I’m quite happy with it, though now I can potentially move to Protonmail as well.
