Hi everybody,
I’ve had a domain name at Gandi.net for quite a while, which included 5 email addresses as well, hosted on my domain. Now they’re however discontinuing this offer, it will now be €3,99 per month per mailbox.
So, I’ve been looking around a bit. I need a service that allows me to connect it to my own domain name, that actually allows IMAP instead of requiring a special client, and preferably should allow me to put up several mailboxes under the same account since I currently have mailboxes for some of my family members.
Security is not a concern since this is only intended to be used for the email I send and receive under my actual legal name, and I know better than to use email for confidential material.
Zoho Mail seems like a good deal, since they have 10GB per user for only €1,13 a month. I’m just afraid that my emails might end up in spam filters since they’re based in India.
https://proton.me/ Are worth a look at. The allow custom domains and I believe have IMAP support. Additionally they encrypt everything they store so are very good from a privacy side (at least as far as you can be private using email).
They only sorta provide IMAP. You need to run Proton Bridge on your computer and that program will connect to their service and provide a local IMAP connection to your mail app of choice. It’s all a bit hacky but works well enough.
That’s a sign that they aren’t goofing on the encrypted part. If done right, they can’t decrypt your emails to hand them over on IMAP, so a bridge would be necessary to decrypt on your equipment, then hand off the decrypted mail to your IMAP client. It’s nice they offer that solution.
It’s a sign they use non-standard tech and lock you in progressively… while touting encryption at rest as a big advantage, when it doesn’t mean anything for email.
The Proton bubble is one evil acquisition away from bursting.
It’s a sign they use non-standard tech
Is there actually a standard tech for end-to-end encryption for emails? Because if not, then I don’t see what other option they had.
There is, it’s called OpenPGP. GnuPG (GPG) is a popular implementation of the standard and many email clients integrate with GPG or implement OpenPGP directly.
To achieve E2E encryption you need to generate a public/private key pair, exchange public keys with the recipient, and then you can encrypt a message that can only be decrypted and read by them.
To simplify the exchange of keys there are keyservers such as keys.openpgp.org where people can publish their public keys in advance. There are many keyservers and they usually replicate keys among themselves. So when you want to email someone and use E2E your email client can look at the closest keyserver and see if there’s a key for that address already there.
This approach to E2E is called OTG (On-The-Go). An OTG method can be applied to any insecure channel not just email. For example the OpenPGP keyservers are being used by programmers who work on open source projects to sign their code so their collaborators are sure it came from them, or by Linux distributions to sign the software packages in their “app stores”.
This is very different from what Proton or Tutanota are doing. They encrypt email at rest while on their server and force you to use non-email protocols when you talk to their servers (instead of standard IMAP/POP/SMTP), but they have no control over messages while in transit to/from other mail servers. Their connections to other servers may or may not be encrypted but if they are it’s only point-to-point for each hop, not E2E. And most other servers do not encrypt email while at rest there. So while email can be called reasonably secure between you and Proton/Tutanota servers, it stops being secure if you actually want to talk to someone who’s not on them.
To achieve secure email, pick your poison: you can try to convince other people to use an open standard & open tool & open keyservers, or you can try to convince them to use a proprietary server & proprietary tools.
Protonmail lets you use PGP
What’s the point with emails that were transmitted unencrypted over the Internet right before that? It’s like sending a post card via mail and then putting it into a safe at the receiver’s side. Sure it’s secure there, but that’s entirely pointless.
It’s true that there’s no point when emails are unecrypted in transit, but when sent to other Proton Mail users, they’ll be end-to-end encrypted. Additionally you have the option of not sending the email content itself, but rather a link to the encrypted contents.
I wouldn’t say it’s entirely pointless. You are correct that by the nature of email proton has to be able to read it in transit, there’s no avoiding that, it’s how email(and SMTP specifically) works. But what it does mean is that proton can honestly say it can’t read emails once they move beyond their edge systems. Personally, I don’t use email for anything critical or sensitive without additional encryption.
I use proton for my domains email too, but consider that their integration with other services is pretty bad. I haven’t found a proper tool for calenders sync, and email sync with thunderbird or other clients requires a extra app.
The pro of choosing them is that you get all their services: VPN, password manager, storage, calendar.
They are great, but much more expensive which was the issue. PurelyMail are the cheapest option.
Proton for sure.
If you have iCloud+ this is included and you can use Apples Mail app
I moved to this from tutanota so I could have IMAP. No complaints.
I like the GPG encryption option they have as it’s basically what I believe tuta does to their mail by default
Fastmail is awesome. If you want to set it up as receive only, you can set up CloudFlare email forwarding for free and have it forward to your regular account.
I’m very happy with fastmail for a similar use case to OP. Definitely a strong +1 fron me!
I’ve got Fastmail set up for myself (more tech savvy) and for my wife (it needs to ”just work” and easy like Google), and I’d say it’s a solid balance between wanting to do a bit more with the email and a rock solid just works email. At $5/mo (or $50/yr) per user, it’s not cheap, but I think the service is quite good and I’ve been extremely happy with the service provided. I also never have issues with SMTP access for my home server, I don’t think my mail has ever been sent to spam for any of my family or even sending reminders to my work email.
Their iOS app has also replaced the default / native iOS mail app because it’s just that good, which is a nice plus.
The ability to see up sieve filtering is great too. I’ve got a massive script that automatically sorts and files away most of my emails.
I want to like Proton Mail, but their sieve filtering kind of sucks, and with large mailboxes it slows down to an almost unusable amount.
I’ve also been extremely happy with fastmail. LOVE the subdomain addressing, ability to use folders or labels for organization, and the integration with bitwarden.
Be aware that the Australian government’s Assistance and Access bill allows them to compel local companies like Fastmail, or even employees of local companies without the awareness of their employers, to implement backdoors in their software without informing anyone about it.
I’ve used zoho before years ago, it’s pretty good. I currently do use proton personally as it has a good mix of stuff, including a VPN.
Can vouch for Zoho. Cheap and realiable if one doesn’t need encrypted stuff.
Zoho is great, especially for OP’s use case where they want to manage multiple mailboxes under the same domain. The Zoho cpanel can do all that.
Also Ive never had my outgoing emails rejected.
Just adding that the base level is free up to 5 users is you want to sample it a bit before paying for more features.
Been using Zoho for years, cheap and reliable.
Currently using Zoho for my small business and its been great. Bought a domain off of Namecheap for a price of a sandwich and used it on Zoho for free.
Migadu, postale.iO, mailbox.org, mxroute
Second mxroute, I got their black friday deal last year and I’ve liked it.
BF deal is live right meow -10GB, unlimited users/domains, 300 email sends an hour, for $10/year.
I don’t need it, but I’m thinking about buying it anyway.
Look into setting up Mail in a Box. Hosted on a server (I use digital ocean) your own domain name, as many users as you want. https://mailinabox.email/
I use Migadu, they put restrictions on the number of incoming and outgoing emails, not the number of domains or addresses, it’s not as cheap as the ones you’ve mentioned but per year it comes pretty close.
https://purelymail.com/pricing
$10 per year, single email can handle another plan option that is around $5 per year, with $10 minimum payment and 30 day free trial.
I’ve had a great experience with Migadu.com. if your use case is many domains/aliases with light use, it’s perfect.
you can use Skiff (that’s what i am using)
mxroute is currently offering a 10GB lifetime account for a hundred bucks US. One time fee.
I’m also in the process of leaving Gandi and I’ve written a post about it here.
If you’re ok with leaving your domains and nameservers at Gandi you just need to edit your DNS records and point them to another email service.
Migadu and MXroute work like you described, one account, multiple domains and mailboxes, they charge for what you use (mails and storage) not mailboxes. They will give you the DNS records to add to your nameservers.
You can use imapsync to copy your mail over to the new mailbox.
Check what it will cost to renew your domains, I had a surprise there too.
You can also transfer domains to another registrar, which may offer a free mailbox with it like Gandi used to do.
There are also other options, like using external nameservers. You can do any combo of domain registrar, DNS service and email service you want, ranging from having them all at one provider to using a different provider for each.
Iirc netcup offers this too, with additional groupware.
Most of the services I know of are about $3-4 per user per month. Google, Amazon, and Rackspace are all either $3 or $4 per user.
