Gmail replacement

I’ve been slowly trying to move as a much as I can away from googles data horde. The big one will of course be Gmail. Does anyone have any good recommendations for a good, reliable, privacy conscious email provider?

Other than possibly just hosting my own email. Which I guess wouldn’t be too bad, but I’m sure it would be a not insignificant money investment.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
While I too grumble about google's increasingly evil tendencies... I can't go back to what life was like before google's spam filters. :(
 
Yeah... Comparing the spam filters between my Gmail and my wife's Outlook account, it's no contest - and outlook is supposed to actually be good at this compared to others.
She loses mails in her spam and gets spam in her mailbox. I get neither...
 
I have my own domain that comes with email from Godaddy.
I use Thunderbird as a local email client (though Godaddy also has webmail). Thunderbird has both manual filtering and adaptive spam training. My email address has been exposed on the naked internet for near 20 years, and I see very little spam in my inbox.
 
While I too grumble about google's increasingly evil tendencies... I can't go back to what life was like before google's spam filters. :(
Honestly, most of the email I get I consider junk. The priority inbox is what does the most for me. I just don’t find myself relying on email to communicate anymore. It’s more just a unified login name now.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Honestly, most of the email I get I consider junk. The priority inbox is what does the most for me. I just don’t find myself relying on email to communicate anymore. It’s more just a unified login name now.
Well, as Tinwhistler says, when you register a domain and get hosting, most any provider will also include e-mail service. I'm not sure I'd trust godaddy any more than google, but there's any number of registrars and hosting companies that would fit the bill.
 
As far as I know, go daddy doesn’t harvest your email content for advertising, and whatever else it wants. But I guess that could always change. I have no doubt they would let any government agency who asks have all the access they would want though.

I was looking at Proton mail. I’m pretty sure they’ve been around for a while, and I think they have a decent reputation.
 
It's a thing I've never done, mainly because I haven't had sufficient need to do so (and because it would probably require a biz-level ISP acct and/or static IP).
The short version is that if you do decide to go that route, the biggest tradeoff is that it is up to YOU to make sure your server gets all its patches and stays up to date and that YOU will be the one who has to defend it from outside hacking attacks.

--Patrick
 
I don’t know that I want to go that far. I am starting to lean towards what @Tinwhistler is doing. I may just have someone like go-daddy host my email for now. The nice thing about using your own domain is I could move it to another provider if needed. I’d just either lose my old email or have to migrate them somehow.
 
since I have Thunderbird move everything off the web server and to my local drive, I never have to worry about even that.

And "local drive" can mean onedrive, dropbox, mega, etc, so it can still be 'local' to various systems.
 
since I have Thunderbird move everything off the web server and to my local drive, I never have to worry about even that.

And "local drive" can mean onedrive, dropbox, mega, etc, so it can still be 'local' to various systems.
You can’t really do that with a mobile device though can you?
 
Dropbox works just fine on my mobile. But I don't check email on my phone, so I don't know if there's a thunderbird client.

Just looked..there's not.
 
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