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Email Solutions: what do you use?

Good morning, I'm curious what users of this forum use to send and receive email in daily life. A few months ago, I finalized my termination of my Google account and all related services, if not for the sake of my privacy and liberty, then for the sake of my sanity; I now use Proton as my only email provider. Unfortunately, I have learned that every single one of my sent emails has ended up in the recipients' spam filters or is silently blackholed outright. I send ordinary messages from an ordinary address, however according to my cursory review of user anecdotes, Proton's domains are widely blacklisted, allegedly due to large volumes of abuse, and apparently an association with "radical conspiracy theorists."

Clearly, I must switch providers again, but what are the options? My threat model is very permissive - I am not some sort of black hat hacker who only logs in via Tails, I am an ordinary student with ordinary needs - all I truly require is that I am not so brazenly spied on and interfered with as I was by Gmail and Outlook. Essentially, I am looking for an email solution which does not do anything to me that ought to be illegal, while of course ensuring that my messages are not universally marked as spam. (n.b. I do not currently have the resources to host my own private email server, but I would like to learn about this route nonetheless.)

Thank you for reading, and thank you in advance for sharing your experience.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #1 –
I use a gmail account for receiving email. Thunderbird or the gmail website can be used for both sending and receiving email.

For programmatic email sending I use s-nail mailx with msmtp as the client interface to gmail. As a single user linux I can configure msmtp access to smtp.gmail.com in /etc/msmtprc. The arch wiki has good info on s-nail and msmtp.

I seem to recall having to allow a specific APP to access gmail.

For security there's always protonmail.com which can be used similarly.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #2 –
Self hosting is the only way to go if you want control of your email.

opensmtpd + Dovecot is what I use on a little minipc. It doesn't require much in the way of resources computer wise. You could pick up something on ebay for aroung £30.

Unfortunately dynamic residential ip's get blacklisted entirely these days so I relay all outgoing smtp through a miniscule vps which costs $19 a year.

To reduce being marked as spam requires DKIM, SPF and DMARC set up correctly and time.
Time because until your sending IP gains reputation you'll experience messages marked as spam and more so delays in the recipient getting your emails (Many servers will deliberately TEMPFAIL your emails on the basis that that many spam bots won't try again. a proper SMTP server will keep trying to send the email. It gets through in the end and your IP gets whitelisted in the end)

Well done ditching the Google accounts. I did the same a few years ago.
I'd be lying if I said self hosting email wasn't complex at all but it's not as complex as many people think. Certainly not 'next to impossible' as I often see stated.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #3 –
I would never use Proton. Maybe they've fixed a few things, but back when I tried them out, "full" features were available only after 1) installing their phone client, and 2) uploading your address book. They didn't mention this in their promotional material. Also, IIRC, they don't fully support POP3/SMTP using a local MUA.

I used COTSE for years (Church of the Swimming Elephant). They were better back in the old days, and their website has gone from being very informative to a pile of suck. But, they're very privacy focused, and have features such as VPN and proxy. They also offer web hosting. I had trouble with them failing to promptly renew their certificates nearly every year, and with billing - they stopped billing me, but didn't let me know, and I didn't notice it, then suddenly I got a notice of termination with just 1-day of advance warning. That said, there are good features. You get your own sub-domain, so on-the-fly aliases and filtering based on those is very easy. Their anti-spam and mail filtering are very good.

However, I ended up switching to Mailfence. Price is decent (appx $44/yr) with sufficient support for aliases, including +mode addressing. I chose them after surveying several pages on the web for "private e-mail service". They're in Germany, IIRC. So far, AFAIK, the only mail service which won't accept mail from them is CenturyLink. Why? I don't know. It's nearly impossible to contact them in a useful manner, even when I have DSL from them. Mailfence supports POP3/IMAP/SMTP just fine.

FWIW, I use Claws-Mail as my MUA. Very good program.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #4 –
I like free proton, but I just use it as web email. you can set up container tabs and have all your aliases logged in, secure and for free.

and a couple moz accounts to use the relay masks.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #5 –
Some good free options could include Mail.ru (but you might need to know a bit of Russian to navigate the site), Yandex, which is also Russian in origin but is now based in Europe last I heard, and has a wholly English (and other languges) interface, and GMX, a German provider, as good general purpose options. I've gained the impression that Yahoo has weak spam filters, it seems to receive more than others.
There's a table here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers
But some of the info on there is wrong or incomplete, like it fails to mention Yandex offers a free account, and I think you can have more than 2 alias addresses on free GMX.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #6 –
@gripped Hi again, thank you. This information is useful to me, especially about TEMPFAIL. I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the mini PC if everything is routed through the VPS (does the $19/yr plan not afford enough power to run a mail server?). I can't afford a domain and a host at this time, so I'm tempted to (extremely reluctantly) go back to using Gmail for now.
I feel just a little bit discouraged from taking email privacy seriously, because any email I send that isn't a support request will be going to a Gmail address, where Google's webmail client AI can scan and profile whatever I send, can't it?

@just_jed Hello and thanks. I think everything you mentioned about Proton has changed, except that they do give you an un-dismissable prompt to complete a list of chores, with the reward being a doubling of the "500.00 MB" of storage afforded to free users. One of the chores is to set up forwarding with Gmail (specifically Gmail), which I find perplexing for a company to do when a large part of their de facto business model is to give one the freedom to terminate their Google. (Ironically, about a decade ago, Google offered me an extra 2 GB of storage for submitting to a security procedure.) One of the other chores is to install the (almost unusable, another thing that hasn't changed) mobile application, another requirement I find perplexing to come from a company that claims to sell privacy.

Mailfence's fees... wouldn't the monthly cost of self-hosting an email address be about as much? I assume that using the custom domains from the "Entry" personal plan is necessary to prevent emails from being sent to spam by Google et al.

Quote from: n00b – on
I like free proton, you can set up container tabs and have all your aliases logged in
Hi, how are you getting aliases on a free plan? I am prompted to buy a Mail Plus subscription when attempting to add an alias.

@####### Hello, thank you. I like Yandex Image Search but I don't know how trustworthy they are as a company. It's worth noting that people who live in the USA, such as myself, may face real-life discrimination for openly using Russia-affiliated internet services, whether or not this affiliation is factual or current. It's starting to feel like it's the 1950s all over again. In America, even applications to renew passports now require a valid and reachable email address (not a telephone number, though  ???)!

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #7 –

Quote from: n00b – on
I like free proton, you can set up container tabs and have all your aliases logged in
Hi, how are you getting aliases on a free plan? I am prompted to buy a Mail Plus subscription when attempting to add an alias.
Perhaps aliases means something different to you? I mean you can be logged in to several accounts at once, one per container tab.
And Mozilla has a free relay for 5 addresses per account.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #8 –
I have Betterbird. It's a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird, Thunderbird on steroids. I have 4 email account logged onto it using IMAP, and I have had no issues with it so far.
S6/Plasma

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: nezunezu – on
@gripped Hi again, thank you. This information is useful to me, especially about TEMPFAIL. I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the mini PC if everything is routed through the VPS (does the $19/yr plan not afford enough power to run a mail server?).
The vps could manage it except for the storage side.  I have a lot of old emails! The vps has 20gb.  Not quite enough.
I prefer to have the main server in my home.  The vps, in this instance, is really just providing me with a static, non-residential, IP address.
The minipc also has webserver and a nextcloud server on it.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #10 –
Yandex had an office in California at one time but closed it in recent years. Yandex.ru is based in Russia while Yandex.com moved to a European HQ as a separate company to be able to continue providing services as normal to avoid sanctions a couple of years ago. I've not had any problems in the UK although not many other people seem to use it here. It's probably one of the best free accounts, although in recent years the option to choose slide show themes showing photos of Russian landscapes in the background was removed, and it now has only more normal static graphic themes. The current political situation is temporary and calming down at present. Perhaps due to the history of Communist ideals, Russian society and government is often kinder and more generous to others, valuing the idea of helping each other for the common good, so more trustworthy and inclined to give better free deals than money and power grabbing big tech? And you did say you were trying to get away from Google!

GMX is also good and is quite like Gmail, if you were looking for something similar, but has no inbuilt "disk" feature which can be useful for transferring large files, you'd need to find some other website to do that separately.
Yandex has a disk but no alias addresses, Mail.ru only allows these if you provide a mobile number for verification, while free GMX gives you up to 10 and you can delete them and create new ones. You can also link email accounts together so the mail from one is forwarded to another. I've found that although you can get some idea what to expect from research, online info can be outdated and incomplete, the best thing is to create an account and take a detailed look at promising candidates.
Tutanota is another free account, but apart from the unusual ability to send securely encrypted emails to other Tutanota users, it's pretty basic with minimal features.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: nezunezu – on
@just_jed Hello and thanks. I think everything you mentioned about Proton has changed, except that they do give you an un-dismissable prompt to complete a list of chores, with the reward being a doubling of the "500.00 MB" of storage afforded to free users. One of the chores is to set up forwarding with Gmail (specifically Gmail), which I find perplexing for a company to do when a large part of their de facto business model is to give one the freedom to terminate their Google. (Ironically, about a decade ago, Google offered me an extra 2 GB of storage for submitting to a security procedure.) One of the other chores is to install the (almost unusable, another thing that hasn't changed) mobile application, another requirement I find perplexing to come from a company that claims to sell privacy.
Which is part of the point. They talk a big game, but then try to get you to do things that suck.
Quote from: nezunezu – on
Mailfence's fees... wouldn't the monthly cost of self-hosting an email address be about as much? I assume that using the custom domains from the "Entry" personal plan is necessary to prevent emails from being sent to spam by Google et al.
Nope, no need to do a custom domain. In fact, self-hosting your own e-mail comes with the need to do things to avoid being treated as a spammer, such as SPF and DKMS, and making sure you have proper reverse DNS.

I could self-host e-mail. Spin up a cloud host somewhere, do all the work, but why? I've played at being a sysadmin, even worked at being a sysadmin a bit. I don't need the extra chore, when it's under $5/mo to let someone else deal with all the tasks.

I have correspondents who use Google, and no troubles with mail coming from mailfence.com to them. Same with Outlook users.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: n00b – on
Perhaps aliases means something different to you?
I don't know what terminology they use for alternate accounts, but "alias" to mean alternate addresses/identites under the same account is standard in Proton's documentation, as well as that of all other webmails I've used.
Quote from: Archie – on
I have Betterbird. It's a fine-tuned version of Mozilla Thunderbird, Thunderbird on steroids.
I'll try it myself too, but would you say that it's extensible enough to easily configure use with a keyboard only?
Quote from: gripped – on
The vps, in this instance, is really just providing me with a static, non-residential, IP address.
The minipc also has webserver and a nextcloud server on it.
Thanks again, it sounds good and educational and I might go down this path, but I don't know enough about email to know what to do when things go terribly awry (which they always do on my computer ;)). For example, if the email server has downtime, will incoming emails to be lost to the void? I don't know the answers to these types of questions or how to find them myself, and while I don't like to be ignorant and do think it's worth knowing, there are things much more important and interesting to me to learn right now. The media server I could barely manage to set up for my family's TV is rather lousy, so I can't imagine what it would be like to run a mail server. Do you think someone like me could self-host email despite this?
P.S.: Asking sincerely and non-judgementally, what is the purpose of storing over 20 GB of old emails? I discard most of what I receive (besides personal correspondences, which get archived), and I always wonder if there's a better way to do what I'm doing.
Quote from: ####### – on
The current political situation is temporary and calming down at present. Perhaps due to the history of Communist ideals, Russian society and government is often kinder and more generous to others, valuing the idea of helping each other for the common good, so more trustworthy and inclined to give better free deals than money and power grabbing big tech? And you did say you were trying to get away from Google!
Yandex holds nearly 74% of the search marketshare[1] and over a quarter of the browser marketshare[2] in Russia. Their annual revenue is in the hundreds of billions of rubles and rapidly growing.[3] If Yandex isn't big tech, what is it?
I have no personal experience representative of Russia or its people, nor any formal education in their politics and economy, so I don't know if what you've said is true, and I couldn't use it to judge the integrity of their corporations anyway. At least concerning the internet, the professed values of the average America could not be more different from the demonstrated values of Silicon Valley, could they?
I do want to get away from Google, but I can't deny the realities of where I live, nor neglect my compatibility with the status quo, as I do need to make a living :( Americans trend superficial with regard to strangers, so I can't wager my employability on whenever the cyber-McCarthyism (present nationwide since c. 2015) will expire.
Quote from: ####### – on
free GMX gives you up to 10 and you can delete them and create new ones.
OK, I'm almost sold, thank you for this. Familiarity in technology is not important to me, so things not need be similar to Gmail, as long as my dentist's receptionist doesn't shoot me a weird look when I list it as contact information :P I will register and give it a good look if I can determine their integrity.
Quote from: ####### – on
Tutanota is another free account, but apart from the unusual ability to send securely encrypted emails to other Tutanota users, it's pretty basic with minimal features.
I've used Tutanota as a disposable email for mandatory signups before, and my impression was that that's all it's good for. I don't know if things have changed or if I was ever right in the first place, but I can see that Tutanota users still have issues with their emails being filtered or blackholed by official institutions (and apparently all of Outlook).
Quote from: just_jed – on
Which is part of the point. They talk a big game, but then try to get you to do things that suck.
Unfortunate, since they seem to have a cultural near-monopoly on privacy-oriented webmail in the USA.
Quote from: just_jed – on
I have correspondents who use Google, and no troubles with mail coming from mailfence.com to them. Same with Outlook users.
Thanks, good to know. I will register with GMX and Mailfence and compare them for now, and perhaps one day I will switch to self-hosting if it seems right to do so.
Thank you all for reading and replying. I'm learning loads.
EDIT: Um... they are both suspicious. gmx.com mandates for more information on signup than Gmail did back when I first registered. Why would my details such as my gender be important to a webmail provider for anything but targeted marketing and data brokerage? Why do they bill themselves as having "state-of-the-art security" when their minimum password length is 8 characters?
And Mailfence will not let me proceed without a non-Mailfence recovery email address. Doesn't this defeat the purpose? They aren't the only mail I've known which mandate a recovery address, or at least endlessly pesters you to add one after you register. It seems as though nearly every email, privacy-oriented or otherwise, not only accepts that everyone will cling on to their old Gmail for one little thing, but actively enable the fact. Even Proton asked me for a non-Proton verification email address when I tried to log in from a different IP address and user-agent.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: nezunezu – on
For example, if the email server has downtime, will incoming emails to be lost to the void?
That's depends on the settings of the sending SMTP server but proper ones keep trying to send it to you for 4-5 days. 
Quote
Do you think someone like me could self-host email despite this?
Maybe. But you'd have quite a bit to learn. There are solutions which set it all up for you. iRedMail is one example but this use postfix+mysql  (or did) not opensmtpd and is far more complex than my setup which is worse if things go wrong[/quote]
Quote
P.S.: Asking sincerely and non-judgementally, what is the purpose of storing over 20 GB of old emails?
I'm too lazy to sort and delete them and access to a years old email has saved the day more than once. When I deleted my google accounts I did a google takeout on the emails and keep them as well. Call me Mr Email Hoarder ;)

I'm not necessarily saying you SHOULD self host your email.
Only that this is the only way to have full control over them. imho.
I don't trust the providers of email services in many senses so prefer to host my own.

Re: Email Solutions: what do you use?

Reply #14 –
GMX can't be suspicious, it's German! Dependable or well engineered would be more appropriate. German's are also reputed to be methodical, presumably why they want to know these details. Think BMW, Mercedes, or Artoo - Artix has a significant German input.The requirements for opening email accounts do seem to increase as time goes by.
Mail.ru is the only email provider I've come across that sends me a birthday email, by the way, so how thoughtful and kind is that, given that most want to know my date of birth, but then never do anything about it?  ;D