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Switch from Gmail to another Reliable mail service ? Some suggestion?

A

AGX

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 12, 2014
180
3
Hi,

after some time, I have decided to switch from Google Gmail to another email service... i read some article on the net about the use of personal data of this mail service, and i'm a lot scared/irritated from this practice

I tried several time other mail service, but my question is, there is an email service comparable to Gmail, and with a better privacy policy?

In some forum I have read about Fastmail.FM but I don't have any info about it.

Thanks
 
I use iCloud mail. It works pretty well - at least good enough for me. And Appel is serious about your privacy with iCloud mail. No service is perfect, but considering email has become less integral to keep in touch than it used to be, it is good enough for me - and integrates tightly with my MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, and Watch.
 
I have the same problem. I have been trying to ditch Gmail ever since they dropped push notifications, but it's not easy to find a free alternative. I have tried iCloud, Outlook.com, Protonmail and Zoho. I'm seriously thinking about Google apps (paid Gmail) or Exchange/Office 365, but I'm not sure if it is overkill for personal mail.
 
Maki Roc said:
I have the same problem. I have been trying to ditch Gmail ever since they dropped push notifications, but it's not easy to find a free alternative. I have tried iCloud, Outlook.com, Protonmail and Zoho. I'm seriously thinking about Google apps (paid Gmail) or Exchange/Office 365, but I'm not sure if it is overkill for personal mail.
Click to expand...

Why did iCloud and Outlook.com not work for you? Suspect it'd be a good addition to the thread and help the OP find a service that works for him.
 
exi said:
Why did iCloud and Outlook.com not work for you? Suspect it'd be a good addition to the thread and help the OP find a service that works for him.
Click to expand...

I have them both (iCloud and outlook.com) and no issues with either of them. I like outlook.com far better than gmail too.
 
Maki Roc said:
I have the same problem. I have been trying to ditch Gmail ever since they dropped push notifications, but it's not easy to find a free alternative. I have tried iCloud, Outlook.com, Protonmail and Zoho. I'm seriously thinking about Google apps (paid Gmail) or Exchange/Office 365, but I'm not sure if it is overkill for personal mail.
Click to expand...

It's not overkill if you want to have control over a consistent email address for the future.
 
exi said:
Why did iCloud and Outlook.com not work for you? Suspect it'd be a good addition to the thread and help the OP find a service that works for him.
Click to expand...

iCloud didn't quite work out for me for a number of reasons:
1. Push email on non iOS platforms only works with IMAP IDLE, and that really isn't battery efficient. The badge counter not updating the read status was also annoying
2. Silent filtering.
3. Shared storage with iCloud backups

Outlook.com had the following problems:
1. Over aggressive SPAM filter with a lot of false positives.
2. Outlook.com is very trigger happy to blacklist certain IPs or domains. Silent filtering occurs but this could be overcome by whitelisting the sender (if you are lucky to know the address)
3. IMAP sucks really bad (on Thunderbird atleast)
4. No CARDDAV support at the moment
5. Hate the domain name. It's confusing for people in the country I live in. Hotmail is actually easier to the ears but then you have to deal with email snobbery. Really sad they dropped support for custom domains

Regardless of the current faults I think Outlook.com is the only true contender to Gmail. They are promising all kinds of cool features for the future while I hear nothing about iCloud updates which seams to prefer to stay spartan for people with simple needs.

BrianBaughn said:
It's not overkill if you want to have control over a consistent email address for the future.
Click to expand...

True. I love having a personalized address that I can transfer to any service that currently works for me. On the other hand I don't use email that much for me to pay 5$ a month. Still on the fence with this.
 
Maki Roc said:
iCloud didn't quite work out for me for a number of reasons:
1. Push email on non iOS platforms only works with IMAP IDLE, and that really isn't battery efficient. The badge counter not updating the read status was also annoying
2. Silent filtering.
3. Shared storage with iCloud backups

Outlook.com had the following problems:
1. Over aggressive SPAM filter with a lot of false positives.
2. Outlook.com is very trigger happy to blacklist certain IPs or domains. Silent filtering occurs but this could be overcome by whitelisting the sender (if you are lucky to know the address)
3. IMAP sucks really bad (on Thunderbird atleast)
4. No CARDDAV support at the moment
5. Hate the domain name. It's confusing for people in the country I live in. Hotmail is actually easier to the ears but then you have to deal with email snobbery. Really sad they dropped support for custom domains

Regardless of the current faults I think Outlook.com is the only true contender to Gmail. They are promising all kinds of cool features for the future while I hear nothing about iCloud updates which seams to prefer to stay spartan for people with simple needs.



True. I love having a personalized address that I can transfer to any service that currently works for me. On the other hand I don't use email that much for me to pay 5$ a month. Still on the fence with this.
Click to expand...

I share a lot of the same complaints with iCloud and Outlook.com, actually. What, other than a hosted Exchange, have you found comes closest to perfect given those issues?
 
exi said:
I share a lot of the same complaints with iCloud and Outlook.com, actually. What, other than a hosted Exchange, have you found comes closest to perfect given those issues?
Click to expand...
Maybe Outlook.com in the very near future?

I read this on The Verge yesterday:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/5/8552965/microsoft-outlook-com-office-365-migration

and it makes sense now to me after trying the new built-in Mail client included with the latest Windows 10 build that MS is rejiggering the underpinnings of Outlook.com.
 
campyguy said:
Maybe Outlook.com in the very near future?

I read this on The Verge yesterday:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/5/8552965/microsoft-outlook-com-office-365-migration

and it makes sense now to me after trying the new built-in Mail client included with the latest Windows 10 build that MS is rejiggering the underpinnings of Outlook.com.
Click to expand...

That would be pretty interesting. Wonder if the blacklisting would still be an issue then. If I could find a mail service that did not have the push, badge counter, IDLE, and silent filtering issues... only thing in the meantime that I can see that meets the cut is a hosted Exchange account, maybe?

Anyone have any insight on just how much an issue silent filtering is with Outlook.com as compared to iCloud which has been discussed on this forum quite a few times? I know I've seen articles talking about it.
 
exi said:
That would be pretty interesting. Wonder if the blacklisting would still be an issue then. If I could find a mail service that did not have the push, badge counter, IDLE, and silent filtering issues... only thing in the meantime that I can see that meets the cut is a hosted Exchange account, maybe?

Anyone have any insight on just how much an issue silent filtering is with Outlook.com as compared to iCloud which has been discussed on this forum quite a few times? I know I've seen articles talking about it.
Click to expand...
Yes, interesting to me as well and I'm looking forward to some deets when they come to light - I've surmised that MS will get this "melding" going about the time Win 10 hits the streets on their new Surface 4 devices. There were a few web pages I'd read on Office Blogs about this but the whole Office Blogs site is down now. :mad:

As to filtering and the like, especially compared to Office 365 (which I use for my own personal email in a single-user Business account), I'm seeing more MS web pages that now have "Outlook.com/Office 365/Exchange" all mentioned in the same light - I bookmarked this one regarding spam/filtering/blacklisting/etc. and you can see for yourself how some of the underpinnings are coming together:
https://mail.live.com/mail/junkemail.aspx
I'm actually pretty satisfied with Outlook.com but it's not my main driver. I like that I can create up to 10 aliases (not just the adding of delimiters that Gmail uses - Gmail is now my garbage collector for newsletters, my Netflix queue notifications, and my Feedly account) AND one can assign one of those aliases as the "main" account; my main .mac account is my iTunes/App Store account login and I can't change it and it's a focus of a spambot. Grrr.

As to a reliable email service - there's one new(er) service that's in a free preview that I'm going to sign up for this weekend that looks like it's hosted Exchange on the backend (Outlook Web interface, Outlook Win & Mac compatible!) and it's cheap @$4 per user per month for email w/ 50GB inbox/contacts/calendaring or $6 for those services plus "docs" - Amazon Workmail - http://aws.amazon.com/workmail/

I'm really happy with Office 365. A few of my friends ditched AppRiver (too unreliable) and Rackspace (seems to be moving to bigger and better things, although they're happy with it but MS was just cheaper). Free email, including iCloud, seems to me to be the gateway drug into other services like iPhones or ads and I'm pretty much done with free email except to host my iPhone data or my Feedly feed! I'm hoping that Workmail is easy to use (I noted that they've got Autodiscover up and running!!!) and reliable.
 
I was using gmail since basically day one and I mean day one. Then like 6 months a go, after 10 plus years of using gmail my account gets disabled for no reason. Well after a long internet search come to find gmail has no customer service. Well seeing as it's a free service it's what ever. So I go through the process to try and get my account restored. No luck. Seeing as I have used this account for 10 plus years this really left a bad taste in my mouth and now I really hate using anything to do with Google. I used to love gmail and was very loyal to them. But disabling my account for no reason is a new low for Google. So now I use my back up account yahoo which I hate but seeing as it's the only other account most of my contacts had seemed easier then trying to start all over with a brand new account.
 
exi said:
That would be pretty interesting. Wonder if the blacklisting would still be an issue then. If I could find a mail service that did not have the push, badge counter, IDLE, and silent filtering issues... only thing in the meantime that I can see that meets the cut is a hosted Exchange account, maybe?

Anyone have any insight on just how much an issue silent filtering is with Outlook.com as compared to iCloud which has been discussed on this forum quite a few times? I know I've seen articles talking about it.
Click to expand...

My current paid email provider usually reports when one of our IPs is blacklisted, and I've observed that it is usually done by Outlook.com (not Office 365/Exchange online, as they use a different system). The second most problematic provider is AOL. Never had our IP blacklisted by iCloud (atleast to my knowledge). It usually happend because certain customers had auto forwarding turned on, which forwarded spam to the receiving account. This got our IP reputation into a lot of trouble.
Despite being a bit aggressive with blacklisting Outlook.com has a safe sender list so you can whitelist any problematic address or domain, and the mail will come through. With iCloud there is no such option.

This will all change when Outlook.com converges to a single platform with Office 365/Exchange online. This article explains how.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tzink/archi...om-hotmail-are-converging-infrastructure.aspx

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Outlook.com (or Outlook Mail as they are allegedly going to rename the service) will improve to the point that I can finally forget about Gmail for good. And it would be super sweet if they supported custom domains again (for consumers), but I won't hold my breath for that.
 
Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't see anything in those articles about Outlook.com email or "Outlook Mail" getting any friendlier with Mac OS. The Verge article seems to be saying that the web interface for Outlook.com will change to be like the one currently at Office 365.
 
BrianBaughn said:
Forgive me if I'm wrong but I don't see anything in those articles about Outlook.com email or "Outlook Mail" getting any friendlier with Mac OS. The Verge article seems to be saying that the web interface for Outlook.com will change to be like the one currently at Office 365.
Click to expand...
Wut? First sentence of that The Verge article:
"Microsoft is planning to replace the technology and interface of Outlook.com with Office 365." No "seems" there - and it's not in their article.

Try Outlook.com with the Win 8.1 client then with the Win 10 email/calendar/people clients and try/use Office 365 - programming logic here. Different pipes altogether. The interface tweaks are irrelevant.

IMHO, Go To Jail. Do Not Pass Go (until you reread that article and sample Office 365 and the new Win 10 email client as I have). Then you'll be forgiven. :D
 
I believe Outlook.com will support the exchange protocol when it switches to the Office 365 platform. This would enable push email on OSX with the default mail app.
 
mail.com?

I loved iCloud e-mail until yesterday, when it stopped working for me (confirmed to be an issue on Apple's end, still not fixed). Ive had a mail.com account (formerly email.com) for many years as a backup, and never had any trouble with it. But I don't know what their privacy policy is. Probably no better than gmail.
 
I've still yet to see the perfect email service (for my preferences anyway). The topic I see does come up once in a while.

What I'd love to have:

-Push on all devices using native client (Mail.app on Mac, iPhone, iPad)
-Push syncing / live syncing of all statuses (I open an email on mac, or delete it, and it disappears or updates status on other devices immediately)
-Custom domain
-Ability to flag mail items

For a long time I've been using Google Apps. It essentially hits all of these except for ability to flag mail items. Flagging works in OS X, and shows up in mail.app on other OS X instances, but it never shows on iOS (likely due to using Exchange Activesync to get push on iOS from Google Apps). Only other downside is messy IMAP configuration in mail.app on OS X. What I love about it, is it's always fast at pushing and syncing. I get a new mail item, open it on Mac at my desk, it instantly disappears from the lock screens on my iPhone and iPad.



Maki Roc said:
I believe Outlook.com will support the exchange protocol when it switches to the Office 365 platform. This would enable push email on OSX with the default mail app.
Click to expand...

BrianBaughn said:
I'll believe it when I see it!
Click to expand...

I've been using Office 365 business for a few months, solely for email. I use it with iPhone, iPad and Mac (all native clients).

Pros
-push email
-custom domain
-ability to flag emails

Cons
-push isn't instant, can be anywhere from 1 minute to 5+ minutes. This gets quite annoying, especially when I'm used to how quickly Google Apps pushes not just new items but read and delete statuses.
 
Not to hijack - still relevant to this thread.

Reliability and this worry with silent filtering is the biggest thing that sticks in my craw as has been discussed before.

I use a MacBook Pro at home, iPhone on the go, iPad occasionally. May or may not return to Windows some day but being platform-agnostic is not a huge thing to me.

Currently use iCloud for everything -- mail, contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, some Pages/Numbers/Keynote use, pictures. Seamless with OS X and iOS. I prefer simplicity and like one service. Cons regarding mail as above.

Am thinking about going to Outlook.com for mail and solely mail while keeping everything else with iCloud. Gain badge updates, lose active connection on desktop (no IMAP IDLE) which is less of an issue and may be a non-issue if platform unification as above includes Exchange support for Outlook.com accounts. Supposedly would be more reliable(?) than iCloud but am unsure. Don't know how much or often blacklisting is an issue -- or if senders receive notifications of non-delivered status.

The alternative would be to migrate everything to Outlook / OneDrive. Lose Pages/Numbers/Keynote seamlessness (have not explored the Office 2016 beta or Office 365), custom fields in iOS contacts, etc.

Anyone have any strong feelings for pros/cons to this?
 
Maki Roc said:
I believe Outlook.com will support the exchange protocol when it switches to the Office 365 platform. This would enable push email on OSX with the default mail app.
Click to expand...
Outlook.com supports EAS clients already - it has for several months now. I use Outlook 2013 (in a Parallels VM) and connect to my Outlook.com via EAS - email, calendaring, contacts, and tasks all sync perfectly. I used Autodiscover to set it up, the setup took about 2 minutes. Checking the Outlook.com settings in Outlook confirmed to me that the app is using an EAS connection (I checked).

For clients that don't use Autodiscover, the settings are on MS's web site, 6th flyout down:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/send-receive-from-app
 
exi said:
Not to hijack - still relevant to this thread.

Reliability and this worry with silent filtering is the biggest thing that sticks in my craw as has been discussed before.

I use a MacBook Pro at home, iPhone on the go, iPad occasionally. May or may not return to Windows some day but being platform-agnostic is not a huge thing to me.

Currently use iCloud for everything -- mail, contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, some Pages/Numbers/Keynote use, pictures. Seamless with OS X and iOS. I prefer simplicity and like one service. Cons regarding mail as above.

Am thinking about going to Outlook.com for mail and solely mail while keeping everything else with iCloud. Gain badge updates, lose active connection on desktop (no IMAP IDLE) which is less of an issue and may be a non-issue if platform unification as above includes Exchange support for Outlook.com accounts. Supposedly would be more reliable(?) than iCloud but am unsure. Don't know how much or often blacklisting is an issue -- or if senders receive notifications of non-delivered status.

The alternative would be to migrate everything to Outlook / OneDrive. Lose Pages/Numbers/Keynote seamlessness (have not explored the Office 2016 beta or Office 365), custom fields in iOS contacts, etc.

Anyone have any strong feelings for pros/cons to this?
Click to expand...
I don't see your concerns as hijacking as they're pretty strong concerns - and the OP has been MIA since the first post anyway...

I like O365 (the Business version) since I can order 1 license at a time - IMO the "politically correct" or "millenial" term for "CAL" or "client access license" - and not have to worry about investing in any more corporate products, because I don't need that much power. That's what Salesforce is for, if I need it, and I've read that MS is looking to buy them too.

The only "powerful" feature in O365 that I use and really like is whitelisting/blacklisting of users or domains or IP addresses from my web admin portal - and I REALLY like that.

IMHO any time one subscribes to a free email service you'll have to deal with "the IT guy in the sky", and that's why I *never* use Gmail/iCloud email/Outlook.com email for anything important. FWIW, it's really a shame that MS stopped allowing for the creation of free custom domains on that platform, opting to upsell to O365. But, that aside, IMO I accept that some IT guy is blacklisting as they see fit for those free accounts.

You can also roll your own, using one of the dynamic IP companies like No-IP or afraid.org, both of which have free and low-cost sub-domain services, and use them with your existing Mac clients or the Server app or with MAMP Pro. I'm considering rolling my own with my Mini Server, but I can also use a custom domain with my personal O365 account and filter my own inbox.

FWIW, if you're considering O365 you can pay the $6 per month to MS or buy a Business Premium 1-year card (which has a 25-digit key code) from Amazon for about $75, and the BP option has email plus 5 installs of Office (which you can share so long as the installs are registered in your O365 Portal).

Gotta run! Cheers!
 
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