I have been fortunate to have email for a long time. Since the late 90’s in fact. I thought it might be interesting to compare my email providers since I have just recently switched to a new email provider.
- Pine. This was a client I used during school that was just text and very ugly. However, it was so cool because you could have friendships with people all around the world! I had many friendships with people all over the world, but unfortunately in those days email wasn’t very reliable so I lost track of them. Well, it was a nice start to being international.
- Netscape email. Netscape was so beautiful compared to what Pine looked like. It had some neat features and was so easy to use. I spent years with Netscape.
- Eudora/Quarterdeck/Outlook Express. It’s true for those nerds out there that Quarterdeck was a chat client, but what a chat client it was! It was amazing in its time. Quarterdeck made some amazing software in the day. Eudora was cool and Outlook Express was awful. I was so glad to move to the next big thing.
- iTools then.Mac mail. These were Apple’s failed attempts at email. This was later replaced by iCloud which was still a failure. I tried all of these services and stayed with them way past the point I should have. I kept hoping and Apple kept promising it would get better. It never did. Everything that could go wrong did with these services. Lost email, slowness, crashes, and so on. I will never use any Mac email service again based on my experience over these 5 years.
- Web email like Yahoo/Gmail/other smaller providers. This was interesting but ultimately unsatisfying. Gmail always had irritating ads, and the loss of privacy just wasn’t worth it being free. My last email provider was Gmail, but I have grown tired of their privacy attitude, and their sense of “don’t be evil” just isn’t factually true anymore. I am in the process of deleting my Google account and never plan on doing business with them again.
- Exchange providers from Inmotion/other web hosting companies. Inmotion also had great email but I didn’t use it very much since I was using Gmail when I was a customer. Other web hosting companies aren’t worth mentioning since their reliability was unremarkable or bad.
- For testing purposes, I tried Zoho, Protonmail, GMX, and a bunch of other smaller providers. To me, they all had critical flaws. Zoho is ugly and its interface is overwhelming. I wouldn’t suggest it to the average person. Protonmail had great privacy but it was ugly and overly complicated and not going to be worth its limitations which are currently 500 message limit a month for free. GMX was interesting but ugly and I didn’t like the price structure.
- Using email from whatever client I was working for. Most clients want me on their email system so that I am easy to get ahold of for them. Often when you help people on projects they may want to send you a large file and being on their email system means that can send them incredibly large attachments and not worry about most email providers’ 10MB limit. So in this way, I tried out many different exchange environments in companies and was mostly unimpressed. Most exchange environments tended to have performance issues, especially on Monday mornings, or mornings while people worked. I would not put my personal email on a client’s system, so this wasn’t a good choice for me for personal use.
- Setting up a mail server and running it myself. No way. I am not that interested in email that I would take on this huge task for one person. In addition, it doesn’t make financial sense in that I will never be an exchange-only administrator and don’t want to commit my time to mastering this software. I have been an exchange administrator in the past, but it was one duty among many others and not my sole responsibility.
- Using an email address built into a social platform like Facebook. I am never going to join Facebook, so I wouldn’t do that just for email. LinkedIn can sync your email provider to their service, and then you send from LinkedIn via your outside email provider. This isn’t any good to me. They should have a native built-in email service that doesn’t require an outside email provider. Although I am not sure that I trust them with my personal information.
So what did I end up choosing? FastMail. It had an iOS client, and it was $10 a year for the basic version-I am a light email user, it is beautifully done, it has features without being overwhelming, and it is most like Gmail for people who don’t like Gmail. I can feel good about recommending this to a non-technical person, and assisting them if they can’t handle it. It was easy to import my information from Gmail and has some nice tools to import contacts, emails, and calendars from many programs. They are not paying me, but so far it seems the best Gmail alternative. (Save 10% off the first year price by clicking here. Yes I get a small benefit.)