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but closed sytem that do not comply with the original standards.oOr are POP3 and SMTP now possible? if not, rubbish!
I can't wrap my head around caring enough about your email to avoid the big (and honestly pretty decent) free providers, but somehow not caring enough to drop $10/year on a domain and $5/year on mxroute. The inevitable headache when your chosen free email provider either shuts down or pulls something sketchy in a year or two, and you're stuck migrating all your accounts, will cost you way more time and frustration than just paying for a proper setup now.
Whether I use big corps or not is nothing to do with my level of care about email. It is about not supporting those companies. A matter of principle.
On the other hand there is the care factor of wanting stable email and I can say I pretty much do not care enough to have to pay for it so would be ok with the deadpool merry go round.
With domains that is a different matter but for email I do not have any critical things that I must have stable email without interruption all the time. Sure it is a little inconvenient but swapping now and then is not a big issue.
Yandex gave me almost exactly a decade which is not bad going I think.
Also with email there is an advantage to changing it up. A rolling stone gathers no moss and you purge yourself of all the spam lists. Not that I have much now as I opt out wherever I see the option but it might be more of an issue for some.
If it has to be $0, possibly Zoho or Protonmail. Hopefully they’re both known enough to have less chance of ending up in other parties spam folders, although TBH I’ve heard of it still happening with Protonmail.
Protonmail you do need to commit to their mobile apps though, which may or may not be a deal breaker.
Personally I’m happy to pay a bit for a service where I can bring my own domain name, to make moving in the future much easier and avoiding the need to update email addresses or anything with services I use along the way.
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Or, if you use one that doesn't scan emails etc, you could look at it as using their resources for free and them not getting much from you if you don't use any of their other products.
I get it, I try to use smaller or more ethical companies if I can, but I also look at the values larger companies have and if they align with mine I'll use them and I'll look at the details of what the products actually are, privacy policies etc.
To just say that you don't want to support big corps is rather short sighted. There are many small companies that aren't ethical and many large ones that try to be. Customer service can be equally atrocious at large companies as it can small ones etc etc. They all have investors who want a return.
Also, for the likes of email you need to look at how these are funded. iCloud for example (and I haven't looked into this enough) may not need to have ads and tracking or may be more privacy focused because Apple can afford to subsidise it with other products and its not their main focus. Its main purpose isn't to serve ads but act as a service for other products. Someone like GMX (who are part of a multi-billion $ corp by the way) only provide email so may pump more ads/tracking into it.
Look at the product details, not just the corp.
Also, it seems unfair to expect really small players to fund email without payment. History has shown this doesn't work on scale with players like Another.com disappearing fairly rapidly and others being taken over by the big corps (Hotmail or Rocketmail for example) because free, reliable email is and always has been hard to do.
Personally, I would have considered Yandex a big corp; in fact a very big corp, just not one that's widely known in the west/outside their markets.
They're massssivvveeee.
Even 10 years ago they were big. Their revenues were $11.22 billion in 2024, if you're happy with a corporation that size then you've got the likes of Yahoo!/AOL whose revenue was $7.4 billion in 2020.
Seems like you're deluding yourself into believing that big corps aren't actually big corps.
[Edit] Seriously, as others have suggested get yourself a domain and pay a few $ for an email service. Remember, if its free - you are the product in one way or another.
Ok I just tried to sign up to gmx and that gives the exact same message as mail.com that they no longer accept sign ups from my country. That does confirm suspicions they are the same company on the back end.
Well there are a few different philosophical issues.
There is the aspect of not using a big corp on moral grounds but there is also the practical one that the top 1% of the 1% I notice become much worse with hoops and data collection. So gmx and yandex may also be massive but their sign up processes were less when I last tried to sign up to them.
One thing is preferably not using them on idealistic terms but the other is so much anti spam anti abuse hoops, that being their justification at least, meaning you have to give up so much information like phone number and all this stuff which they will be keeping on you. Gmx and yandex maybe they are big but you could quite easily get an email address without divulging too much personal info when I used to although I see more and more companies slowly creep this way of more data as mandatory to sign up.
Also yea, maybe I was using them but they seemed a lesser evil and it is like with debit cards, you have to make some concessions to interact with society. It is possible to live on cash and bitcoin alone and feel morally superior but seriously limiting.
You have to pick your battles but one hard line in the sand I made some years ago is none of the upper echelon evil corps like google or amazon or ebay.
I may warm to the idea of paying a nominal amount for hosting my own domain via mxroute or suchlike.
Also these two:
https://mailfence.com
https://murena.io
I thought thats obvious? They're under united internet, gmx mail.com ionos fasthost. All horrible in their own way.
even if you stick with free services having your own domain is really convenient. i mean yea its another bill, but at least then you can shift back end providers without much hassle.
Highly agree with this. Some cctld are also dirt cheap if don't mind they might change rules like .in or .eu. Something $5/year ends up only $50 for max 10 years. Don't need to worry mailhoster turn to shit or close shop, just change mx record and migrate in 5 minutes.
Tafak are you blabering. Gmx is old as world. They are decent. I always get spam from gmx and it always land into inbox. Their deliverability is insanely good.
If you want, you can have my spam too
You can always run your own mail server if you want. Just takes about a month of using it daily usually and sending requests to every single email major to get it whitelisted. Ours is whitelisted now and doesn't go to spam usually...
Not sure why everyone wants to host their email on some dedicated email service... Just use a vps, install iRedMail on Debian, setup proper rdns, dkim, SPF, and dmarc records. And then:
1) send about 1-2 emails a day to your own accounts at major email providers like outlook, Gmail, etc and mark not spam if it goes to spam
2) signup for Google postmaster tools
3) on first email to outlook, you'll get a bounce message - use the link to whitelist it
4) ditto the 3 on barracuda clients
5) in about a week, most your email is allowed. After a month, your sender score will be good and will hit inbox non-stop
6) don't start spamming or sending bulk emails until a few more weeks to let score accrue
Don't host the email server on a big platform like hetzner or cloud stuff. Host it on a normal vps that allows mail ports or can unlock them - if you have your own IP range this is even easier - make sure you signup for Spamhaus and whitelist the IPs there also...
We can host a mailserver for you or add you to our existing mail server (that option for free) without issues if it's for business or something normal - just not spamming, of course.
Note: The above is in regards to using your own domain. For personal email without your own domain, you can either use a friend's company domain if it has good reputation - or use proton - proton is honestly amazing and never hits spam... For personal email use it's awesome...
Like I said, I get what you're trying to do but I think you've been going about it slightly misguidedly, with good intention but misguided.
Take your debit card example - yes you need one and practically all of them come from massive financial institutions. But you can pick one from an institution that has clear ethical policies or you can have one from the likes of HSBC who knowingly allowed drugs cartels to launder blood money (https://www.netflix.com/watch/80149536?trackId=14277283). To find this out you need to look into the company a bit more, its not just a case of signing up and giving them less data when you do. In the case of banks around here the better behaved ones tend to be the ones that want to find out more about their customers.
Translate that to email and privacy forms part of the ethics of a company. Its a little bit of the opposite you absolutely not need to give them all your data on signup - just don't think that because you sign up giving them less data that they do less with it or harvest more going forward. Yandex have some very questionable privacy concerns for example.
Anyway, I like what you're trying to do, just perhaps do better research
Try looking into this link: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology/shopping-guide/ethical-email-providers - It outlines who is privacy focused, jurisdictions and other ethical considerations. No need to subscribe, the info is there just not as a handy table.
Definitely consider a domain and a cheap but reliable mail host. Its not as expensive as some people think it is and probably a lot more reliable. I'm careful with my email domain and get virtually no spam on it - I've had it since 1999.
So you do want privacy.
Well that isn't about wanting to hide it but more that it is intrusive to ask for that and I don't see that it is warranted. Need to know basis.
Yes, privacy to a point per the use case. Asking for phone number to sign up for email I see as unreasonable. Just like they never used to ask for phones back in the good old days of the naughties internet. There is future/feature creep, well this is intrusion creep.
Thanks, that is a nice rundown and case study of it being attainable.
Yes sure I do do that too, in terms of looking for ethical companies. I only have so much time though and resources so just haven't done that with emails as yet. Good, thoughtful points though.
Seznam.cz
Is this the same murena that does a privacy focused/maybe open source, not sure, mobile OS? Seems that one is murena.com but don't know if they are related.
Looking back on this as still have not settled on one yet. Well somehow a russian company seems more 'rebel' than others since the west hates russia and I am a communist at heart.
One thing I don't like about this is by its nature you are then 'tied' to the domain. I kind of like the transience of domains that aren't mine. A rolling stone gathers no moss and all. I suppose domains I could do similar? and just dump them when I want a fresh start? just like with websites which are on domains? You are still committed for at least a year though with a domain aren't you? Don't know of pro-rating domains. Maybe it exists, never looked.
Rediffmail .... I think it's free
I have been through almost all the suggestions here now and not found one that is suitable.
Either sign up is forbidden for the IP or they want some extra BS like phone number.