Gmail is awesome, and I have been using it a very long time (Google gave me any email address I wanted when it was being trialled…)
But as Google becomes more and more like Skynet, and my Gmail is too full of distractions I cannot seem to quit, it is time for a new email address just for very important (and private) things.
It needs to be good enough for me to champion to others:
- free
- as easy to implement as Gmail
- clearly better for privacy and the future of this planet
Of course to exist (and keep existing) they need a revenue model. Freemium means low amounts of storage, but that’s OK to start with.
OnMail is new (easily get your choice of email address) and has 10GB storage. However your address need to be 8 characters to be free (clever) and my stupid surname is only 7. Done. Got robskelton and signing up was not arduous. Has app.
Zoho – very similar to Gmail, with 5GB free, and many features including using your own domain name! Has app. So I have registered skelton.work – only $8/yr and a good mix of easy to say and not so common that your choice is taken.
Zoho have been around for a long time, and they have some office suite products as well. And a CRM. They keep improving and are the dark horse in this race. Very good Google alternative. They have 80 million users, but they are based in India, so use them as a protest vote, but not for anything important that needs to be secure…
Mail.com – lots of domains to choose from, heaps of storage, but is ad-supported and do I trust them? I mean, they have banner ads on their homepage…
MailFence – privacy oriented but only 500MB of storage for free. Done. Got robskelton and signing up was super easy. Important – log in every 6 months or lose the account! And no app.
ProtonMail is very well-known for its security, so about time I tried it. Swiss. 1GB storage. Apps. VPN included.
Tutanota – looks like the best for privacy, but for free their domain name is hard to say. One Euro per month gets a custom domain (like @robskel.com) and 1GB of storage. That is slightly outside of my criteria but worth testing.
The negative (?) is mean to be a feature – Tutanota doesn’t use OpenPGP encryption and doesn’t support IMAP, POP, or SMTP. That is good for being extra secure (they use their own encryption system) but it only works with other Tutanota users. Otherwise, it isn’t of any extra benefit.