Since email is really the backbone of all internet communication, it really is important. It’s also a source of valuable information about you, including all of your purchases (receipts and shipping notifications), notifications from various websites, messages from political campaigns, job searches, newsletters, etc. With those details creating a profile about someone is pretty easy, even if that person views all of those messages as basically junk. Like almost everyone I’ve been using Gmail since about 2005 and I’ve been trying it get off of it for two or three years.

I’ve settled on Fastmail. The reasons are that it’s a good compromise on a number of factors such as:

• Multidomain support – With the podcast, blog, and a hand full of other domains, as well as a domain for personal mail, multidomain support is very important. I had been thinking until recently that keeping podcast and blog (business) email in a separate inbox than my personal email was important, but I have generally used the unified inboxes on email clients on my phone, so I’ve found that having them all go into one is just fine.
• Aliases – Virtually unlimited, they each have their own sending identities by default, but you can delete the sending identities. Each alias is also a specific address on a specific domain (unlike Google Workspace where any alias exists on all domains).
• It’s private – It’s paid email and they do not sell your data, and they say they will only will look at your messages if required to do so by the law, which is perfectly reasonable to me.
• You can reset your password – While the mail services that encrypt your messages at rest (such as ProtonMail) do allow you to change your password, if you ever lose it then you lose all the messages and contacts. While ProtonMail’s way of handling it is more secure, I’m comfortable with the privacy risk.
• Two factor authentication with app passwords for IMAP clients – Some providers don’t offer 2FA, others don’t do app passwords so require weird work arounds (like how Google does it now), and others only require 2FA on the website but your usual password works on IMAP. None of those are proper setups in my opinion, but Fastmail does it right.
• Perfect IMAP over TLS support – It works perfectly with any mail client. Such as Thunderbird or Geary on my computer or any mail client on a phone.
• Administration – It’s simple and easy to manage.
• A nice mobile app – I wasn’t going to use their app on my phone, but decided to try it out and I found out I actually like it better than the Apple Mail and Calendar apps on my iPhone.

While email providers such as ProtonMail and Tutuana keep your data always encrypted so they can never look at your emails, if you’re communicating with normal people they will be on a more mundane email provider and government agencies would still be able to capture the meta data and get the messages from the other party. While FastMail is run by an Australian company with servers with the US and falls under the 5 and 14 eyes agreements, for American citizens the US spy agencies are limited in how much they can snoop and would need a warrant to get access to your inbox.

Needing email privacy that can survive a warrant is far beyond my threat model. I just don’t want an advertising company (that’s what Google really is) reading all of my email and I don’t want that data being fed into a an algorithm that will try to manipulate me.

It is worth noting that over the last few years I have tried ProtonMail, Zoho, NameCheap’s Private Email, and Microsoft Office 365.

• ProtonMail – I had a password problem so lost everything in my inbox. Also the increasing the chances that US federal agencies are wasting their time looking at me isn’t worth it.
• Zoho’s calendar didn’t work well with people on other systems. They didn’t include the .ica attachments and I couldn’t get time zones to work right. This was really frustrating for podcast guests and a complete deal breaker.
• NameCheap’s Private Email doesn’t do 2FA well.
• Office 365 is from Microsoft which isn’t that much better than paid Google Workspace, plus the administration is designed for large corporations with dedicated teams in their IT departments, it doesn’t scale down well.

In choosing an email provider the key thing to remember is that if it is free, then they will be having to make money off of you somehow to continue to provide the service, that will probably be by harvesting your data. As far as which of the paid email providers to use, go with whichever one fits best with your threat model and don’t assume that the “most secure” option is best for you.