alternative email providers

[#1]

As always, you get what you pay for ... I gave up on PN email when trying to set it up when I joined PN years ago, it was clunky and horrible.

Pnet BB has proved to be an excellent service and good value for money. I think most ISP provided email is rubbish and use an independent supplier -- in my case Fastmail with Thunderbird. Another advantage is that you can change ISP without change to your email addy/service.

Fastmail basic package costs about £3 per month, even when added to our FTTC package our bills are still lower than other ISPs. No problems in many years; other suppliers may be equally good but I've had no reason to try them.

[#2]

Absolutely agree. I've never had any issues with my Plusnet Broadband - and I created a separate email address years ago as relying upon a free one from my ISP wasn't something I was comfortable with. It's a little bit of a fuss to get your emails out (the ones you need!) but after that it's no problem. 

[#3]

Mail.com - Russian owned. No frills and the option to pay for greater storage. It also allows for creating an entire personalised email address, with countless aliases. Some of the reviews are a bit too glossy and therefore quite suspect, but like all others it has its share of negative reviews. 

Protonmail.com - Swiss owned - and founded at CERN. It claims to provide some of the world's strongest privacy protections and uses client-side encryption to protect message content before hitting the company's own servers, covering its own back to remove the risk of being forced to hand over emails to a third party. Good and bad reviews, with one or two claiming overactive system bots locking accounts without notice, but that happens anywhere.

[#4]

I have domain based email accounts for business. I don't really want to replace my Globalnet (Plusnet owned) email with a domain based email on my current host though, as one of the useful things about Globalnet is if my host's mailserver has problems then I can use Globalnet as an independent backup.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a host for an email only domain? I don't really want to set up another hosting account with webspace etc. as all I'll want is the mailserver. I want something I can use with my email clients, not web based or only through its own app. A quick search has thrown up a few suggestions, but they seem to be packages with a lot more stuff than I need.

[#5]

@Flabula Does anyone have any recommendations for a host for an email only domain? 

I'm looking at Protonmail (https://protonmail.com) at the moment.

[#6]

Surprisingly I have been very happy with PN email which, together with friendly service keeps me here. I have multiple domain names with 123-Reg that forward to PN and it all works very well. Next to no spam via PN too. 

It is beginning to look like PN have little to offer that BT cannot provide and that raises the question will we all get sucked in to BT provisionally? Maybe BT could take over PN mail and do a proper job although history tells us that would be unlikely!

All suggestions for future mail options welcomed!

[#7]

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...Does anyone have any recommendations for a host for an email only domain?...

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Someone I respect and who knows far more about IT, and IT security in particular, than I ever will, uses Fastmail.  I'll be investigating that option.

stuck

[#8]

I have just signed up with Protonmail, not done a lot with it yet, think I might wait till my stress levels have lowered a bit! The intention is to migrate almost everything over there eventually.

[#9]

Thanks for the suggestions. I decided to go with Protonmail and my own domain so I got that set up last night - not complicated to do. Just need to figure out the bridge to Thunderbird next.

I'm going to hang on to my Globalnet email for as long as Plusnet will let me, but I'm going to gradually start moving things over to my new Protonmail account so I'll hopefully be ready for the next great Plusnet email disaster!

[#10]

The one thing I need from a mail service is that it allows an unlimited number of email addresses both for sending and receiving, without needing individual setup of "aliases" or such like. Plusnet works well for that. I have my own domain, and all emails are routed to Plusnet where I can pick them up in a catchall mailbox. And I can send using any address, still on my own domain, through relay.plus.net. PN must now be one of the few ISPs that still keep that sort of service running, most have now removed catchalls for inbound and outbound.

From the suggestions here, only Fastmail offers this: they give the instructions at https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000277942 . Any other suggestions welcome especially if they are free. I'm checking with combell.com, they claim to give unlimited addresses free with domain hosting, but in reality it seems to be a single mailbox with one address.

[#11]

@Stegs_W  mentioned Zoho Mail. Does anyone else have any experience of them?

[#12]

I do use them, but they require outbound emails to have individually registered addresses so no use for me. Their free service is now very limited, I got in when they had a lot more functionality. If you only want one mailbox with one email address they'll be fine, otherwise less so.

They have all sorts of other "apps" which I've not looked at.

[#13]

Yes, @SilverE is correct about Zoho Mail. While you can use an unlimited number of inbound addresses using catchall, you have to set up an alias for outbound mail, and you can only have up to 30 of these. 

[#14]

I tried to set up an email account with Zoho to migrate my freenetname domain to but I had trouble confirming that I owned the domain to transfer it (they need you to add a file to the DNS to get a confirmation code or something!), so I gave up and have set up an account with Ecohosting instead. They are UK based, had a good trustpilot score and rep for customer service and offer multiple mail boxes, depending on the package level, so hopefully they should be OK. I will post up if it all goes well and let you know.

[#15]

Got my Protonmail set up with my own new domain and the bridge to Thunderbird working so I can download email to my PC. Pleased with it so far and it's way faster than the domain based email I have for work with my web host.

The major headache I'm getting now is that changing all my email logins to the new email is going to be a very long job - complicated by the problem that several sites send a verification code to the old email - which I still can't get to!