# emailhost: i use gmail for my personal email, i couldn't find anything better

what service should one use for their private emailing? there are many options and each individual's needs are different. but let me explain how i arrived at gmail as the option for my usecase by exploring couple of alternatives.

# fastmail

fastmail is a paid email service. its list of features is pretty nice. for instance it lets you create aliases so you don't need to give out your real email address when somebody needs an email address.

however it is a paid service: you need to pay each month. if you don't, your account gets cancelled, you are locked out of your address. and it's even worse: after your account is gone, your username reopens for registration so somebody else can easily take over your email address. that sounds pretty scary in today's world where email is pretty important since you can easily get access to any service with just a simple password reset via email. this just feels too risky for me. this is described at https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000279581-Expired-subscriptions:

If the account is still not renewed after a few weeks, access to the account will be disabled. Eventually, the entire account will be deleted, including all stored messages. Once an account has been deleted, the username and any aliases on the account can be re-used.

# custom domains

i see lot of people advocating for custom domains. it makes sense if you use the email as a professional address but for a personal address it sounds a lot of hassle.

this also needs payments so it has similar downsides: if you are incapable of paying for any reason, you get locked out of your email and others can take your address which is too big of a risk for me. oh and you need to make sure your dns provider doesn't get hacked either. overtaking your domain would also mean game over for your digital life.

and custom domains require a lot of expertise (or money) to get right. you need to run the email hosting service or pay someone to do it for you. and ensuring that you keep getting through the spam filters is also a lot of work.

# protonmail

ok so i don't like paid email because it requires non-trivial effort to keep them running. there are many free alternatives. one example is protonmail which aggressively encrypts your email storage. but protonmail is a usability nightmare for me. vanilla imap no longer works with protonmail due to the encryption. and if you ever lose your password, you can no longer access your old emails. this is described at https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/reset-password/:

Your password is used to decrypt your emails and other data. Proton does not have access to it. If you forget your password, you will lose the ability to read your existing emails and access saved data.

there are some cases when that doesn't apply (https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/restoring-encrypted-mailbox/) but in general protonmail's threat model doesn't really apply to me. besides, if i wanted to have a sensitive conversation with someone, email would not be my protocol for that anyway.

# gmail

i use gmail with mutt/imap and it works pretty well. my only big concern about gmail is that they might lock down my account at any time and i won't be able access my email anymore. such things happen quite frequently according to the news. but this risk can be somewhat reduced: don't use your gmail account for any other google service. don't use it for youtube, don't comment using it, don't use drive. create separate account to use different services. keep a separate account just for private emails. then there's very little risk that you'll lose your account for leaving a bad comment or similar nonsense. and besides, such risks are present with other services too. you can be locked out of your fastmail account or your domain could be seized. at least gmail doesn't allow username reuse.

the other big feature i really like with gmail is its inactive account handling. if i understand correctly, it allows configuring trustees for your account. e.g. after an inactivity period elapsed your spouse can access your email. then they can then access government and financial services that you registered with your email address. and since the account is free, the account will stay live if you simply share your password. compare this with fastmail where any random stranger can take over your email address after some inactivity period.

# aliases

there's one thing lacking in gmail: it doesn't allow you creating aliases so if you use it raw, you'll leak your email address and get ton of spam with no option to stop that after the leak. i'm aware of the + aliases, but that still leaks your address. this is a bit annoying so you need a forwarding service to address this issue. i found the following ones:

all of them have free plans. i started using anonaddy since that seemed the most sympathetic to me. it's pretty neat: you click a button and it generates a "randomstring@anonaddy.me" email address for you. you can generate a new address every time you need an email address (e.g. to register on a site).

when somebody sends an email to that address, anonaddy will forward it to you. anonaddy will wrap the original message, it will tell you through which address you got the email from. it will also let you disable the address in case you start getting spam on it. it will also let you reply through that anonymous address. anonaddy will automatically rewrite the to/from fields so you can have email conversations without ever leaking your address.

another benefit of using a forwarding service is that it's a bit easier to change your personal email. you just forward the anonaddy emails to a different address, no need to update the email address in all the services.

# would i pay for email?

yes! with the right payment model, of course.

i don't like the monthly subscription model. i'd prefer a usage based model. rather than paying monthly, you pay, say, $10 and you get a quota of 10k emails and 100 MB bandwidth. you can use your account indefinitely until you run out of your quota in any dimension. then you can still access your account (up to, say, 10 years), you just can't send and receive emails. you can then top up your account again to bump your limits. you would only pay a monthly fee if your storage goes over, say, 10 GB. the service could delete old emails to get your account under the quota if you don't pay.

with such a service i would worry much less about the fact that i cannot pay for some reason and then i lose my account even if it barely gets any usage. in the fastmail's case a heavy email user pays the same as the light user. this model is paid after usage. it sounds fairer to me.

but i haven't found such a service yet. if fastmail fixed the account name reuse issue and provided such a payment model, i'd definitely consider paying for it.

to be fair, i don't really need indefinite account retention and username reservation. about 10 years should be relative safe.

# summary

in summary for my personal email i choose a free service like gmail with a free forwarding service like anonaddy. so far that's the best combination to get the features i need:

edit 2024-01-19: added a note about hacking dns providers to the custom domains section.

published on 2021-10-26, last modified on 2024-01-19

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