Dropping G Suite
Google recently announced that they were extending AMP to email, and for me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve been gradually reducing the amount of Google services I use over the past few years: DuckDuckGo has mostly replaced Google Search, archive.org and Hathi have mostly replaced books.google.com, and for better or worse I use iOS instead of Android. I still use YouTube and that doesn’t have an obvious competitor, but I can at least choose to move away from my paid G Suite account as there are plenty of alternatives.
First, what do I want from a replacement service? The main thing is obviously email. I’m happy with iCloud calenders, and I don’t often use Google office products or Drive much any more. My list of needs and nice-to-haves came to:
- Two-factor authentication with TOTP (a must)
- Secure IMAP interface (also a must)
- Reasonable webmail interface with no advertising (nice to have)
- Multiple catch-all domains (at least two if not more)
- At least 3 Gb storage
- Hosted in the EU and GDPR compliant with a reasonable privacy policy (ideally with a warrant canary, stated goals etc.)
- Servers powered by renewable energy (nice-to-have)
- Reasonable price (I want to pay for this: I want to be buying a supported product)
There are a bunch of companies potentially selling this service, so after an hour or so I was able to put together this table. Where companies have multiple products I’ve picked the cheapest that fulfils as many of the criteria as possible.
Two-factor authentication | IMAP access | Webmail access | Multiple domains | EU hosting | Renewable power | 3Gb storage minimum | Price per year | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Fastmail | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ (US |
? | 25Gb | 400 SEK |
Office 365 Business | ✓ | ✓ | Sort of (Exchange’s webmail is pulling-teeth painful) | ✓ | Maybe, it looks like they can move you around | ? | 50Gb | 1,264 SEK |
Apple iCloud Mail | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ? | ✓ | 5Gb | Free |
Soverin | ✓ (for webmail at least) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 25Gb | 384 SEK |
Runbox | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗, but Norway is good enough | ✓ | 5Gb | 294 SEK |
Protonmail | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗, but Switzerland is good enough | ? | 5Gb | 600 SEK |
Posteo | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | 3Gb | 148 SEK |
Tutanota | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 10Gb | 236 SEK |
Mailbox.org | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Certainly 1, maybe more? | ✓ | ✓ | 5Gb | 354 SEK |
Migadu | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗, but Switzerland is good enough | ? | Unlimited | 384 SEK |
So who am I going to go with? I haven’t actually made the move yet, but Runbox is looking interesting as they tick all the boxes. The default suggestion is usually Fastmail but I’d rather have some EU presence and unfortunately they’re an Australian company with servers located in the US. Posteo look good but the lack of multiple domains is problematic. I probably would have been more interested in Soverin and Migadu, but an email account without two-factor authentication in 2018 is unforgivable; putting that aside they look like good services and I hope they add it soon.
Update: Soverin say they have 2fa for webmail.