Ask HN: What is the most reliable email provider?
I've heard of people having Gmail accounts suspended and recently my iCloud email address stopped receiving messages due to a billing issue. I have work and school emails, but I would like something longterm and reliable (preferably a third party provider). Does anyone have any suggestions?
Get your own domain and host your own email on that. I use a small, family run ISP, and while there are the occasional outages because they can't be available 24/7, there is always someone I can talk to if there are problems.
The main problem with every big provider is that there is no one to talk to if something is wrong, and sometimes the people you do end up talking with are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
With your own domain you then have a long-term solution, as you can migrate the domain to a different host if necessary. You can even host the domain and then redirect your email to someone recognisable, like fastmail, protonmail, or even gmail, changing the redirect if/when needed.
There are several recommendations for alternate e-mail providers in the comments of this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759 (Search for "fastmail", "protonmail", "tutanota", etc. to find the relevant subthreads.)
I've been using fastmail.com for years, and have found it to be very reliable. (As with many e-mail providers, you can use it with your own domain.)
You mentioned work e-mail. That's the least reliable e-mail of all for anything non-work-related, since (1) you lose access to it immediately if you're fired or laid off, or if the company closes, and (2) you have absolutely no expectation of privacy (your employer can read or delete your messages on a system that it owns - the messages are its property, not yours).
Another vote for Fastmail. I've been using it with my own domain for the last couple of years with zero problems.
You could run your own mail server easily if it was just send/receive. But you need spam/virus protection and that's 99% of the time spent on it.
You could subscribe to something like SpamHero and have it check the emails for you. That's the only service I know. Does anyone know about good alternatives?
I’m super happy with Runbox.com both from service prospective, business model and location
Fastmail has been rock solid for my personal email for a number of years.
Another vote for fastmail.
Besides anecdotes, do you know how reliable Gmail is?
Gmail is great if you don't mind having a multi-billion conglomerate profiting off your email data.