How I Manage My Email Accounts
I have tried multiple email services. An email server is one (or multiple) piece of technology I am not really interesting in self hosting. It is very complicated from what I found. There are great, easy to deploy solutions, however, there are so many other complications with establishing a reputation and not getting blacklisted.
How It Was
I, originally, had two domains with active email accounts. Those were my personal, non-gmail account associated with seanland.ca and the business account for Seanland Entertainment.
I was using Office356 for the business account. I had the package that contained all the goods; basically all the Office applications and email. The cost was ~20 CAD a month. It seemed to be worth it. Or, so I thought.
My personal email was being hosted at hey.com. The service was incredible. Also, I love and firmly believe in the business philosophy of DHH. It feels like his methodolgy is for the good of the people that he works with. I have also read a few of his books. The cost associated with the service was ~15 CAD a month after exchange.
Why the Change?
There are two main reasons I wanted to set up a better solution for my emails.
The Cost
For ~35 CAD a month, I felt like I was paying too much to host two email accounts. Sure, there we added benefits for both the services.
hey.com had an amazing mentality around emails and how you take action on them. The apps had linux support, which is awesome and a rarity.
Office365 is great for business applications, however, I self-host CryptPad, an incredible office suite that is web based and well assessible anywhere with my VPN back home. And...
I Needed More
I needed more. I have started to have the desire to migrate away from my gmail account. So, I needed to add an additional domain for how I wanted to start using my email. I wasn't willing to increase the cost by at minimum $5 CAD to an account to O365 and I didn't want to host an email on yet another service to save a few bucks.
What Am I Doing Now?
Not getting too deep into politics, beliefs, privacy and security, Proton seemed to be the best option (Not affiliated and not a referral link). The reasons I did switch:
- Cost Savings: The pricing overall went down to ~13 CAD a month.
- Hosted Location: This is part of the privacy, security, politics piece. I like that it is in Switzerland, however, the CEO has said some - let's say - debatable things.
- Bonus Functionality: VPN Service, Cloud Drive, Password Manager, Crpytowallet as well as the required Calendar and Mail clients.
- Linux Support: ♥️😍🥰
- Three domain and fifteen email address support.
- Built in, simple, Gmail migration service.
- The actual privacy and tracking blocking.
- The apps are open source!
The third domain has officially been added. The goal of this third domain was to set up a mailbox that I use for signing up to different services and accounts. I will be using one mailbox with aliases depending on the service. It is a slow and tedious process.
Now all three of my addresses, as well as any aliases I use land in one mailbox. Depending on the address an email is being set to dictates what happens to set email. So, for different services, emails will be auto labelled and routed to different folders, or just labelled and left in the main inbox to be moved after being addressed.
I am doing this to hopefully avoid spam and have better control over email address squatters. I literally have someone that uses my gmail address to sign up for their personal activities. It is also scary to think, what information they have ignorantly shared with me. I was literally able to find out where they live due to their carelessness. Maybe this is a blog for the future...
The Results
I have had this set up for a few months now. I am extremely happy with service. The apps are great across all the ecosystems I use and I think my email methodology is slowly paying off.
If you are looking to take ownership of your email and migrating to a paid service. I think what proton offers is hard to argue with. I am always looking to use the best and I mean that ethically, economically and technically. If you do have a better option, please let me know! Thanks for reading.
