Leaving Gmail, OK — but where to go? 😨

De-Googling yourself

To stop being tracked like an animal by Google means having no Google account at all. That means deleting your Gmail account. I’ve had a Gmail address since 2006 — back when Google services opened up through invitations.

For a few years I’ve had my own domain name and an email address to go with it. I naively added the retrieval of those emails to my Gmail account to keep everything in one place.

Now I want to escape this prison and move to a webmail 📧 that won’t resell my data — and, more importantly, have the ability to search Google without being logged into their account. I went looking for a privacy-respecting email service. I’m not paranoid and I accept that a service might access my emails the way a court order would — so I’m not necessarily looking for end-to-end encryption 🔐. If I need truly private conversations, I use the excellent Signal messenger anyway.

Requirements

To find my ideal email service, I still needed a few handy features that Gmail has been offering for years:

• Subaddressing — you know, the plus sign “+” in your email address 🥰
• At least 5 aliases
• A pleasant web interface
• A decent iOS app 📲?
• A Snooze feature (hence the app)
• Ability to use a traditional email client
• At least 10GB of storage, ideally more

The contenders

I’m not listing every option here — only the ones that caught my attention because they offer one or more interesting features. If you want to compare “almost” all of them, I recommend this site , which is very well put together and genuinely comprehensive.

StartMail

A German service 🇩🇪. What attracted me was the ability to create time-limited aliases — useful for signing up to websites just to use a service without the risk of being spammed afterward.
It’s from the same company behind StartPage , the search engine that feeds exclusively on Google results without the cookies 🍪.

Pros:

• Time-limited aliases — handy for signing up to a throwaway site, you know, those lovely whitepapers 😂

Cons:

• Expensive — $60/year for only 10GB of storage

ProtonMail

Hard to leave this one out — it’s the one that comes up on every blog. I’m not sure where its reputation comes from (certainly not its UI) but it’s consistently well-regarded for privacy.

Pros:

• Servers in Switzerland 🇨🇭
• Excellent privacy
• No compatibility with traditional email clients on mobile, and you need a “bridge” for the desktop client

Cons:

• Only 5GB on the €48/year plan
• Forced to use their mobile app — no bridge for fetching mail in Apple Mail on iOS
• The v3 interface is genuinely ugly (v4 was in beta when I wrote this)
• No snooze feature — maybe in v4

FastMail

A truly great service — very complete. If you’re coming from Gmail, you’ll feel right at home. Plus you can try the full version free for 30 days.
Personally, I really took to this Australian 🇦🇺 service.

Pros:

• The interface closest to Gmail, feature-wise too (snooze included! 👍)
• Very well-made iOS app

Cons:

• Based in Australia 🇦🇺

Tutanota

This one I hadn’t heard of — it’s a German service 🇩🇪. Inexpensive at €1/month in the basic plan. As strong on privacy as ProtonMail.

Pros:

• Secure contact form integration on websites
• Very (too?) simple interface

Cons:

• No compatibility with traditional email clients
• Only 10GB on the €48/year plan
• Lacks features (snooze, adding filters directly from an email)

MailFence

A Belgian service 🇧🇪! I stopped at account creation from my iOS phone — it crashed, which annoyed me, and I didn’t go any further…
https://mailfence.com/#plans

Pros:

Cons:

• Too expensive for the 20GB plan — €7.50/month.

Mailo

The little frenchie of the bunch 🇫🇷.

Pros:

• Family account management
• Unbeatable pricing — I’d recommend it to anyone who needs an email address, ditch Gmail and go with Mailo
• Tons (too many?) of features

Cons:

• Cluttered interface
• No DKIM signing
• A truly 🤢 iOS app
• Can’t try the premium account without paying for a full year (€12)

Decision time 🕰

And the winner is… none of the above 😂.

I did feel drawn to Fastmail — the app and the web interface are really top-notch, and the features, including snooze, are all there. I’d strongly recommend it to any “geek” who doesn’t want to overthink the “hosted by the bad guys” angle.
The interface is great, as I said. The features — aside from end-to-end encryption — make it a complete email service. The price is fairly competitive, under €50/year. Personally, especially for a single account, I’m not about to pay more. But add the cost of a domain name, an account for a spouse, the kids — it adds up fast 💰.

I would have liked to try Mailo , because there’s not much missing before the service becomes really good — there are a ton of great ideas, and it’s a French service 🇫🇷. Unfortunately, there’s no way to test it with your own domain name without committing to a full-year subscription.
That said, I’d recommend this service to everyone! It should be the default choice — I’d even say we should be creating accounts for our kids on this service rather than letting them sign up to something that will exploit their personal data for commercial manipulation.

End of suspense: I went with the OVH Pro plan, which is actually nearly equivalent to the email included by default when buying a domain name from Gandi . I get 10GB of storage, expandable to 50. I pay €24/year, domain included — so roughly €14 for the email service.
The interface is fairly austere — it looks like Outlook — but the core features are all there: notably unlimited alias creation and Subaddressing. I can also create mail rules (if the sender contains XX, move to this folder).

Conclusion

For a fairly modest sum, I now have an email account with my own domain name. The setup is accessible to everyone, and the OVH or Gandi interface is fairly user-friendly. In short, if you want full control over everything, I recommend going through the email service provided with your domain registrar.

I’m curious to see where French email provider Mailo goes, and I’d really love to see more government incentive to help people move to an email service that isn’t managed for advertising purposes. Especially now that you’re all required to file your taxes online — which means having an email address.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’re wondering how I handle the “snooze” feature that’s been on my wishlist from the start. I use the Spark email client (coming soon to Windows) — I find it really enjoyable. I don’t think I’ll ever use the paid version, so I’m taking the risk that it disappears. If it does, I’ll switch to a traditional email client — and yes, because in my setup I’m free to use whichever email client I choose.

I strongly encourage you to register at least a domain name in your own name, so you’re free to use whichever email service you want and don’t have to worry about any given service shutting down.

Now I can search Google without being logged into that damned account! Because other search engines just don’t cut it for me .

I also encourage you to change your browser — see my article here .