[MlMt] good email providers that play well w/ MailMate [was: moving my mail from one server to another—will my IMAP mailboxes & their contents survive the move?]

[Robert Cutler]

I concur with John completely.

I had run my own mail server since 1994-95 — starting on a Mac SE (!), then for about 12-13 years on a Mac Quadra 950, and finally on an Xserve starting sometime around 2007-2008.

While it was a lot of fun and didn’t take a lot of my time to administer once everything was setup, the combination of new email standards being enforced (Google would only intermittently accept messages from my server), the mail server software not keeping up with them (it stopped being updated at least 10 years ago), and my wanting to reduce my electric bill led me to switch to Fastmail last December.

Couldn’t be happier.  It all just works, and it was extremely easy to move all the email over without loss.

And the small monthly cost for Fastmail is more than offset by the reduction in my electric bill.

(I have no connection with Fastmail except as a satisfied customer…)


On 12 Apr 2023, at 12:37, John Doherty wrote:

> I switched to fastmail after 15 or 16 years of hosting my own mail server.
>
> I've been really happy with them. Migrating all my old mail was a snap and happened much more quickly than I expected. They also have MailMate-specific setup instructions, so they are MailMate-friendly at least to that extent:
>
> <https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280001-How-to-set-up-MailMate>
>
> I don't remember whether I had to use their instructions or not, the whole thing was pretty simple and straightforward.
>
> I'm using their "standard" 30 GB plan. Paying up front for a couple of years brought the price down to a little less than $4/month.
>
> Honestly, I should have done something like this years ago. Hosting my own mail server cost a lot more and although it was sort of fun and educational in its time, that hadn't actually been the case for a long time.
>
> So FWIW, happy fastmail customer here. I expect to stick with them for a long time.
>
> On Wed 2023-04-12 11:55 AM MDT -0600, <ken at kenpope.com> wrote:
>
>> *Thanks* for the continued stream of great info.
>>
>> My plan to move to a much cheaper dedicated server crashed when I discovered that a much cheaper dedicated server couldn’t deliver what I needed.
>>
>> Part of Plan B includes finding a good, secure email provider that (a) will accept my domain name, (b) plays well with Mail Mate, (c) will allow me to import my current array of emails, & (d) allows sufficient storage (e.g., StartMail looks great but has an inflexible limit of only 10G storage for all plans).
>>
>> The following prospects made the initial cuts of my research.  I’d appreciate your comments about any of the following or any other provider you recommend or warn against.
>>
>> MailFence
>> Proton
>> Fastmail
>> Thexyz
>> Scala Hosting
>> mailbox.org
>>
>> Thanks as always for your help.
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