Email is important to my daily workflow, and I’ve built many tools which encourage productive use of it for software development. As such, I’m often asked for advice on choosing a good email service provider. Personally, I run my own mail servers, but about a year ago I signed up for and evaluated many different service providers available today so that I could make informed recommendations to people. Here are my top picks, as well as the criteria by which they were evaluated.

Unfortunately, almost all mail providers fail to meet my criteria. As such, I can only recommend two: Migadu and mailbox.org.

#1: Migadu

Migadu is my go-to recommendation for a mail service provider.

Advantages

• Migadu is a small company with strong values and no outside capital (i.e. no profit-motivated external influence). Email support and a human being answers, and their leadership is accessible if you have questions or feedback.
• Their pricing is based on bandwidth usage, and does not rely on artificial scarcity like limited domain names or mailboxes.
• Has lots of features for your postmaster - you can treat it as a managed mail server for your organization.

Disadvantages

• They have suffered from some outages in the past. The global mail system is tolerant of such outages - you don’t have to worry about messages being lost if they were sent during an outage. Still, being unable to access your mail is a problem.
• If you are on a trial account, they will put an advertisement into your email signature. I don’t think that it’s ever appropriate for a mail service provider to edit your outgoing emails for any reason, and certainly not to advertise. Updated 2021-03-12: this is no longer the case.

Full disclosure: SourceHut and Migadu agreed to a consulting arrangement to build their new webmail system, which should be going into production soon. However, I had evaluated and started recommending Migadu prior to the start of this project, and I believe that Migadu fares well under the criteria I give at the end of this post.

#2: mailbox.org

Mailbox.org may be desirable if you wish to have a more curated experience, and less hands-on access to postmaster-specific features.

Advantages

• Excellent first-class support for PGP, and many other strong security and privacy features are available.
• Was able to speak to the CEO directly to discuss my concerns and feedback, and have my questions answered. Raised some bugs and they were fixed in short order.

Disadvantages

• The interface is a little bit too JavaScript heavy for my tastes, and suffer from some bugs and lack of polish.
• They are a German company serving mostly German customers - German text leaks into the UI and documentation in some places.
• Completing a Google captcha is required to sign up.

Others

Evaluated but not recommended: disroot, fastmail, posteo.de, poste.io, protonmail, tutanota, riseup, cock.li, teknik, runbox, megacorp mail (gmail, outlook, etc).

Criteria for a good mail service provider

The following criteria are objective and non-negotiable:

1. Support for open standards including IMAP and SMTP
2. Support for users who wish to bring their own domain

This is necessary to preserve the user’s ownership of their data by making it accessible over open and standardized protocols, and their right to move to another service provider by not fixing their identity to a domain name controlled by the email provider. It is for these reasons that Posteo, ProtonMail, and Tutanota are not considered suitable.

The remaining criteria are subjective:

1. Is the business conducted ethically? Are their incentives aligned with their customers, or with their investors?
2. Is it sustainable? Can I expect them to be around in 10 years? 20? 30?
3. Do they make unfounded claims about security or privacy, or develop techniques which ultimately rely on trusting them instead of supporting or improving standards which rely on encryption?¹
4. If they make claims about privacy or security, do they explain the limitations and trade-offs, or do they let you believe it’s infallible?
5. Do you trust them with your personal data? What if they’re compelled by law enforcement? What is their government like?²

Bonus points:

• What is their relationship with open source?
• Can I sign up without an existing email address? Is there a chicken and egg problem here?³
• How well do they handle plaintext email? Do they meet the criteria for recommended clients at useplaintext.email?

If you represent a mail service provider which you believe meets this criteria, please send me an email.