Goodbye, Google: Switching from GMail to Mailbox
In recent years, I have been making attempts to minimize using services provided by Google, the primary concern being privacy. In my earlier post, I wrote about using Kagi as my search engine of choice. Today, I want to talk about Mailbox.org, a paid email provider that I migrated to from GMail.
My expectations and why previous email providers didn’t meet them
I heavily rely on email in my daily life. I always had at least two accounts: a private one and a professional one at my current workplace. Most of the time, I had more than one mailbox for work. In order to manage multiple email accounts conveniently, I use a desktop email client. Thus, a basic requirement for me is that an email provider allows reading and sending emails via a client. This sounds like a really, really trivial requirement, but you will see in a moment that for some email providers this is far from obvious.
For the most part of the last 25 years, I have used a free email account from Onet, a Polish news portal and email provider - think Yahoo. It being free came at a price of receiving advertising emails directly to the inbox. Luckily, it is trivial to filter out such mails with a custom filter in the email client and never see those adds. As such, I was happy with services provided by Onet. However, at some point they started to silently put restrictions on emails send via desktop clients. In particular, sending emails that only contained links or attachments, or were simply too short, resulted in them being silently dropped by the SMTP server. Imagine a situation where you are making arrangements with someone and reply simply with “Yes”, and that email gets silently dropped and never makes it to the other person. Or you just want to send someone a link, but that person never receives it. I have been in multiple such situations without realizing it. Dropping emails for no good reason would be bad enough in itself. But doing so silently in such a way that the sender does not even know that the message was not delivered is simply too much. When I realized what is going on, and verified with the provider that this is an intended behaviour that’s part of their “security policy” (sic!), I knew I have to start looking for a new email service.
Unfortunately, at this point in time, I was heavily occupied with events in my private life and did not have the time to properly research paid alternatives. And so I went with an easily available solution: GMail. Well, that was a mistake. Firstly, GMail complicates usage of clients that don’t support OAuth (mine doesn’t). Secondly, GMail places sent emails in the inbox. If you send an email via a client, your client will then download that email into your inbox, showing it as a new email. This is a major annoyance. Again, it can be sorted out with some extra work and custom filters, but this is not how email should work.
I lived with GMail annoyances for a couple of years, until last November I finally decided to bite the bullet and move to a new email provider.
Mailbox.org: Pros and Cons
After some research, and recommendations from friends, I decided on Mailbox.org, which offers a good set of features at a competitive price. As mentioned earlier, one of my motivations to move away from Google are privacy concerns. Mailbox.org operates from Germany, which means it must follow the EU’s strict data protection laws. To me, this was an important argument in favour of using Mailbox.org.
Mailbox.org offers lots of neat little features that one does not typically get from free email providers such as GMail. These include multiple email aliases, disposable addresses, encryption support, detailed SPAM protection settings, and mailbox backups, among others. Aside from email, Mailbox.org also provides a suite of online applications. These include:
- An address book and calendar.
- A TODO list that allows to manage tasks, track their progress, set deadlines, attach files, etc. I couldn’t figure out a way to integrate it with a calendar, but I admit I haven’t tried very hard. Perhaps there’s a way of doing it.
- Cloud storage with 5GB of space (in the Standard plan).
- XMPP chat
- Video conferencing based on OpenTalk.
- Etherpad, a lightweight alternative to Google Docs.
- Creating polls and event scheduling based on Framadate.
It is good to see alternatives to GSuite finally being offered, though I admit I have not tested most of these tools, since I rarely collaborate with others via such tools and tend to work on the desktop. I only really tried using Etherpad and, frankly speaking, the experience wasn’t great. Firstly, Etherpad seems to forget which edits were made by whom, i.e. rather than associating edits with a Mailbox.org account it seems to be using cookies that have short expiration dates. Secondly, it frequently resets to default display settings, which is quite annoying - presumably cookies, again. But worst of all, it isn’t reliable. I had a situation where a document I shared with someone became completely broken and unresponsive. After contacting the support, I was told that they had an infrastructure problem and the only way to solve the problem is to create a new document and copy the contents of the broken document there. It was a one-time incident, but something like this should not ever happen if the tool is to be considered reliable.
Beyond that, Mailbox.org offers good technical documentation - and I really mean that. This documentation does not shy away from providing full technical details so that a knowledgeable user gets all the information they need.
And lastly, the service works with an email client without any problems. This should be obvious, but as demonstrated by my experiences, it isn’t always the case.
There are a couple of cons, though, aside from the already mentioned Etherpad incident. Possibly the biggest usability issue are strict SPAM filters. By “strict” I mean following all sorts of standards, that many big providers on the internet (such as Microsoft) don’t follow. As a result, some incoming emails don’t get delivered or arrive delayed. In particular, I have found greylisting to cause trouble. Thankfully, SPAM filter behaviour can be modified in the settings, but I don’t like how the default settings are problematic, even if, strictly speaking, the fault does not lie with Mailbox.org.
Mailbox.org offers online technical support - which in itself is good and yet another thing one does not get with free email services - but I have found that support to be highly incompetent. I contacted support on three different occasions, and each experience was bad. I encountered consultants that were arrogant or lacked knowledge, trying to convince me that the behaviour I am experiencing is a problem caused by my browser and sending me through many pointless debugging steps, only to admit in the end that this is actually an intended behaviour of the service.
Speaking of “intended behaviours of the service”, one of them is repeatedly logging out of the web client. Not that I use the web client frequently, but having to log in every other day was annoying when I first started using the service and frequently experimented with various settings. I initially thought that this was a bug, since the settings allow to disable automatic logout, but I was eventually told that this is all intentional - despite what the settings seem to imply.
There are a few more minor annoyances in the web client, such as the inability to click any links in emails moved to the SPAM folder. So if you want to click an unsubscribe link you first need to move an email to the inbox folder, click the link, and move it back to spam. But again, this isn’t really a huge problem for me.
One last issue is a really minor one, but when I initially got the new email
address I kept mistaking the .org domain with .com and on several occasions
nearly provided an incorrect email address.
Summary
After many years of struggling with free email providers, I finally have a mailbox that works like it should. I regret not making this move earlier, and I regret even more ever getting involved with GMail. This was a mistake that I should not have done, given how hard it is to entirely phase out an old email address.